Summary of data, mashups and APIs event

Last Wednesday, I went to an event at Fazeley Studios in Birmingham to explore innovative, useful and important applications of data.
The event — titled Data, Mashups and APIs — was organised by Birmingham Social Media Cafe and sponsored by The Guardian, Barefoot Wine and Screen WM.
I won’t try and summarise the whole event. A huge [...]

Give us a Twirl!

The regional resource catalogue continues to grow, giving policy and decision makers across the West Midlands improved access to data and research to support evidence-based decision making.
The development and growth of the catalogue has been achieved by working in partnership with West Midlands and sub-regional organisations to help share and publicise data and research about [...]

Substance misuse in the West Midlands

The National Treatment Agency (NTA) for Substance Misuse  has today published its report, Getting to grips with substance misuse among young people, which indicates that increasing numbers of teenagers in the West Midlands are receiving help for drug and alcohol problems through increased access to services in the region.
The report shows that the vast majority [...]

Making information more accessible

How to make complex information available to a wider audience and how to make it more easily understand? Those were questions being considered in Coventry this week.
On Tuesday 20th January, Coventry City Council hosted a meeting designed to share ideas on how regional partners were using software to make their information more readily available.
The main [...]

Got something useful you’d like to share?

As part of our strategic objectives, we aim to provide effective access to intelligence to encourage higher standards of evidence-​based decision-​making. One of the ways in which we do this is by providing a resource catalogue of research, data and intelligence about the West Midlands and its sub-regions.
The catalogue is built through contributions from Observatory [...]

Sharing intelligence from Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire

Yesterday, I attended the Coventry, Solihull and Wawickshire Researchers’ Forum to demonstrate the Regional Resource Catalogue and show how the data and intelligence in the catalogue might support the work that they’re engaged in, and also to encourage further contributions to the catalogue from members of the forum to help share their data and intelligence [...]

Have your say!

We at the Observatory aim to provide you with a first class information service on the region, and a website that makes this easy for you to do. Recently we have been thinking about what we could do to improve finding information on our website and how we could lay it out better for you.
To [...]

Sub-regional information sources

If you are looking for specific data or information about one of the sub-regions, in addition to the Regional Resource Catalogue on wmro.org, you might also like to try one of the sub-regional intelligence units.
Here is a list of some of them to help you track down the information that you need.

Herefordshire Partnership
Worcestershire Research & [...]

West Midlands worst for fear of homophobic hate crime

The West Midlands heads some league tables that it can be proud of, but this is not one of them.  According to new research published by Stonewall, gays and lesbians are more likely to fear homophobic hate crime in the West Midlands than anywhere else in the UK. Of course fear of crime isn’t the same [...]

Can’t I just use Google?

When promoting the regional resource catalogue to colleagues around the region, we tend to find that most tell us they’re using a search engine like Google, Live or Yahoo! to try to source data and information.
However, they also tell us that these Internet search engines do not always locate the information that they need or [...]

Sandwell… I know it so well!

Our regional resource catalogue has grown rapidly during the past twelve months and it now provides fully searchable access to over 2500 datasets, reports, web sites and other intelligence available. It’s one of the – if not the – most comprehensive catalogues of West Midlands data and intelligence available.
With coverage growing all the time, we [...]