How British Blind Sport uses Silk
British Blind Sport (BBS) is a national charity in the UK aiming to help blind and partially sighted people play sports. Part of their work involves sharing the data they have amassed with sports governing bodies to improve sports opportunities for people with a visual impairment.
The Silk British Blink Sport Cambridgeshire has data and visualizations about the geographic spread of blind and partially sighted people in the Cambridgeshire area, about schools, sport clubs, and other topics. BBS also uses private Silks to collect and explore information on specific regions, schools and sports.
Data from bbs-cambridgeshire.silk.co
Thomas Davies is the Information & Database Coordinator at BBS. We asked him to tell us a bit more about how he uses Silk, and he kindly allowed us to publish this on our blog. Here are our questions and edited excerpts of Thomas’s answers:
What is your goal for using Silk?
> Over the next 3 years, our aim is to share research and data with sporting National Governing Bodies (NGBs) to ensure all their visually impaired (VI) participation programmes are based on solid evidence. As a charity, we are tasked to increase sporting participation amongst visually impaired people. Therefore, it’s important to understand the spread of visually impaired people across the country and focus participation programmes in areas where there is a large number of VI people and a demand for sports opportunities.
How will Silk help you meet these goals?
> Silk allows us to quickly display data on a map. I struggled to find a decent mapping service that was actually user-friendly. Also, we hope to produce different reports for specific NGBs and for specific regions in the UK. I would much rather create a report on Silk instead of producing a printed booklet for NGBs. I want to encourage NGBs to interrogate the data and Silk should allow us to do that. Also, Silk allows us to continually update the information and have NGBs receive subscription digests.
How do you create your Silks?
> We store all of our data in Podio and then generate Excel spreadsheets which I convert into a .CSV file. I can import CSV files easily into Silk. I wouldn’t have the patience to manually add all our data! As I haven’t delved too much into Silk yet, I often use your example projects to learn how I can layout my data in an attractive and effective ways.
On a personal note, at Silk we are proud to help NGOs (like Human Rights Watch) move their data online and visualize that date in beautiful and interesting ways. If you work at an NGO and are reading this, contact us and we can help you build a Silk for your organization to replace paper reports or help your team communicate its message with data (or words, images, video and audio - all work well on Silk). If you have any questions for Thomas or us, please let us know at [email protected]. Cheers!