Open project/source/data/government

The Justice Data Lab – an overview

Emma Tomkinson Criminal Justice, Evidence-based policy, Open project/source/data/government, Social Impact Bonds, Social Impact Measurement , , , , , ,

MoJ Data LabWhat is the Justice Data Lab?

The Justice Data Lab allows non-government organisations to compare the reoffending of the participants in their programmes with the reoffending of other similar ex-offenders. It “will allow them to understand their specific impact in reducing re-offending… providing easy access to high-quality re-offending information” (Ministry of Justice, Justice Data Lab User Journey p.10). There is no charge to organisations that use the Justice Data Lab.

The Justice Data Lab is a pilot run by the Ministry of Justice. The pilot began in April 2013. Each month, summaries of results and data are published, including Forest plots of all results so far.

Who might use it?

The Justice Data Lab can be used by “organisations that genuinely work with offenders” (Justice Data Lab User Journey p.11). One request will provide evidence of a programme’s effect on its service users’ reoffending. Several requests could compare services within an organisation or over time to answer more sophisticated questions about what is more effective.

This information could be used by non-government organisation for internal programme improvements, to report impact to stakeholders or to bid for contracts. It was set up at the time the Ministry of Justice’s Transforming Rehabilitation Programme was encouraging bids from voluntary and community sector organisations to deliver services to reduce reoffending.

What are the inputs?

Input data are required to identify the service users from a specific program and match them with a comparison group. Information on at least 60 service users is required and the organisation must have worked with the offender between 2002 and 2010.

Essential:

  • Surname
  • Forename
  • Date of Birth
  • Gender

At least one of the following:

  • Index Date
  • Conviction Date
  • Intervention Start Date [note: feedback from applicants is that this is required]
  • Intervention End Date [note:feedback from applicants is that this is required]

Highly Desirable: PNC ID and/or Prison Number

Optional: User Reference Fields

What are the outputs?

The one year proven re‐offending rate –  defined as the proportion of offenders in a cohort who commit an offence in a one year follow‐up period which received a court conviction, caution, reprimand or warning during the one year follow‐up or in a further six month waiting period. The one year follow‐up period begins when offenders leave custody or start their probation sentence. A fictional example of the output provided by the Ministry of Justice is quoted below:

The analysis assessed the impact of the Granville Literacy Project (GLP) on re‐ offending. The one year proven re‐offending rate for 72 offenders on the GLP was 35%, compared with 41% for a matched control group of similar offenders. The best estimate for the reduction in re‐offending is 6 percentage points, and we can be confident that the reduction in re‐offending is between 2 and 10 percentage points.
What you can say: The evidence indicates that the GLP reduced re‐offending by between 2 and 10 percentage points.

Publication
Applicants should note the following requirement: “an organisation requesting data through the Justice Data Lab must publish the final report, in full, on the organisation’s website within four months of receiving the final report.”

I’d be very interested in the opinions of applicants on this requirement. Is it an issue? Does it create perverse incentives?

What are the implications?

The implications are huge. Prior to the Justice Data Lab it was very difficult for non-government organisations to establish a comparison group against which to measure their effect. Evaluations of effect are expensive and thus prohibitive, particularly for smaller organisations. In addition, the differences in their methods and definitions meant that evidence was more difficult to interpret and compare.

This is exactly the type of evidence that developers of social impact bonds find so difficult to establish and will be essential to constructing social impact bonds to deliver  Transforming Rehabilitation services. It is a measure of outcome, which is desirable, but often more difficult to quantify than input (e.g. how much money went into the programme), activity (e.g. what services were delivered) or output (e.g. how many people completed the programme).

New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) were involved in designing the Justice Data Lab and their Data for Impact Manager, Tracey Gyateng, is specifically thinking about applications to other policy areas.

How is it going?

See my November 2014 post on information coming out of the Justice Data Lab.

Also note the announcement of an Employment Data Lab by NPC and the Department of Work and Pensions.

More information

Information on the Justice Data Lab home page includes links to a series of useful documents:

  • User journey document – information on what the justice data lab is, and how to use its services.
  • Data upload template – use this template to supply data to the justice data lab. Further descriptions of the variables requested are given, and there are key areas which must be filled in on the specific activities of the organisation in relation to offenders.
  • Methodology paper – this document gives details of the specific methodology used by justice data lab to generate the analysis
  • Privacy impact assessment – this is a detailed analysis of how an organisations’ data will be protected at all stages of a request to the justice data lab
  • Example report template – two examples of a standard report, completed for two fictional organisations showing what will be provided.

Criminal justice service providers might also benefit from getting involved in the Improving Your Evidence project, a partnership between Clinks, NPC and Project Oracle. The project will produce resources and support, so follow the link and let them know what would be of most use. The page also links to an introduction to the Justice Data Lab – a useful explanation of the service.

The bulk of this post has been copied directly from the Ministry of Justice documents listed above. It is intended to act as a summary of these documents for quick digestion by potential users of the Justice Data Lab. The author is not affiliated with the Ministry of Justice and does not claim to represent them.

