Wandsworth has finally launched its open data page (although the content management system lists the data itself on a different page and it’s then a further two clicks to get the actual data!). While bits and pieces of data have been published for a while and have existed throughout the council’s website for a long time, this finally gets it all in one place, under the open data licence (and hopefully, therefore, enough to get us onto OpenlyLocal’s list of fully open councils).

I’m an unashamed fan of open data, and it will be interesting to see how it is all used. I’m rather pleased that my attempt at re-mapping the grit bins is approaching 3,000 views – which I’d bet compares favourably to the number of views the page containing the data has had.

The sad thing is that we will never really know the extent to which its used, because it’s there for others to take, without having to ask for it or tell us what they are doing with it – but if public data is getting out there then it can’t be a bad thing. Indeed, I’d bet that, in a year or two, we’ll have applications on our phones and the web using data from councils across the country and wonder why on earth it took us so long.

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