Across the 20 local authorities taking part in the Information and Signposting Project effort is underway to get data into Plings through the Input API. Duncan from Blackpool has taken time our from development work to share with us the four steps that Blackpool have gone through to gather and prepare data to input into Plings….

Identifying Who Has the Data

Before we started looking at getting all of our Plings data together in Blackpool we first of all needed to locate who currently was holding the data we were going to use and it what format. The vast majority of the data we were after was either held in static documents which had been produced locally by individual organisations or teams, in the minds of professionals working within our authority or in the Youth Directory 2008 (a PDF document which had been produced last year – this was what was originally intended to be the minimum Blackpool’s Youth Offer in order to meet the statutory guidance and with little funding to support it).

While in static form a lot of this information was of little use to us as it would need to be manually extracted and input into a more fluid tool which would allow us to adapt it to our needs. As well as this a lot of the information (having been produced in some cases 6 months to a year previous) needed updating to ensure that it was still accurate and relevant to young people living, working or studying in Blackpool. Realistically keeping it live in this format is an impossible task.

Also in some situations we had the difficulty of getting information out of the minds of professionals and into a database or onto paper so that we would have a fiscal record of exactly what we were able to provide.

Gathering the Data

In January 2009 we put together a pair of data collection forms to get information. One form was aimed at collecting information about venues and the other was for activities. We were quite specific in what information we requested, ensuring that it was made clear that if all required fields were not completed the information could not be submitted. In many cases we had found that information had been sent to us in very small amounts, for example emails would be forwarded to us with information about a specific activity but without lots of essential details which we would need to allow us to make a Pling. Using this system we gained a moderate amount of data however not in the quantities that we were expecting and we found that completing the forms sometimes slipped to the bottom of people’s priority list.

After trying the system of using forms to collect the data we decided to try a different approach and rolled out a hour of training to some of our administration staff based in our locality and specialist teams (North, Central and South Localities – Reflecting the geographic areas of Blackpool). It was considered that the locality administrators would be the ideal people to collect the information as they had face to face time with the professionals who in many cases were delivering these activities. The amount of data we were gathering quickly increased using this method and we soon saw results from this. As well as collecting fresh information we also tasked our administration team with updating the information we already had in the Youth Directory 2008 PDF document which we already had allowing us to make use of this vast resource we already had in place.

Additionally the continued with the use of the two forms which we had originally created for use with partners and other organisations who were delivering activities inside the borough but outside of Blackpool Young People Services. We advertised the opportunity for organisations to submit their data via us through our staff intranet and through existing links with the voluntary sector.

Quality Controlling the Data

In many situations we were finding that some data was not of the quality which we or Plings would like. It was often the case that we were only being given part of the picture, for example we knew that there were sports coaching sessions going on at a lot of the parks in Blackpool but we did not have full Plings data with contact information for the session leader or exact age ranges. To combat this we forged links with the services delivering these activities to ensure that we were getting all the information we needed to submit the data to Plings. We utilised the two forms we had created to give people a clear framework and data standards to adhere to when submitting information to us.

Building a Plings Input Tool

For some time we have held a “What’s On” guide on our website (www.rubothered.co.uk) however the information we were holding was not in quite as structured a way that we could submit this effectively to Plings. We had been using a large amount of “free text” fields in our database which meant our data was hard to manipulate into the XML format required for Plings. With this in mind we set about completely remodelling our database as almost a carbon copy of the Plings data schema.

We first came across some hurdles with regards to recurring events. In the original database we had stored each instance of an event as a separate record in the database table, however we found that this was causing our administrators to have to spend large amounts of time inputting the same data over and over again to give continuity for weekly events. With this in mind we decided to remodel the database once again adding an additional table which would hold “activity instances”. With this change completed each activity would have an activity record and a limitless number of instance records which would hold the date which a particular activity would take place (regardless of whether it only occurred once or occurred on a weekly basis).

Once we had all the data safely inputted in the database we then set about the work of building the system to post the information as XML to the Plings database. For this we used a PHP script built in house which selected all records in the instances table which did not have a Plings ID. Once selected the activity details for that instance were then pulled from the activity table and then in turn pulled data from the venue table. This information was then formatted as XML and saved to its own numbered XML file. The details of this file were then saved in the database as “ready to be Plinged”. This stage of the process we referred to as the generator.

After the generator script had been run a second script called the processor selected all the records in the database marked as ready to be Plinged. From this information to individually selected each XML file and posted it across to the Plings database using curl. The XML returns were then processed using the simpleXmlElement PHP function and entered into our databases corresponding records.

Once we had run this script several times using the development API key and having several discussions with David at Substance, we realised that we needed to build in an error tracking function. We created an additional table in our database that was purely for holding error information thrown out by the processor script. The error tracking held the number of the XML file which had caused the error and the amount of errors that Plings had returned to us.

Technology, Action Research, Improving processess

Duncan’s shared learning above overlaps with many of the learning points from other authorities taking part in the Information and Signposting project. Plings, as a project that is using technology to improve the provision of positive activity information, has encouraged, and provided frameworks, for local authorities to reflect upon and develop their processess not just for publishing positive activity information, but also for collecting and quality controlling the information too.

If you have been involved in the Information and Signposting project, and would like to share your four or five step story of getting data ready for plings – just drop us a line.