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A refreshed approach to open data - how you can help

West Yorkshire Combined Authority works in partnership with local councils and businesses to ensure that everyone in our region benefits from a strong, successful economy and a modern, accessible transport network.

By championing the regions interests nationally and internationally, the Combined Authority secure government and other investment to drive the region forward. The Combined Authority are currently investing around 2 billion to deliver better transport and housing, regenerate our towns and cities and protect our environment. The Combined Authority also help businesses to grow and create skilled jobs, and provide support, funding and information to help people travel around the region easily on good quality public transport and cycle-ways.

The Combined Authority has four main priorities:

  • A strong economy - helping businesses to grow and bringing new investment into the region to improve productivity and create jobs
  • Inclusive growth - ensuring that economic growth leads to opportunities for all who live and work in our region to prosper
  • 21st Century transport creating an efficient transport infrastructure that makes it easier to get to work, do business and connect with each other
  • Devolution securing funding and powers to enable us to do even more to make lives here better

The Combined Authority were a founding sponsor ODI Leeds in 2014, and since then we have worked with them on specific projects, and they have contributed to the open data working group. They have also engaged with fellow sponsors and made valuable new connections. In that same time, the digital landscape of Leeds (and beyond) has changed - awareness of open data has increased resulting in new, richer datasets that are more useful for a more diverse audience, including citizen scientists. With new attitudes to open data comes new demands of data publishers, and a new responsibility to create, use, and share data that has wider benefits. The Combined Authority currently provide route, timetable, and real-time bus information available as open data. The real-time bus information was accessed over 39 million times via third party apps last year alone. With a view to refreshing their open data policy to meet the demands of this new data landscape, the Combined Authority will be working closely with ODI Leeds to develop an open data strategy.

To help the Combined Authority understand how open data can support and help deliver their priorities, they would like to know what other datasets or types/themes of data the development community think should be made available openly, and what benefits could be achieved as a result. Please respond on this Google Doc with your ideas and the datasets that you would like to access openly, which could be used to develop solutions that will help West Yorkshire be the best place to live, work and do business!