I looked hard at this at the time of the original SUABW submission. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that the best source of catchment areas will be from those that have been through the process?

Perhaps not. Here are two problems:

Firstly, would the catchment areas generated be of any use? It seems pretty clear, as a result of the numerous decision appeals, that the eventual outcome won’t show nice clear boundaries. One might mitigate this by more sophisticated crowdsourcing (differentiating between those who got straight in, and those via appeal) – but there are complications of siblings, and looked-after children, which also mean that outcome may not usefully reflect boundary.

And this leads to another concern. That by taking individual point data from the crowd we are a) identifying where children live (I’m at the less paranoid end of the scale, but others will baulk at this – and any randomisation of location would blur the boundary) and b) showing, by inference, that outlier cases may involve personal issues such as special needs or complex family circumstances that lie behind the award of a place.

What use would such information really be, in practice? I could just see a whole lot more confusion (and appeals) being generated by such a map; with its inevitably blurred and inconsistent boundaries. Hence my decision to focus on releasing those boundaries that were officially ‘confirmed’ (few as they may be), and exposing the “known uncertainty” of the rest. Seemed more honest. And real.

we ran the competition (i was working in cabinet office then and set it up) expecting maybe 50 entries and were astonished by the hundreds of ideas. it was then a first in the world for a government.

it is always tricky to get innovation to stick in a bureacracy, especially innovation from the centre of government that needs to find a home in a busy delivery department. i moved out of cabinet office in spring last year so don’t know quite where the implementation of your idea has got to.

but show us a better way’s legacy was strong validation for bureacrats that you could do something useful with free data – breaking out of geek corner. it was able to show conclusively that free data used by thirs parties could support the delivery of the government’s mainstream policy objectives. i don’t think government could have got quite as far as it has (see data.gov.uk tomorrow) without the avalanche of hard ideas such as yours generated by the competition.

my hope is that the advances since then will ultimately allow others to implement your idea even if DCFS doesn’t.

You’ll be interested to know that James Gardner, CTO at DWP will be at UKGC10 this weekend. James has just had a book published on innovating within banks – the sector he worked in previously – and we are hoping to run a session on innovation in government. Please be a part of that!