Weeknotes #5, December 16th, 2022

Seasons greetings from the Open Innovations team.

• Stuart has added another 23 directories of warm spaces - mostly from local authorities - to the Warm Spaces directory of directories taking the number of searchable warm spaces up to 8431. It has crossed our minds that someone could take our compiled, geo-coded, JSON of warm space offers and compare this with the Indoors Sub-domain Rank of the English indices of deprivation 2019 to find out if offers are in the areas with the most need. Perhaps creating something like Open Data Manchester's lava lamp plot.
• Giles & Stuart chatted with Parliamentary library people about our project on the Register of Members Interests.
• Work has continued supporting the Distribution Future Energy Scenario (DFES) visualisations for both Northern Powergrid and UK Power Networks by fixing bugs that have arisen from edge cases in the data and adding some new options. Because we are re-using much of the core code between the two DFES projects (and the FES project for National Grid), it means we can apply the improvements to both.
• An enthusiastic student from CSU Sacramento got in touch with us about our bins of the world visualisation. They are taking inspiration from it to map the trash cans and recycling bins on campus using OpenStreetMap and then showing the results on a map (they will probably use the Overpass API results e.g. amenity=waste_basket within a bounding box around their campus)
• Daniel has created a hex map of Arts Council England funding. Paul has been using this to speak to lots of people about cultural data, such as in this tweet exchange
• Paul has been working with to Stuart Clarke from Leeds Digital Festival about helping them to update The Leeds Tech Map in 2023.
• Taz and Dan have been working on updates to the Leeds Digital Festival data microsite over the last couple of months which is looking in good shape. We've added data from their September 2022 festival, created an overall impact dashboard and visualised social media data over the year. Here's the microsite and repo, with a blog post to follow soon!
• Giles has been thinking about the foundations of the tech work we do, and has created a template Open Innovations site for the Lume framework we've started using
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have been in touch with Paul about working with us to create the Data Infrastructure for North England.
• Christian has been in kick-off meetings and a data workshop with Leeds City Council as we look to answer some of their commonly-asked but hard-to-find-out questions over the coming year. Keep an eye out for our launch blog post in the new year.