We are excited to announce a new feature to the Exeter Data Mill – the ability for citizens, communities, SMEs and businesses to request a dataset that they’d like to see uploaded to the platform.

Request City Data

What is the Exeter Data Mill?

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Exeter Data Mill is a data portal established as a collaboration between Exeter City Council, Exeter City Futures and The Environmental Futures & Big Data Impact Lab, where you can access interesting data about our city. 

Exeter Data Mill brings together data from businesses and organisations across Exeter. It gives us the capability to knock down long-standing silos of knowledge, and draw insight into the ways in which we can make our city a better, more fulfilling place to live and work.

One of the key objectives of this project is to help Exeter become an ‘analytical city’. This is a city whose citizens and communities have a good understanding of how they can create, control and use city data, and feel empowered to use public data to create change and influence better decision making. By realising the potential of Exeter’s data the Exeter Data Mill can identify the right services, infrastructure and innovation that meets real needs of citizens, as well as enabling data-driven decisions that will support the city in it’s ambition to become carbon neutral by 2030.

We believe that analysing city data can enable us to take great strides towards building better places. Within a city’s data potentially lie answers needed for developing long-term solutions to the challenges of urbanisation, as well as enabling better decisions to be made about the way we live our lives and develop our city.

We’re now looking to expand the datasets available on the Exeter Data Mill, and we need your help! 

We would like to understand better what matters to the people of Exeter, and this is a great chance to satisfy your curiosity, help the city achieve its carbon ambitions and shape the way the city talks about data in the years to come.

Anyone can ask for data to be added and we will do our best to seek out the data you request from a variety of reputable international, national and local sources, and aim to present the data in a format which is easy to digest. 

  • Are you a citizen who wants to know more about where your energy comes from? 
  • Are you a local retailer who wants to understand the area around your store? 
  • Or are you just curious about something to do with the city of Exeter? 

Request City Data

It is worth bearing in mind that these are informal requests and are not formal Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. If a dataset that you ask for is controlled by a public sector organisation we may be able to offer advice on the best organisation or individuals to contact – if this is the case we’ll get in touch with you directly.

We look forward to reading your data requests, seeking out data on your behalf and will continue to improve the Exeter Data Mill and its benefit to the city. You can email us directly with your feedback about the platform to data@exetercityfutures.com. 

What next?