Techies in Residence NICVA

NICVA, the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, is a membership and representative umbrella body for the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland.

With around a thousand members that range from household name charities to grass-roots community groups, NICVA lobby and campaign to advance the interests of the people and communities that their members support. They offer a wide range of practical services, products and support to our members to help them do what they do best – find innovative solutions for social challenges.

The Problem

To build a definitive database of NI VCSE sector and associated APIs – creating a foundation for new data-led projects to be built on top of.

Creating a directory that can be used by all of NICVA and the sector, which can feed into the work that NICVA are doing around Open Data. This needs to be easily shared and possibly crowdsourced information.

It is hoped that this recourse could be used by individuals, government, local support agencies, MLA’s, academia and developers.

It is important that this is not simply a replication of another data source, and using the data that NICVA possess, as well as harnessing open data sources. NICVA launched the Northern Ireland Open Data node at CultureTECH in September, and have teamed up with Detail Data to help their work.