Insight

The Scottish Cities Alliance (SCA) appointed Optimat to establish an ‚ ‘Open Data User Group‚Äù to provide feedback on the Scottish Cities open data publication plan and to inform future open data publication by the cities.

The SCA is a partnership of Scotland’s seven city local authorities and the Scottish Government. Key aims are to:

• use new technologies and data to accelerate and transform the delivery of city services
• support the cities to work collaboratively to publish the same datasets to the same standard and quality, opening up unique opportunities to develop and test smart solutions using data published across seven city data platforms

The Scottish Government’s Open Data Strategy defines open data as:

‚ ‘[…] non-personal and non-commercially sensitive. Open data is easily discoverable, accessible to anyone and able to be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone. Open Data is data made available, via the internet, in an electronic format which supports its ready re-use, and with open licensing which allows its reuse.‚Äù

The open datasets, accessible via the seven cities individual open data portals, include data relating to, for example, environment, transport and travel, education, health and social care, and several other key sectors. These datasets are freely available to explore and use, regardless of sector or purpose of use.

The Scottish Cities Alliance is keen to engage with organisations regardless of sector and regardless of their experience with open data.

They want to understand how public sector open data is currently being used, how their open data strategies can be improved and how the cities open datasets could be used and the benefits that could be experienced by those not accessing them yet.

To find out more about the Scottish Cities Alliance and the Open Data User Group, join the LinkedIn Group

To contribute to the project, please take a few minutes to complete this survey

Once you have joined the Group, you will receive updates on upcoming project activities.

Ashley Stewart, Senior Consultant at Optimat, had this to say on our appointment:

“We are delighted to be working with the Scottish Cities Alliance and the wider Open Data sector in Scotland to form an Open Data User Group. Having previously undertaken similar and related industry consultations, we are looking forward to working with the key partners to build an Open Data User Group, to identify emerging opportunities in this existing and evolving sector and to identifying opportunities for continued engagement with the Scottish Cities Alliance open datasets‚Äù.