Engaging Lunchtime Session

Last 11th of June the Open Data team from CYC held an internal event for its staff. This event, called “The Open Data World”, was part of the “Engaging lunchtime sessions” the Council organises periodically, and took place at West Offices.

The event was aimed at describing the Open Data concept and explaining the Council’s approach. The event also tried to make participants aware of use and production of data they use in their everyday work, and help them to think if they could contribute to the Open Data project. This could be by providing and publishing some useful data they manage which has been requested from outside of the organisation.

A number of people from different departments attended,  and after an introduction by Ian Cunningham, the participants briefly presented themselves and gave a general idea of what open data meant to them, if anything. The floor was then given to Thomas Kozakiewicz, Data Analyst, who gave a presentation on Open Data. There were many questions from the participants, which made the session interactive and interesting. It was useful and an appreciated exercise for the Open Data team to receive feedback and concerns from participants.

Good examples of the discussion are individuals highlighted the need to provide metadata, literally “data about data”, along with the data itself as it gives support to the reader of that data. Another interesting question came from a participant, who asked if additional work is required from individual teams to provide the data. Other concerns were related to things such as data quality.

Although there were many interesting insights from the public, more feedback and contributions from different departments would be useful.  If you work at the CYC, are interested in Open Data and couldn’t come to the event, please get in touch with us so we can arrange further meetings with you. For more information please contact us at info@yorkopendata.org.