People Places Lives' experience adopting the standard for Hull City Council
Kate Mackay, Head of Digital Delivery at People Places Lives (PPL), describes implementing the standard for with Hull City Council
At People Places Lives (PPL), we appreciate the importance of standardised data in connecting with local organisations, ensuring that information is available for easy public access and improving service provider engagement, so we were excited to work with Hull City Council on adopting the Open Referral UK standard.
Hull City Council were keen to adopt the open data standard to make it as simple as possible for individuals to find groups, services and activities in their local area.
Process
We implemented the standard in our directory for Hull who were participating in a pilot project managed by the Local Government Association.
Our experience of the process was great - there was lots of support on hand throughout the project and many opportunities to share feedback, queries and experience between the pilot local authorities and technology providers.
Challenges
We know from experience that engaging providers can be challenging and, with this in mind, we are always working to make the directory registration process as simple as possible.
One challenge we faced was determining the length of the registration form. There are many different lists of categories available within the schema, so working with Hull City Council in achieving a good balance to ensure that providers would not be put off or confused by the process was vital.
Another difficulty was working through the existing database, re-tagging the listings to match the new values from the schema. From Hull City Council’s perspective, this was a significantly resource-intensive task and the data then needed to be reviewed and re-uploaded by PPL.
Benefits
There are many organisations in Hull with their own directories and lists of services, so the aim of this project was to create a standard template that eventually all organisations can use to share data with each other. A key benefit is that providers only have to update their information in one place, which makes managing their listing easier and reduces the risk of users stumbling across outdated information.
The standard gives our customers the potential to share data across geographical boundaries, ensuring a good coverage of information for end-users while relieving pressure from individual local authorities and making the process simpler for providers to manage their own listing.
Advice for others adopting the standard
For public-facing directories, don’t be afraid to only use the categories from the schema that you need. It’s important to find a balance between collating enough information to make the listings useful for end-users and other organisations while also keeping the providers engaged and the directory simple for users to navigate.