Case Study: Bath & North East Somerset Council achieves a community-run, cost-saving open data platform with Socrata

Bath & North East Somerset Council - Customer Case Study

Socrata partnered with Bath & North East Somerset (BANES) and a grassroots developer group called Bath: Hacked to tackle the council’s lack of in‑house expertise for launching an open data program. Early efforts—unstructured CSVs and one‑off hack events—proved unsustainable, and the council wanted a faster, community‑led approach that would let citizens take ownership of local data without a heavy municipal burden.

Socrata delivered a production datastore in weeks, enabling Bath: Hacked volunteers to curate and expand datasets (parking, housing, crime, historical maps, air quality) and attract DEFRA funding for visualizations. The result: a community‑run platform, cost savings for the council, sustained civic engagement by volunteer curators, and a replicable model now being formalized as a Community Interest Group.

Bath & North East Somerset Council

Jon Poole

Research & Intelligence Manager, Council