Case Study: Sheffield City Council achieves digitised services and greater transparency with Socrata

Digitizing Sheffield Through Open Data

Sheffield City Council partnered with Socrata to build an open data portal and digitize services to better engage residents and support economic growth. The existing council website blocked community participation, dataset uploads were cumbersome, and the authority lacked in‑house developers and a ready platform; the initiative also had to meet Transparency Code, FOI and Core Cities requirements and drive a culture change away from PDFs toward reusable data.

A Microsoft partner funded a Socrata pilot, and the council ran events, workshops (notably the AirMap air‑quality project) and a council‑wide open data working group to prepare stakeholders and publish datasets. The portal (data.sheffield.gov.uk) launched in February 2015, delivering staff training, faster FOI responses, empowered service teams that now publish and link datasets, and better public and business access for planning—yielding measurable cash and non‑cash savings and advancing Sheffield’s smart‑city and business‑intelligence goals.

Sheffield City Council

John Curtis

Head of Information and Knowledge Management