The Housing Open Data Challenge was a part of The Open Data Challenge Prize Series, which was a series of seven challenge prizes to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social challenges. It was funded by the Technology Strategy Board,(now known as Innovate UK) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, now known as the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The Challenge posed the following question, which it incentivised innovators to solve: How can we use open data to help people get the best out of renting?
Open data has the potential to power tools that provide solutions to real problems. Although the UK is the world leader in releasing open data, its use in informing real world solutions has been limited and fragmented, with innovative start-ups lacking support and data expertise to scale to a sustainable business level.
This series of challenges aimed to galvanise a new community to use open data as the key ingredient in helping solve social problems. The challenges helped SMEs and start-ups to work with data providers, industry experts and business leaders to develop new ways to reuse available data, creating sustainable business opportunities.
MoveMaker is a smartphone app that helps people living in social housing swap their properties. It was submitted by Isabelle Champion, Pip Keast, Alice Granville and Ed Wallace from the Research and Innovation team at Viridian Housing.
Although useful on their own, bringing these datasets together creates a picture of an area, helping people to make better-informed decisions and ultimately find homes that are right for them.
Social housing tenants house swap for many reasons – space, money, changing family circumstances or distance from work. MoveMaker makes it really easy for people to swap their homes. Like popular dating apps, people are only matched where there’s a mutual interest. They can chat and agree to a move through the app before working out the details with the authorities.
Around 2 million people currently live in homes that are too big or too small for them. By making the process of finding the right home really easy, MoveMaker wants to get more people swapping. This will help people use housing stock more effectively and reduce pressure on housing waiting lists.
The MoveMaker app will be free for social housing tenants to download and use. Housing Associations will be able to use it for free for 12 months.
MoveMaker is currently in development and will be available to use from Summer 2015. Social housing providers interested in trailing the app for free should go to www.movemakerapp.co.uk for more details.
Open JamJar is a service which helps tenants in the private sector who are receiving housing benefit budget for their rent.
RentSquare is an open data powered platform connecting tenants and landlords directly around the best rent price.
