Bristol Uncovered is one month old

Bristol Uncovered Street Sign

I publicly launched Bristol Uncovered just one month ago, and I thought I would give you an update on how it is going.

I told all of our Councillors about the site, with this message:

Why?

Residents need to have a more a constructive relationship with their Councillors, and we all need to work together to help Bristol be the best city it can.

Most people don't know enough about how the Council operates and the work that goes on in City Hall.

It is practically a full time job if someone wants to be fully informed about what and how decisions are made on our behalf.

Residents need to know more about their Councillors and you need to know as much as possible about the Wards you represent.

I have created Bristol Uncovered to try and provide that useful information.

I got some very useful and positive feedback. Here are some examples of the feedback received from Councillors. Please note that I did ask for their permission before publishing their feedback.

Feedback

Al Al-Maghrabi - Bristol City Councillor for Frome Vale

I have to say this website is incredible, you should be proud of your hard work. This is exactly what local politics needs, openness and transparency and a good way to let residents know about decisions that are being made as you are right it is nearly a full-time job to keep up with everything happening. I will be using this tool to assist me in my work and I can’t believe there has been nothing like this until now! Thank you so much for sharing, I will be sharing the site with my constituents.

Bristol Councillor

I agree with your reasoning about transparency and appreciate the time and effort gone into this. There were some articles I didn’t even realised I’d been referenced in so thank you for that also. I’m sure other councillors feel the same gratitude. The Fixmystreet link is super useful also. Keep it up!

Bristol Councillor

This is genuinely brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

Bristol Councillor

A very impressive piece of work, and very useful indeed.

Thanks to the Councillors who took the time to provide feedback and kindly gave permission for it to be published.

Design

Most of the work goes into the Power BI Reports that are updated almost every day. But I realised that providing some insights and analysis would be helpful, so I added the bristol-uncovered.uk "front door", where I could publish articles like this one, and also allow people to subscribe to get email updates. All of the material I publish is available at no charge, but I did add an option where people could contribute £5 a year to help cover the costs of hosting the site. I didn't know if anyone would contribute their hard earned money as they don't get anything extra (apart from a warm feeling in their heart). Out of the 96 people who have subscribed to receive updates, 6 of them have contributed some money (thank you).

How do I get the data?

All of the data is obtained from "open data" sources, and where the terms and conditions prevent the data being shared I have asked for permission to publish it.

Sometimes, it is difficult to get the data in a form that can easily be published. When that happens I have to write some computer code to get the data in a form that I can analyse.

Because I have written code to automate the data collection, validation, transformation and analysis. I just press a button and 60 minutes later the updated reports are published.

Items added to Bristol Uncovered in the last 7 days

Diverse Voices

As well as publishing data about planning applications, committee meetings etc. etc. I wanted to try and provide other people's views and insights about Bristol, which is why I added reports about Bristol Podcasts and Bristol People's "Voices". There are a lot of local people spending their time writing, talking and singing about Bristol and I recommend you take a look at their work.