Friday Lunchtime Lecture: Creating a billion-pound open dataset

The ‘Indices of Deprivation’ are used by central government, local government, charities and businesses to target a phenomenal amount of public spending each year. They are a valuable resource in ensuring services and funds are targeted towards the most vulnerable in society. Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) are the team behind the Indices of Deprivation 2015, a highly trusted, robust and accessible set of data that is used extensively. During this lunchtime lecture, you’ll hear the highs and lows of working with administrative data, and what it took to create the most downloaded dataset on data.gov.uk About the speaker Chief Executive and co-founder at OCSI, Tom Smith is a lifelong data addict with degrees in physics, artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience. Tom supports public sector organisations to use information effectively for policy and decision making, thus using better data for better decisions. He is Chair of the Environment Agency Data Advisory Group, and was project lead on UK government Indices of Deprivation.