Weeknotes #2, November 25th, 2022

The second weeknotes! We found it really useful to have written last week's notes, so we're back again. It proved to have been a positive reflective practice and way of sharing stuff across the team, let alone our (doubtless) extensive readership. What's been particularly nice for this week's editor is that people have chipped in throughout the week by updating the repo and suggested stuff that we should mention

Some things we've worked on:

• Taz, Michelle and Giles held a retrospective on our Youth Futures Foundation data site project. We learned a lot and built a lot of potentially sharable components in this project, so quite a lot to discuss! This will definitely help with similar projects in the future.
• Stuart has continued working on the Warm Spaces directory of directories to add more search/filtering options to our lightweight warm spaces search tool. If you know of any more directories of warm spaces that we are missing, let us know.
• Giles and Stuart have made some progress on a new project with the UK Parliament Digital Service. More to come soon!
• Dan and Giles have made more changes to the Leeds 2023 data microsite. There is now a page dedicated to the Social Media metrics. The Awakening ballot metrics page has also seen a bit of an update to include details of group ballots and numbers of seats allocated. Have you submitted your ballot entry? Giles and Michelle also made more progress with some additional datasets for Leeds 2023.
• Paul has been reflecting with the team on the KEN event last week and thinking about how we can support its development. The overall impression that he took away is that it was really refreshingly proactive session, which is really well aligned with our #RadicallyOpen way of doing things!
• Christian has published a blog post about the Economic Data Dashboard (EDD). The EDD is an open-source economic data tool that built for Knaresborough.

The space has been busy too, and we've been preparing for some forthcoming events:

• We've had some new clients in the space this week including Jordan Dorset Ryvita. As an aside, it's notable that 100% of clients who came in during the week requested vegan food.
• We met with the NERC Digital Solutions Hub team this week and got them involved in #PlanetData. The team is based at The University of Manchester, and have created the Hub to make better use data from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
• We had the first meeting of the Northern Economic Data User Group in the space this week. You can read some of what we got up to, and keep up-to-date on it all, on the project hub page. Contact Christian Spence more info.
• We're working on the agenda for the next Open Data Saves Lives session on 7th December. It's entitled AI in Health. Sign up now!

In other news:

• Tom attended the Great Northern Conference. It was hosted in Manchester, and he noted a minor cultural victory on display at the tea station. Judging by his twitter feed for the day, there was lots of interesting talk about regional devolution and transport (or the lack of it).
• We are up for 2 awards. Firstly, we're shortlisted in the Data categfory of the OpenUK Awards. Paul and Kathryn are off the awards ceremony next week. Wish us luck! We're also nominated on the Net Zero 50 List 2022. You can vote for us in the Net Zero Non-Profit category!

Other miscellaneous thoughts:

• Giles read the most recent newsletter from Dan Hon with interest. Dan is a great writer, and this is a really thought-provoking trawl through the current state of the Twitter diaspora, and the challenges of transplanting a social network from one place to another, as is currently happening with the uptake of the Fediverse (and Mastodon in particular). There are growing pains, sure, but also structural risks and a real danger that the network will impose undue bias on the discourse that it is supposed to support.
• On which topic... we hold daily-ish standups, which we run as hybrid sessions where we go round the table talking about things we're working on, plans and blockers. Stuart had been tracking the order of speaking, and realised we might have been introducing some inadvertent bias. We started using a list randomiser to attempt to address this.
• This article on how to write an image description contains some great pointers to writing better alt text on images.

...and finally, Giles has been tinkering with the weeknotes site a bit more:

• First, the site is now also consumable as an Atom feed, so you can read what we've been up to get access via a feed reader like it's 2008 or something. Simply paste the atom feed link into your feedreader, and away you go. The Feedly reader is a good choice, but other options are available.
• Lastly, there are social media tags, so sharing links should be a bit more attractive. Checking this is made really simple with the Metatags tool (with an honourable mention for opengraph.xyz).