Mapping the needs of a community

Emma Tomkinson Evidence-based policy, Open project/source/data/government, Social Impact Bonds, Social Impact Measurement , , , ,

Australian update: Community Insight Australia is working to shape and translate the Community Insight tool for Australia. Please get in touch if you share our vision and would like to take the journey with us.

Policy-makers know that social programmes are more effective if they are provided in the areas of greatest need. But, historically, it has been resource intensive to identify either areas of need or the range of needs of a particular community. This task would either involve weeks of combing through the latest data from all reliable sources or painstakingly interviewing a large enough sample to make assumptions about the populations. As a public servant, I’ve spent hours on the computer painting maps of social disadvantage, a new map for each indicator.

This problem is also faced by Housing Associations and other social housing landlords, who provide homes to over 4.5m households across England, and operate in an environment in which accurate data about communities they work within has become increasingly important to policy and delivery decisions. Their ability to access relevant data has been limited by poor quality data systems and a reliance on a limited pool of research analysts to interpret the data that was available.

In response to this, new housing think-do tank HACT and social policy data experts OCSI recently launched Community Insight, a web-based tool which allows non-expert staff at all levels to explore geographically social indicators of need quickly and easily for the first time, using constantly-updated, reliable data.

I was lucky enough to have Matt Leach, from HACT, take me through Community Insight and I couldn’t have been more impressed. The key to the tool is its simplicity.

  1. You choose the geographic area you are interested in on a map of England and Wales.
  2. The tool will give you the demographic and social indicators of the area.

Screenshot of Community Insight showing a selected area, specific houses by housing type, social indicator categories on the left and colours on the map showing the density of the chosen indicator, mental health issues.

Community Insight area screen grab

Features:

  • the social indicators are also presented in comparison to the national average
  • information about a geographical area can be interacted with online or exported in seconds as a detailed report
  • you can drill down by area or statistical collection for more information
  • the statistical collections behind the tool are automatically updated as their sources are updated
  • geographical areas can be defined specifically by a spreadsheet of housing stock or drawn with your finger or a mouse onto a map as a suburb, county or region.

Some of the ways housing providers are using Community Insight could transfer to policy makers and programme designers:

  • comparing between different areas in order to target community investment programmes to areas of greatest ‘need’
  • assessing change over time in different areas, as a starting point for evaluation of programme impact
  • combining with more detailed data from administrative data sets, to develop ‘at-risk models’ to identify areas and properties (and indeed individuals) that might be at risk e.g. of rent arrears

The tool is notable for a number of reasons:

  • it is one of the first large scale commercial approaches to accessing and interpreting open data launched by a UK-based social enterprise in a major public service area
  • it was designed from the bottom up as a tool for practitioners (one of the design principles that drove the team was “democratising data”)
  • it has had instant, mainstream success, with over 60 landlords with a total stock in management of nearly 1m households subscribing to the service within 4 months of its launch
  • it’s incredibly easy to use and the data produced is fit for purpose.

Easy to use

The tool was developed with its users involved at every step of the way. Rather than start with the data sets and try to make them interactive, the development of Community Insight was driven by the needs and intentions of the user. The intended users are housing providers – they can upload their housing stock and ascertain the social characteristics of the people they house. However, even a quick play with the tool suggests that a much wider range of unintended users – policy-makers and programme designers across government and other public service areas – might be beneficiaries. A number of local authorities, for example, facing significant cuts to their in house capacity to collect and analyse data have expressed interest in embedding Community Insight in order to retain the ability to access information on the communities they work within.

Business model

Community Insight is sold on a subscription basis, with subscribing organisations having unlimited staff access to the tool across their business. They are able quickly to produce comparable reports on different geographical areas as the need arises. OCSI and HACT ensure the data is constantly updated and will continue to develop and improve the resource over time. Subscribers report an immediate reduction in the costs of community profiling consultancies (for some housing associations paying back the annual subscription in a matter of weeks), little to no installation or maintenance overhead (as all data is updated centrally) and minimal training requirements for new users.

Selection of headline indicators from the  Community Insight Report on Emmaville (a fictitious village).

Emmaville overview

 Statistics for each selected geographical area

  • population by number, age, gender, dependency ratio, population size over the last 10 years, ethnicity and country of birth, migration statistics, household composition, religion
  • number of types of houses e.g. flats by local median price of each, renting and ownership proportions, trends in house price over the last 6 years, central heating, overcrowding and dwelling size, local communal residential establishments
  • vulnerable groups by types of benefits claimed and number of claimants
  • crime by type recorded and 10 year trend
  • health by life expectancy and long-term illnesses, healthy eating, smoking and binge drinking
  • education by qualifications, pupil scores at key stage tests
  • economy by income, employment status and sector, job vacancies, local businesses, index of multiple deprivation, child wellbeing index
  • transport by car ownership, distance to key services
  • community by classification of type, feeling of neighbourhood satisfaction, active charities, air pollution

Potential uses

Following their roll-out in the housing sector, HACT and OCSI are considering where Community Insight might be applicable or adaptable to other sectors.  After my brief trial of the tool, my immediate thoughts for additional applications by potential non-housing provider users are:

  • designers of social impact bonds and other payment by results programmes might use the Community Insight tool to select an intervention cohort of appropriate size and need
  • researchers might use the tool to scan areas where they might focus their on-the-ground investigations
  • journalists might use the tool to describe the community a particular event has taken place in
  • local authorities might use the tool to educate their staff about the diversity and differences within their communities
  • social investors interested in place-based investing

What might you use it for?

