Blog

  1. Why PostgreSQL + Django is my data pipeline of choice

    This blog post is based partly on an interesting conversation at Open Data camp 9 in Manchester this year, where Giles from Open Innovations led a session called DIY FTW! What’s in YOUR toolbox?. As well as showcasing a bunch of tools that I'd not come across, it also …

  2. Where to get boundary data on new parliamentary constituencies

    The 2024 UK General Election happens on July 4th. This election will be fought on a new set of constituency boundaries, with the makeup of constituencies changing for the first time since 2010. You can find out more information about these changes on the parliament.uk website. If you're analysing …

  3. Where to find geographic boundaries for the UK

    Geographic boundary data is a requirement for any geographic analysis or map-making. But finding boundary data is often a nightmare. Mapstack @mapstack_io Just Googled for "UK county boundaries as GeoJSON". Results:1. data.gov.uk no joy (see screenshot).2. gis.stackexchange.com post from 2015, suggesting I use ogr2ogr …

  4. What powers charity websites?

    I wanted to understand what technologies charities are using with their websites. What CMSs do they use to create content and layout the sites? What web technologies are they using - to what extent have the embraced the latest tech on their sites? And how well are they complying with some …

  5. How many charity employees have been furloughed?

    This blog post is a write-up of a twitter thread exploring data available. These are very rough estimates, based on data that's available at the time of writing. It's frustratingly difficult to find out how many charities have used the government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, or how many employees have …

  6. Working with XBRL

    Some notes on the XBRL data format, as I've been working with it this week. I'm working with Power to Change to help them extract data from accounts. What's XBRL/iXBRL? XBRL standards for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. iXBRL is the same but "inline". They describe a data standard for …

  7. Text analysis in the voluntary sector

    Last week at the Data 4 Good event in Birmingham I gave a talk on the opportunities and challenges that text analysis offers to the voluntary sector. It was a short lightning talk so I was only able to give a quick overview of the possibilities, and it's a big …

  8. Grants in Kingston

    On Tuesday I was lucky enough to take part in a Kingston "Data Day", organised by the fantastic Superhighways and Kingston Voluntary Action. The aim of the day was to showcase some of the work that charities in Kingston are already doing to use data in their work, and see …

  9. Adding charity details using findthatcharity - Part II

    ...continued from part 1 Part II - add charity details Once you've got a list of organisations in OpenRefine with charity numbers you can then add more details about the organisations using findthatcharity.uk. You can add: postcode website latest income link to Charity Commission register date registered/removed Company Number …

  11. Back in the GDPR

    G-day (the 25 May) is fast approaching, when charities will need to be GDPR-compliant. While half of charities apparently haven't heard of it there's no shortage of resources so I've put together a list of the resources I've seen produced on github. If you see anything missing then please add …

  12. Names shared by genders

    Building the gender classifier I've written about here got me interested in ambiguous names - those that are shared by people of both genders. I realised I could use the list of male and female charity trustee names I'd gathered to look into this in a bit more detail. Bearing in …

  13. A name gender classifier

    Something I've needed to do a couple of times is take a long list of names and classify them into male and female. For example, I've looked at lists of people who attended events to see whether they were reaching more men or women - this then helps target future events …

  14. Twitter bot – random charity

    I’ve been playing about with twitter bots, and following some instructions on using the twitter API in python, I’ve created a bot that tweets a link to a random charity every half an hour. The code and more details on the bot can be found on github. From …