Birmingham Civic Dashboard

One of our big ideas has been looking at approaches to “sense the city”. Ways for people to connect to the city almost like  a friend. Ask it “how it is doing?” and ‘feel’ the city’s wellbeing. Birmingham Civic Dashboard (BCD) is an experimental approach to this. Mudlark designed and built the BCD for Digital Birmingham after a successful application to NESTA’S Make It Local programme. This program was designed to encourage local authorities and local digital media companies to work together in exploring innovative use of open public data, creating innovative user centred applications and digital services for their local communities and promoting further collaboration and innovation within local authorities.

The Birmingham Civic Dashboard maps, times and categorises the requests or “contacts” – calls, visits, website enquiries and emails – that come in to Birmingham Council every day, through its Customer Relations Management Centre. The Dashboard went live 6th October 2011.

Users can explore the Dashboard by location, category and time, drilling in to what is effectively a living heatmap of the conversation between the residents and officers of Britain’s largest local authority.

Each coloured spot on the map represents one contact. Its colour indicates where in the council – which unit – the contact has been sent to.

Users can zoom in to the map to see where the contacts come from – plotted down to the first three letters of their post codes – or click on a list of the city’s ten constituencies and the four wards within each constituency. Some contacts have no location associated with them – categorised as “not assigned”.

Users can also examine which of Birmingham Council’s nine main service units was sent the contacts featured the your map view, and, by clicking on a unit in the left-hand column, see the sub-units – most of which have their own sub-units.

The Dashboard updates every 24 hours, adding to the searchable archive of contacts. On the Contacts per Hour graph, a line for each main unit plots the volume of contacts against time of day, refinable along with location and category.

The dashboard also expresses trends, the relative activity of different service units, volumes of contacts within categories and a sample “ticker” of recent contacts.

Mudlark designed and built the BCD for Digital Birmingham after a successful application to NESTA’S Make It Local programme. This was designed to encourage local authorities and local digital media companies to work together in exploring innovative use of open public data, creating innovative user centred applications and digital services for their local communities and promoting further collaboration and innovation within local authorities.

Website: www.civicdashboard.org.uk