We reached a significant milestone with our work on Youth Futures Foundation, as the version two site is now live... ish. (Well: its available on the web, which is near enough!) YFF have a few project launches over the next couple of months, and the data dashboard site is part of this story. Giles and Michelle spent a good couple of hours reviewing the brilliant work that Taz and Luke have been doing in processing data and creating visualisations. This was mostly a 'step back and check for consistency' kind of review: as with all of these things, it's only when looking at the considerable set of visualisations that the team has put together that they were able to see common patterns emerging, not to mention the need for an additional bit of navigation that you didn't realise you needed (but now you use every time you visit the site!). Following this initial review, and a subsequent full-team crit, we feel justifiably proud of what we've delivered. There will doubtless be snagging, and improvements, and other new features added over time. Find the link to the site on our YFF project page. Check out the NEET pages in particular, which were automatically updated on Thursday with no manual intervention!
Christian has been working more closely on labour mobility data for our project with Leeds City Council. Through analysis of the ONS Labour Force Survey, we're starting to build a model which looks at how many people commute into Leeds, and how that differs by industry and occupation. Next steps (after a much-needed break for half-term) will be connecting this to compensation of employees data in both the GVA statistics (production) and gross disposable household income statistics (income) to see if we can estimate how much money 'earned' in Leeds is taken home for spending elsewhere. Blog post coming in the first week of May!
Christian, Giles and Luke had a long and productive working session with colleagues from JRF as we begin to develop the first prototype for our Poverty Insight tool for North England. Triangulation was the word of the meeting, where we discussed that it's how data across domains interacts that is at least, if not more, important than data within anyone domain. This is going to be a fascinating project!
Paul, Luke and Taz took part in the 'No Code Hack' as part of Climb23 on Tuesday. Working with the Data City and Panintelligence, in just 10 hours we built an 'Inclusive Growth Dashboard' to show disparities in investment to female-led business. We'd love to take this further and continue working with Panintelligence to develop the dashboard even further.
Stuart has written a long-delayed blog post about open approaches to building databases of trees. Too many crowd-sourced tree-mapping projects seem to become silos of closed data. They should be more open. This ties in nicely with some work we're currently shaping up with National Trust.
Taz and Paul met with the team from Leeds Digital (organisers of the excellent Leeds Digital Festival) to discuss the next tranche of work on the LDF data microsite that we (mainly Taz and Stuart, to be completely fair) have created for them. This is pretty much the grandmother of the data microsite architecture that we've since rolled out for (amongst others) LEEDS 2023, Youth Futures Foundation, West and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, and now JRF. It's great to have such an ongoing relationship with the Leeds Digital team and to have the opportunity to help them develop this valuable tool in accountability and openness.
In Amazing Stuff That People Do With The Web news, Giles and Luke independently came across the User Inyerface. I mean... it's horrible, but also scarily familiar. Slightly (by which I mean, almost infinitely) more relaxing is the Slide to unlock web game (touch devices recommended / required). And in the very useful category, Giles made excellent use of the Rico's cheatsheets site - particularly the git log and git log format cheatsheets. To be perfectly honest, this is only here so he can find it again!