This week, we were delighted to confirm that WYCA have renewed their sponsorship with us for the 9th year! We have done some great work with them over the years and we're looking forward the next year. If you're interested to know more about how we work with our sponsors, we share everything in the open on our website, and every year we publish our sponsor reviews. Huge thanks to WYCA!
Paul has been catching up with our network this week, seeing how we can support our sponsors with their priorities for 2023/24. We're looking forward to working with the University of Leeds, Leeds City Council and NHS England. Watch this space for upcoming news!
Christian has spent another week on the details of the Tax Devolution Tool where you can play fantasy Chancellor and change the tax rates for existing and new taxes and see how much they'll raise. This week has seen the incorporation of Tourism Taxes (hotel bed levies) and Employers' NI retention, both of which featured directly in the Northern Powerhouse Partnership's report, Tax DevoNation, which was launched in Liverpool this week and which Christian managed to attend as well. Next week will see the user interface tided up, some user notes written as well as technical and methodological blogs, though if you're feeling brave, you might be able to infer some of that from the codebase for the project which is all online on GitHub.
We also welcomed Zizzi for an event in the space this week, who were a pleasure to host and told us they 'loved how easy you made our day - its just the perfect space'. Happy to hear it! We're pleased that events are starting to pick up again post-pandemic. All of our info on hiring our events and innovation space is on our website.
Louis has been busy organising our hosting of the Leeds Data Ethics Forum. This is going to be on the 7th of June, featuring collaboration from the Turing Institute, Leeds City Council and DLA Piper.
Luke has spent the week working on the LSIP project. He has partially automated some of the data pipeline processes so he can quickly create the right visualisations for the website. The key area for the LSIP is understanding further education and this has been his main focus for the week. He has produced detailed breakdowns of the skills supply for FE, which you can see here. Next week he will tidy up the formatting and colour schemes on the site, and prepare any additional data that is needed.
Giles has again spent his week working on LSIP. The big news this week is the creation of a tree map visualisation of skills demand using d3 and d3-hierarchy. This is already partly integrated into the OP Lume Viz plugin that we mentioned last week. There's a scatter plot on the same page which is also created with d3. He's also refined a few data pipelines for Leeds 2023, including pulling live data from Airtable and Rosterfy. The Leeds 2023 Microsite is now more or less hands off, with the exception of one or two data files which have to be manually collected.
Next week is the end of sprint 2. We had a mid-sprint checkpoint on Tuesday, allowing a brief reflection on progress so far. We're really blazing through the tickets, although it feels like there may be a few things dropping out.