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Who’s making their local election data open?

You may have read about our collaboration with LGA and OpenlyLocal to encourage councils to publish local election results in open data format on their websites. This blogpost celebrates the pioneering councils who've already achieved this .....

The Open Elections Data Project is an initiative by OpenlyLocal supported by Socitm and the LGA to encourage councils to publish the results of the local elections as open data.

This blogpost to celebrates the pioneering councils who've already achieved this, and we expect to be adding many more names over the coming days and weeks.

The project isn't just about results from these elections now, by the way, so even if you didn't have elections this time, please do join in - you'll see from the list below that Trafford have made all their results since 1998 open.

If you aren't aware of the project, essentially what we are trying to do is get councils publishing their election results on their website 'marked up' in a particular way so that the results can be 'machine-read' and therefore easily reaped from websites and re-used. One obvious re-use is compiling a national database of results - something that is otherwise a painstaking and laborious task involving lots of cutting and pasting, and consequently is not freely available at the moment.

A couple of things have happened since we launched the project that have helped things along. Lichfield DC webmaster Stuart Harrison wrote some code for the Jadu content management system, and this has been taken up and released by Jadu to its other local government customers to short cut the process for them.
Second, Moderrn.gov, providers of a democratic services application used in local government have updated the software so that results published through the application will be marked up as open data automatically (councils just have to upgrade to the latest version and follow the instructions on the Modern.gov user forum).
Apart from this there are many web teams who have been working on individual solutions appropriate to their own back office systems and web CMSs, aided by lots of advice from Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal and other web managers communicating and collaborating through the Open Election Data Project community in the IDeA Communities of Practice.
So, congratulations to the authorities on the list already, and we look forward to seeing many more added to it in the near future:
  • Lichfield District Council
  • Trafford District Council (All election results since 1998!)
  • Eden District Council
  • Gosport Borough Council
  • Lincoln City Council
  • Wyre Borough Council
  • London Borough of Redbridge
  • London Borough of Barnet
  • London Borough of Richmond upon Thames
  • Cheltenham 
  • Portsmouth City Council
  • East Staffordshire
  • South Cambridgeshire
  • Coventry

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