The Great British Public Toilet Map (TGBPTM) is an open dataset of 12000+ publicly accessible toilets in the UK, accessed through an online interface. It allows people to find location and accessibility information, and to add, edit and remove data (crowd-sourcing).
National toilet data was last collected in 2001 (Audit Commission: 5959 toilets in England) with public toilet data fragmented across 406 councils. A subset of councils (81) produce open data. Since 2008 provision has become far more diverse, devolved and privatised, as ‘publicly-accessible’ toilets. Datasets created by online information-mining, available open data or crowd-sourcing have been ineffective or become obsolete.
Ramster developed a three-pronged methodology recognising the strengths of these methods in combination, to create a national dataset of publicly-accessible toilets that elicits ongoing updates from providers and users.
She was awarded £20K by Nominet Trust (now Social Tech Fund) to develop her methodology which revealed 9000+ toilets when the website launched (Nov 2014), and a grant from Open Data Institute (2016) to analyse her data for regional inequalities in provision.
Ramster was invited to present on her application and creation of open data to meet a public need by the Open Data Institute (2014), Geomob (2014) and OpenTech (2015) conferences. In 2016 she was a finalist (with Bichard) for TGBPTM in the ESRC Outstanding Impact in Society Awards and BT Tech4Good competition. Several local authorities have contributed and/or link to TGBPTM data.
This applied research creating an open dataset builds on previous work of the same name (TGBPTM pilot, 2011-2014) that gathered public demand for digitised public service information (local open data), an output of TACT3 (2009-2012).
In 2018, with Bichard and developers Neontribe, Ramster set-up Public Convenience Ltd; a spin-out from the RCA to sustain and develop TGBPTM for public and commercial applications.