News and updates - Page 13
28 January 2014
Open data in arts and sport grant making - open data hiding in plain sight
Sometimes open data on grant making just pops up unexpectedly. I was giving evidence to the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value and spent some time poking around in the Arts Council England’s website looking for strategy and policy documents as well as any open data they may have. ACE has a good research capability but […]
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23 January 2014
Transparency in giving in the cultural sector - evidence to Warwick Commission on cultural value
I gave evidence to the Warwick Commission today on a range of digital issues and philanthropy. The digital stuff i cover over there but here is the section on philanthropy and transparency. I call in particular for the Arts Council England, which publishes its grants to publish also the evidence and evaluations they hold for […]
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29 July 2013
Update on activity
In our view at Indigo, to achieve our objectives we cannot lead the argument with open data itself. Open data is a critical enabler to achieve benefits. It is the benefits that appeal to senior grant makers only rarely the data itself. An update on activity since the kick off meeting. Nominet Trust, BIG and Indigo […]
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23 July 2013
Promising response from BIG to FOI requests for data
BIG Lottery Fund is the largest of the organisations that distributes money from the state-sanctioned Lottery in the UK. They have given a helpful response to my two FOI requests. I made two probing requests – one for a set of grants data from a geographic unit of manageable size and one for the nature of data […]
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27 June 2013
First catch your data
It isn’t always easy for large organisations to just open the floodgates and pour data out. There’s always a host of compliance issues, some real, some over-cautious. Tim Berners-Lee’s original, highly readable 2009 article on bureaucracies and open data acknowledges this and urges them just to publish, not spend years agonising: Just do it…There […]
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24 June 2013
Meeting hosted by Indigo Trust on 20 June 2013
Indigo Trust hosted a meeting at its offices to discus open data, philanthropy, grant making and the principles underpinning this blog. The minutes will be published in due course, the following attended: Simon Marshall Big Lottery Funding Cathy Pharoah Cass Business School Owen Barder Centre for Global Development Beth Breeze Centre for Philanthropy – Kent […]
24 June 2013
Opening up data around grant making - a demonstrator for Esmee Fairbairn
In 2010, Esmee Fairbairn a leading grant maker in the social justice area held a futures event. One team took Esmee’s grant information from their website (where it was published in pdf documents) and turned it into a database. By turning the data into a versatile database, instead of static documents they were able to […]