Weeknotes #1, November 18th, 2022

The Open Innovations team is having a go at writing weeknotes. This is our first attempt to see how it works out for our team, and what form they should take. Here are some principles we're considering:

• Keep them short and link out
• Whole team contribution, single editor with a new editor each week
• Publish on the web and share via our regular channels
• Rough and ready but published is better than polished and late

It turns out to have been a busy week! We've been delivering projects...

• Taz and Dan have been progressing work on the Leeds Digital Festival microsite. It's nearly there!!! We're reusing the stack that we've developed for the Leeds 2023 and Youth Futures Foundation codebases on this project. This gives us another point of reference for what it makes sense to make re-usable, and what is specific to the other projects.
• Michelle and Giles have been discussing LEEDS 2023 data flows and their evaluation framework. This builds on and documents our work on the LEEDS 2023 data microsite. We also had a brilliant meeting with the LEEDS 2023 accessibility partners about making our visualisations more accessible.
• We have helped publish more open data on behalf of LEEDS 2023, including data about volunteering and their opening event ticket ballot.
• Looking forward to next year, we're excited to be talking about becoming data partners to some really great organisations that are aligned with our values.

We've been cataloguing things and generally building our capabilites...

• We've noticed a lot of Warm Spaces Finders out there. Stuart has started cataloguing them in a "Warm Spaces Finder" Finder (code on Github).
• Giles has been experimenting with DVC to catalogue commonly used reference data. He's created a reference library of data we use frequently. He's also using DVC to manage pipelines of data processing in our work with Leeds 2023.
• Stuart has been building a hexmap of all the wards in the UK. Can you help?
• Michelle, Taz and Giles have made the move to Notion to manage our projects and pipeline, and for some internal note-sharing.

We've been attending or preparing for events...

• Stuart attended an ONS virtual meet-up about their Climate Change dashboard
• Paul attended the launch of the University of Leeds Knowledge Equity Network. Here's his (short) tweet thread about the event. He was asked to deliver a provocative presentation on Innovating with Data.
• Christian and Kathryn have been preparing for the launch of the Northern Economic Data user group next week. Sign up to secure your place.

We've been thinking, researching and reflecting...

• Dan has been experimenting with visualisations of Arts Council England grants data.
• Christian spent a lot of Thursday picking through the autumn statement.
• Giles came across this set of design patterns for dashboards looks worth a read. We are doing lot of that sort of thing at the moment, and are always looking for interesting ideas. (Via @davechild on mastodon.me.uk.)

And finally...

• Stuart and Giles built this website to present these weeknotes. You can even take a look at the code we used to build it.