Open Data Round Up: 24/02/14

Welcome back to my round-up of the most interesting recent stories from the world of open data:

• The Open Data Institute has announced further expansion of it’s international network, signing up five more organisations to act as “ODI Nodes”. The new Nodes will be located in Osaka, Seoul, Sheffield, Philadelphia and Hawaii and will bring together companies, universities, and NGOs that support open data projects and communities.

• Pivigo Academy have developed an “Data Science Summer School“, due to start in August 2014, which is the first of it’s kind in the UK. The five week course is aimed training PhD students and researchers in the commercial tools and techniques needed to be hired into data science roles and will be sponsored by KPMG.

• TechCityUK recently organised Flood Hack, a forum for developers to work on apps and systems which could support members of the public affected by the recent bad weather in the UK and by future extreme weather events. 18 different apps were developed during the event, two of which received development funding from the Nominet Trust to take their apps further – FludBud, which finds users who are near to flood affected areas and tweets them information about potential volunteers near them, and Flood Feeder, which creates a visualization of an aggregated feed of flood & related data.

• The care.data programme which proposes to allow sharing of NHS patient data in England has been postponed by six months in response to concerns raised by patients and doctors. The postponement will allow NHS England more time to address concerns around privacy as well as to get a greater understanding of the potential risks and benefits. Dr Geraint Lewis, the Chief Data Officer for NHS England, has written a detailed post on the safeguards that will be put in place as part of the care.data programme to protect patient privacy.

Is there anything else you’d like to see covered in these posts? Let me know in the comments or get in touch via Horizon’s social media channels!