Three examples of public engagement in policy development

Emma Tomkinson Evidence-based policy, Open project/source/data/government

(from www.socialbrite.org)

The Social Impact Bond Knowledge Box I produced for the Centre for Social Impact Bonds at the Cabinet Office (UK) includes contributions from many external individual contributors. It provides opportunity for users to comment on or suggest edits for each page and submit links to their own work in order to keep the resource up-to-date. It was inspired by these three examples of policy interactions with the public:

1. The White House has a petition site called ‘We the People’ that promises a response to petitions that raise over 25,000 signatures. In 2012, a petition to “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016” received the requisite signatures, and the White House used their humorous response to promote domestic innovations and the study of science, technology, engineering and maths.

2. In November last year the Cabinet Office (UK) launched an on-line consultation seeking public views on the new datasets code of practice that will be issued under Section 45 of FOIA. It set out the amendment with a comment box under each clause, inviting the public to make comments or specific edits. While the consultation helped the team refine the amendment in light of users’ responses, it was also intended as an educational exercise, to “make public authorities aware of their new responsibilities under the new FOIA ‘datasets’ sections.” The consultation is now closed.

3. The London Assembly encourages the public to take part in their processes by:

  • Participating in consultations
  • Suggesting something to investigate
  • Putting a question to the Mayor
  • Asking an Assembly Member to present a petition on their behalf
  • Subscribing to their monthly ezine.

Check out Govloop’s Citizen Engagement Hub that’s packed with resource links and their guide Innovating at the Point of Citizen Engagement: Making Every Moment Count which includes seven inspirational stories.

What other examples are there of government crowd-sourcing their policy development?

Raleigh citizens will create their open data policy and catalogue

Link Emma Tomkinson Open project/source/data/government

While governments across the globe are committing to open data policies, these are proving harder to deliver than to write! Raleigh has asked its citizens to contribute to their policy development. The great thing about this, is that they’ll get an idea of who wants to use their data and how. Government data are often published to answer a set of random questions in formats that aren’t accessible to statistics programs.

I expect Raleigh will have much more success with this approach than the UK Cabinet Office did with their Public Data Corporation. Announced in January 2011, the Public Data Corporation was to “bring together Government bodies and data into one organisation and provide an unprecedented level of easily accessible public information and drive further efficiency in the delivery of public services”. Unfortunately, it took so long to figure out how it was all going to work, that the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills struck it off the register in January 2012. We may yet see a revival of the Public Data Corporation, although the proposed Raleigh approach of providing a centralised directory to separate agency data sources may be the compromise they’ll have to make.

Big Data… what’s it all about?

Emma Tomkinson Evidence-based policy, Open project/source/data/government , , ,

I’m still getting my head around the concept of big data, but it’s creating some buzz. From its Wikipedia page

“Big data” is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.

I quite like Melissa Hardt’s brief and easy to read Govloop blog post summarising big data. In it she refers to the Obama administration’s US$200m “Big Data” Initiative announcement – it ends with a good summary of spending in various departments.

I heard it said that “big data” is a McKinsey term – whether it is or not, they’ve produced a report that scans the data, systems, talent and potential in the US.

The interest point here for me is data visualisation – realtime, moving pictures of systems.. imagine flexible public services with realtime responses to their service environment…

NSW Government ICT strategy – first mention of open data and open government in NSW – Yay!

Emma Tomkinson Evidence-based policy, Open project/source/data/government , ,

The Department of Finance and Service ICT Policy unit has led the move into open government and open data for the NSW public service with the development and publication of their ICT Strategy. Let’s hope this heralds much greater access to NSW public data! The Strategy will be driven by the ICT Board, with seven Directors General including Premier and Cabinet and Treasury. The idea of open data is pretty radical for the NSW Government at this point, so there’s huge potential for impact!

NSW Government ICT Strategy 2012

Information and communications technology is an everyday tool for almost all our daily transactions and information needs. It allows for innovative approaches to government service delivery and community and industry engagement. The NSW Government ICT Strategy 2012 sets out the first steps to support the public sector to drive better service delivery, greater transparency and better value from investment in ICT.

Download the full NSW Government ICT Strategy 2012 pdf (23 MB) or the overview document pdf (2.7 MB).