"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics". This quote popularised by Mark Twain but attributed to Disraeli amongst others came to mind during our NINIS training seminar in SW College Cookstown on Thursday 3^rd December.

What's NINIS? The Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service run by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) see http://www.ninis.nisra.gov.uk/ . NISRA statisticians are working inside all government departments to collect data on a huge range of issues and send it back to NISRA. NISRA then acts as a hub collating the information, checking it for accuracy and making it available in a useable format for the use of government planners, politicians and the general public.

How is this relevant? Well it's important for community organisations to produce evidence to back up the arguments they are making around the issues they are trying to tackle. We all know that when we are trying to make a case to funders or statutory agencies then it's not enough to just appeal to their finer feelings or sense of duty. Hard evidence is much harder to dismiss. Hard evidence produced by government and verified as being statistically robust is even harder to dismiss These statistics can also be useful for community groups who are trying to hold government departments and agencies to account and can provide hard evidence of changes we already have experienced in our communities.

In terms of what's available on the site there's information on everything from the number of farm businesses to dental registrations of under-5s to travel to work times. You can create maps and break data down to, in most cases, electoral ward level and in some cases even smaller geographical areas. In fact it could be argued that it's a case of information overload as one of the challenges to anyone looking at the website is to filter down to the information they really need and ignore what's not relevant.

The session was really useful and gave people the chance to explore the website and then do a series of exercises to get used to the site's functions and features. Thanks to Sean Mallon of NISRA for coming down to run the session and SW College in Cookstown for hosting the session in its IT suite.