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'Pic and Mix' Update - Help yourself to government data

Many of you will have heard about 'Pic and Mix', but for those of you who have managed to avoid my pleas for data, I’ll briefly re-cap on what the project is all about.

There’s a great deal of information and data available to the public, from bus routes and GP information, through to recycling statistics and Ofsted reports. All this information is freely available to the public but not necessarily easy to find. Part of the 'Pic and Mix' project looks to make this information accessible online from a single place. But in addition to making information available for download, 'Pic and Mix' makes the data available in a format which allows people to ‘mash’, personalise and share information.

Imagine being able to select data relating to care homes in Kent, adding inspection reports, and the location of nearby support services. Having easy access to this type of information would help people make decisions about things that really matter and more importantly, empower them to me more informed and engaged with their community.

That’s what 'Pic and Mix' is all about.

There are more than 350 datasets on the 'Pic and Mix' website and we have started to promote the site more widely than the pilot group. We’re getting great feedback to our Tweets and were even mentioned in a BBC article! The priority now is to get more people using the site and personalising our data. We’re also still on the never-ending hunt for more data so manage non-sensitive data that may be of interest to the people of Kent, please get in touch. Your feedback on what we’ve done so far would be great and you can keep up to date with the project by following our tweets.

- A special thank you to Paula Rixon for this update on the Pic N Mix project. If you would like to know more about the project, you can contact Paula at Paula.rixon@kent.gov.uk or 01622 696934.

Picture: A Pic N Mix stall showing a variety of sweets with metal scoops resting on top, with thanks to Christophe Dune for publishing on Flickr under a Creative Commons license some rights reserved.

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