Last night the Creative and Development team from Beyond’s London office made it along to the Facebook Developer Garage monthly meet in East London. Along with the free beer and pizza, were a few guest speakers giving some great insight into the availability and potential use of government data.
The government’s transparency policy now gives greater access to more public data than ever before. It’s amazing the kind of things you can learn these days, I never knew that there were so many Otters so close to my home and I can now easily find out which hospitals have had the most cases of MRSA. Aside from these less used statistics, there is a mine of information that can be gathered and displayed to interested parties.
Fortunately for us, as a Creative team, this data isn’t exactly pretty when it comes from governmental websites, and if it were, we would probably complain that our money was being wasted by making it look good! Something we’re getting involved in more often is the creation of Infographics from such data. The Infographic is such a great way to get data displayed in a way that is easy on the eye and simple to understand at a glance.
One of the more memorable speakers gave a fascinating insight into the power of the social network, and I don’t just mean Facebook and LinkedIn. Real life, person to person social networks can influence whether or not a person is more or less likely to be able to find a job or whether they are likely to put on weight for example. I think with all the free beer and pizza at FDG I think the latter is a distinct possibility for all the team..