Web service API for Observatory’s search service

A new search engine went live on the Observatory’s website last month. The aim is to provide you with better search results — ranked by relevancy — and more detailed controls over refinements to your search results.
Another feature is that the search service provides search results from other regional organisations’ websites; the search isn’t [...]

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 [...]

Draft new menu structure for wmro.org

It’s just over 12 months since the re-launch of the Observatory’s website www.wmro.org. Since the re-launch last year, our range of research has widened and there is a new focus on particular themes.
To try and help visitors to our website more easily find the research and data they want, I’m considering how best to restructure [...]

Better ways to share information digitally

The Observatory’s Population & Society Group is planning a seminar in the summer to investigate and discuss how research organisations in the West Midlands can get better at sharing information digitally. Do you have any thoughts on this?

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 [...]

Should the Observatory keep blogging?

This Observations blog was set up in July 2008. Formally, the aim is to support one of our strategic objectives:
Provide effective access to intelligence to encourage higher standards of evidence–based decision-making
Also, as the first foray into blogging at the Observatory, it’s an experiment to see what happens when we share information in this way.
Six months [...]

The economic downturn – impact on skills and the labour market

Our November 2008 briefing paper on the Economic Downturn, produced by WMRO’s Skills team, examines how the current economic climate is affecting the West Midlands in terms of skills and the labour market as a whole.
Here are the key headlines for quarter 3 of 2008:

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 [...]

Building a Register of Consultants

We’re developing a new directory for public agencies and the voluntary sector to use when searching for organisations to invite to tender for research projects.

Why are we doing this?
The Register of Consultants aims to solve two issues originally identified by the Economy & Labour Force Group:

The same usual suspects are asked to carry out research [...]

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 & [...]