--- title: "Launching the Civic Dashboard & Our Push for Better Open Data | Coolock Village" description: "The new Civic Dashboard is live. Here is how we are using open data, the technical challenges we hit, and what we are asking Smart Dublin and the LGMA to fix." canonical_url: "https://coolockvillage.ie/news/civic-dashboard-launch/" template: "raw-page" schema_type: "NewsArticle" date_published: "2026-02-24T00:00:00.000Z" date_modified: "2026-02-24T00:00:00.000Z" --- Coolock Village Dublin 5 Ireland info@coolockvillage.ie Community-led civic action, local business, reporting, and regeneration hub for Coolock Village, Dublin 5. coolockvillage.ie www.facebook.com www.instagram.com www.wikidata.org Permalink to Launching the Civic Dashboard & Our Push for Better Open Data news Back to Updates - - Share News / 24 February 2026 / 4 min read # Launching the Civic Dashboard & Our Push for Better Open Data The new Civic Dashboard is live. Here is how we are using open data, the technical challenges we hit, and what we are asking Smart Dublin and the LGMA to fix. Author Ryan Winkler Updated 24 February 2026 Discussion Open Bottom line ## Article summary The new Civic Dashboard is live. Here is how we are using open data, the technical challenges we hit, and what we are asking Smart Dublin and the LGMA to fix. The Coolock Village Civic Dashboard is officially live. It is designed to pull local data out of obscure government portals and put it directly in front of you. No login. No PDF hunting. No searching across five different council websites. You can find it now at /civic-dashboard . ## What it shows Right now the dashboard tracks two live data feeds: #### Planning Applications Every application submitted near Coolock Village, pulled live from Dublin City Council. See what is Pending, Granted, or Refused. #### Bus Arrivals Real-time departures from the NTA for the routes serving Main Street. No more guessing at the bus stop. The plan is to keep adding feeds: traffic, notices, council votes, local events. If there is a data source you want to see, let us know. ## How the data gets here The short version: we pull from government APIs, clean up the data, and display it in plain language. The slightly longer version: the site is built on Astro , a framework that renders everything as fast static HTML and only loads JavaScript where it is actually needed. The whole thing runs on Cloudflare’s global edge network, so pages load instantly regardless of where you are. What is ArcGIS? ArcGIS is a mapping platform used by most Irish government agencies to publish geographic data. The LGMA uses it to serve a national feed of all planning applications. We query this feed, filter it to Coolock Village’s coordinates, and display the results on the dashboard. For planning data specifically, we connect to the LGMA’s national ArcGIS dataset, a centralised feed of planning applications from every local authority in Ireland. We filter it down to Coolock Village’s geographic area and map the results in real time. ## The problem we ran into Building this exposed a serious flaw in Ireland’s open data infrastructure. - - Data Feed Broken Since August 2025 The LGMA national planning feed stopped syncing Dublin City Council applications in August 2025. That means every planning application submitted in Dublin since then is missing from the public dataset. Applications are being filed. Decisions are being made. But the data feed does not know about any of it. We tried to work around it by going directly to DCC’s own portal (Agile Applications), but that system actively blocks automated requests. It is built to serve human users clicking through a browser, not civic tech pulling data on behalf of a community. Even basic data requests bounce back. On top of that, the national dataset does not include the internal ID needed to deep-link directly to a planning file. So even when the data is there, we cannot send you straight to the source. ## What we are asking Smart Dublin to fix We sent a formal request today to Dublin City Council’s Open Data unit and the LGMA. We are asking them to: - Restore the DCC data sync — everything since August 2025 is missing. - Add deep link IDs — so we can send residents directly to the planning file, not a fuzzy search. - Add Eircodes and ward boundaries — so the data can be filtered for Coolock Village, cross-referenced with councillor records, and linked to other civic datasets. We also shared our own Coolock Village Business Directory dataset as a demonstration of what structured, joinable local data looks like. We are not just asking them to do better. We are showing what better looks like. We will publish their response here when we get one. ## In the meantime The dashboard is live and running. Where the data is stale, it says so clearly. Where it is working, it is pulling real applications from the national feed. Go check it out. Let us know what you want to see added next. R Ryan Winkler Coolock Village Regeneration Project ## In this update - What it shows - How the data gets here - The problem we ran into - What we are asking Smart Dublin to fix - In the meantime - - ## Share this update WhatsApp Facebook Mastodon post Email - Copy link ## Filed under - #data - #civic-tech - #dashboard - #planning Keep reading ## More from Coolock Village News ### Keeping the Village Directory Accurate 26 Feb 2026 / 3 min News ### The Main Street Issues We Are Tracking 12 Jan 2025 / 3 min Initiative ### The Three Outcomes We Are Working Toward 10 Jan 2025 / 3 min Older Dublin's 2026 Community Fund: Ideas for Coolock Village Newer Coolock Village's Water Pressure Problem Is a Fire Safety Risk All updates ---