What personal responsibility are we each willing to take for the place where we live?

In 2010 Who Owns My Neighbourhood was one of the UK's first local authority open data projects, supported by Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) through the Make It Local programme.

Diane Sims and myself were interested in drawing out the difference between ownership and responsibility, and whether a sense of responsibility could be nurtured through making ownership visible, and capturing stories about places.

"We want people to think about what personal responsibility we are each willing to take for the place where we live, and how we might be able to help each other to look after it."

Diane and I hosted a series of three conversation events to talk to people in a Huddersfield neighbourhood about the common spaces where they lived, to give us a better sense of how people thought and talked about ownership and responsibility.

Myself and Pete Fitzpatrick, working together as Thumbprint Co-operative, designed and built the Who Owns My Neighbourhood website using the data set Kirklees Council holds of the land that it owns.