As part of our plans to become a cooperative council Lambeth Council has recently made a commitment to be ‘open by default’ with its data and has published a set of principles that outline this approach. Lambeth will also encourage citizens to help prioritise data for open release and will be encouraging an online dialogue via an open data Wordpress site.

Citizens being able to access and use data about Lambeth and the services provided here is a key part of becoming a cooperative council and will help citizens, local councillors and professionals to work together better. To support that we have been working on a project with Boilerhouse, a digital and communications consultancy, and partners in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to develop an open data demonstrator tool. The tool will use Lambeth open data alongside partner open data sources to demonstrate how data released by the council can be more useable and accessible to the public.

The project will initially use data in relation to the development of Lambeth’s Food Strategy to demonstrate what can be done with council and partners’ open data and test how it might enable co-production and cooperative commissioning in this area.

This event is to present the demonstrator tool to residents, councillors, partners, developers and a range of stakeholders who will have the opportunity to use and give feedback on the tool and discuss ways to make it better.

A beta version of the tool will be available around a week prior to the event for you to begin testing and providing feedback.

This event will also provide an opportunity to engage with residents and stakeholders about how to make open data more useful in local decision making and helping citizens get involved in decisions about services in their local area.

Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be available on the day.