The big news this week is that we've been joined by Luke. He's spent his first week learning about the LSIP project and getting a grasp on how to visualise data on the Web. He has also been looking at 4 projects on northern economics (Northern economic data, Leveling Up, Coastal Economies and Knaresborough Connectors) and thinking about where he can add value. On Thursday he had a meeting with Tom on all things buses, and is investigating the possible application of machine learning in this area.
Giles, Christian, Michelle, Stuart and Paul had a working session this week to plan the combined delivery of our upcoming economic data projects. As well as outlining the projects, we reviewed the technical underpinnings of all these projects and christened the Data Tarn (our version of a data lake collecting a consistent set of open data). The good news is that all the components we need exist in some form or another. There is work to integrate them and make them more general, which we'll be using these projects to drive. We've already made a start documenting the platform. We also discussed how we manage the pace of delivery across a small team, whilst still delivering on time and to budget. We've instituted whole team sprints for delivery, each sprint running for two weeks. We'll plan individual tickets (ideally bite size) and schedule these into the sprints based on priority and available team capacity. We're currently in Sprint 1, having soft-launched this a week or so ago. The first sprint is due to finish next week, so we will be holding our first planning session on Tuesday. We'll share our experiences of using this in future weeknotes.
Christian has also been continuing working on the data for our Tax Devolution project with Northern Powerhouse Partnership. You can read more about it on that link, or play with the (still in development) app here. There's a launch event for the project at Open Innovations HQ on Tuesday 21 March at 4pm. More information is available at the bottom of the blog post.
Meanwhile, Taz has been busy writing up the recent #OpenDataSavesLives event on the theme of Health Inequalities. You can now view the recording and read the blog post. This topic has proven really popular, and we'll be coming back to it in our next session RAP for Health Inequalities on the 10th May. Visit the event page to find out more and register!