Pic and Mix aims to increase public access to Kent-related datasets including those generated by Kent County Council (KCC). For the purposes of the pilot, we have brought together a sample of the most useful information.  Where possible, it’s been provided in a format that allows it to be ‘mashed’ and customised. Please help us shape this initiative by suggesting additional data and ways in which we can improve this site. And if you do anything clever with the data, we’d like you to share that with us too!

Licence

Open Data Usage - guide and basic rules

Using the data published on this site is governed by the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

The following Code of Conduct has been taken from the Central Government Datastore guidance on open data usage.

The data is provided to you the developers for you to develop applications which will make the world a better place, providing more or improved utility for the general public based on public sector datasets. We are here to help you do the great things we know you’re itching to do, but, as part of this being a trusted space in which we work together, there are some basic rules.

You are encouraged to:

• use provided live sources for the datasets as your primary data source, where possible – much of the data provided is dynamic and fluid (although in many cases over an annual or longer period of time), and basing your application on the keys in the data we are providing will ensure that your application is as up to date as possible;
• where using our data feeds, please if possible cache the data over a short period of time to reduce load both on your application and our servers;
• where you cannot use our live sources as the primary data source, please still use the keys contained within the data as the primary or foreign keys within your application, as this will enable you to migrate as simply as possible to up-to-date data and information when it is made available;
• where using your own long-term caches of our data, please refresh the data within your application in a timely manner when a new set of the data is made available;
• engage with us when something’s wrong – point out any inconsistencies in the data you find, make suggestions about how to improve the service, request new data sources to be added, and tell us about what you have built so we can help you to promote it!

You should:

• refer back to and cite the origin or source of the data when using it;
• clearly state where possible about which data is derived from official sources, which is from other sources, and which data is from any calculation within or outwith your app.

You must not:

• make an application that pretends to be an official government service;
• present the data in a misleading or incorrect manner or to misrepresent or change the data;
• use this site for party political purposes, as the site paid for with public money so it is not appropriate to engage in party-political activity here;
• use these materials in or to support a criminal or illicit activity;
• use these materials on an application to inflame or make comments that are racist, sexist or homophobic, or which promote or incite violence and illegal activity. 

Background

Last year, Kent County Council won Innovate08!

Our idea had three elements:

• To make publicly available information – things like crime statistics, employment information, business information – more accessible.
• We also wanted to provide tools that would enable people to ‘pic and mix’ data to create customised information.
• And last but not least, we wanted to provide a platform where people could share this information and discuss ways in which it could be used.

Winning Innovate08 meant we were given funding for a pilot project to see how people in Kent would respond to a resource of this kind. Our pilot project was intially launched with 25 small Kent-based businesses. With this new site we  hope to get the wider community involved.

So, how could Pic and Mix benefit you? Well, there’s a lot of information out there in a lot of different places. Rather than spend ages tracking down the information you need, we want you to come to a single place – picandmix.org.uk . For example, you may be looking for a care home for an elderly relative. You might want to mix this information with GP locations and bus routes. By plotting this information on a map you will be able to see which care homes are close to a GP surgery, and the bus routes. Another example might be a security company deciding where to focus its marketing efforts. They may want to mix office premises with crime statistics and use the information to plan a campaign.

Please remember, this is a pilot project and so not all the information you want is currently on the site. Let us know what information you want and we’ll do our best to source it.