The Open Innovations Christmas party took place on Thursday, so your editor is typing whilst nursing a large and strong cup of coffee.
We're building a prototype tool for the UK Parliamentary Digital Service. The purpose of the tool is to show what information people can glean from the Register(s) of Members' Financial Interests. Stuart and Giles had a "splendid" (actual client feedback klaxon) show and tell with the team to check our early-stage prototype was heading the right direction. The good news is that it is, so expect to see more on this soon!
You can’t spell festive without FES! It’s the time of year when National Grid publish their updated Future Energy Scenarios and the DSOs publish their Distributed FES in response. We’re again helping National Grid and two of the DSOs (Northern Powergrid and UK Power Networks) publish interactive FES/DFES visualisations, meaning that interested parties can readily compare between the energy demands coming up in the next 30 years.
Dan and Taz have been working on more LEEDS 2023 developments. The Impact dashboard which brings together key information on a singe page is shaping up nicely. This will give the LEEDS 2023 team access to critical data at their fingertips to support decision making. We’ve also made some improvements to the volunteering metrics page, including applying new colour scales to hexmaps and adding more data about where volunteers come from across West Yorkshire.
Christian is furiously writing documentation for the economic dashboard, in the hope and expectation that people start using the tool soon.
Our Warm spaces finder directory and tool has been shared with sponsors and got some very positive feedback, and requests from external orgs/individuals to be added.
The OI team is rarely all in the same place at the same time. We're consciously trying to address the lack of opportunity to by agreeing on a Wednesday afternoon co-working session. We're starting to explore using Gather to facilitate this. Gather is a playful and proximity-based collaboration tool: you control an avatar which walks around a virtual office space. It's interesting how this puts some of us into a different mode of interaction than YATM™ (Yet Another Teams Meeting).
In events news, the Open Data Saves Lives on 7th Dec is sold out! You'll be able to catch up with the recording after the event, so don't panic. There's also a date for the next Northern Economic Data user group, which is 23rd February 2023. Mark your calendars!
Giles has been working on generalising a set of visualisations we developed for Youth Futures Foundation. They're a bit specific to YFF in their current form, but with a bit of work we'll be able to roll them out to other projects really quickly!
We're keen to keep the carbon footprint of our code as small as possible. Giles was therefore interested to come across the Green Software Foundation. There are a couple of particularly useful bits of information. Firstly, the Principles of Green Software Engineering is a good summary of the sort of things we think about. There's also useful list of Green Software. As an aside, the home page the Green Software Foundation could do with some work, given the results we found by running it through the Website Carbon Caculator.
Everybody (well, some people) are talking about the fediverse. Giles found Marcus Hutchin's analysis of how the design of Mastodon allows moderation to scale to be an interesting read.