Spec out what's needed for new SchoolCuts style apps

[jamesmoulding]

SchoolCuts launched in the weeks before the snap general election last year. This simple app, with voters popping in their postcode showing cuts to schools in their local area, affected over 1.8 million votes and had 4 million users in it's first weekend.

SchoolCuts was one of the big tech successes of the 2017 General Election. What's more, it didn't take a lot of work to build. They had the fortune that there was decent and granular enough data on school cuts available when they needed it.

We think this is a big opportunity, a serious low hanging fruit in terms of social impact and effort required.

So, what we need - and this is asking a lot - is a small team to get together and spec out what would be needed from a new SchoolCuts style web app - such as required data, data format, flow etc, so much so that another team in the future likely hailing from Radical Engineers or Outlandish(who developed the first SchoolCuts app), can take your work and run with it.

We've recommended police cuts as the focus of the new app (but ultimately this is up to you) because there is a significant amount of granular and geolocated data on policing, it's also a politically sensitive issue with rising violent crime being reportedly associated with heavy frontline cuts in the number of officers due to austerity.

You can find the data relating to police cuts in the Justice/Police filter view in the Campaign Lab Data Inventory.

[hannah-o-rourke]

It might also be interesting to do this with local council expenditure on different services like housing or recycling..

You can get local authority expenditure on different services for 2011/12 here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2011-to-2012-individual-local-authority-data--2

You can get local authority expenditure on different services for 2017/18 here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2017-to-2018-individual-local-authority-data-outturn

There are some categories which stay coherent across the year which may be worth exploring - including recycling etc...