Making a difference with data

Yesterday we did some work at the Making (and Saving) Money With Open Data event in Birmingham.  James Cattell - of the Housing Department at Birmingham City Council, presented his experiments in visualising weekly rent arrears data as a heat map.

Every week I receive a "traffic light" report in Microsoft Excel format. It shows the weekly variance on each rent account's balance.

James showed how he took tabular data in Excel, anonymised and aggregated the data first and then visualised the data using Google Fusion Tables.

The arrears maps looked promising as an internal tool to understand payment patterns in different areas of the city. James suggested potential for using the maps to target council efforts and tailor approaches to payment collection appropriately to different areas and the varying needs of residents living there.

James' presentation was given as part of the evening ideas generation session (full writeup here) run by SpeedData on behalf of Birmingham City University. SpeedData is a collaboration to inspire coders and data experts to create citizen-focused resources shaped by the expertise of those from across the public sector.