Open Innovations, formerly ODI Leeds, will be 10 years old (yes we know..!!) in November 2023, and what a ten years it has been for everyone. This post considers our operation, our impact, and looks at our plans for the future as we respond to the economic, social and civic challenges of today and tomorrow. Paul discusses the first 10 years of the business, where we are now, and our expectations and hopes for the next 10 years of Open Innovations.
We had our 39th ODSL event on Wednesday, which had a great turn out and a really engaging audience. There is a link to a recording of the session here.
This week saw the end of sprint 7, a sprint in which we closed 42 tickets, with 8 in progress and 4 in review. We had 16 not started. We certainly made the progress we needed, and the drop in tickets is down to, in part, needing to focus on multiple projects, some of which (e.g. JRF, Leeds Schools Cultural Engagement tracker) are in an early stage, and not yet broken down to small, finite tasks, and others (e.g. YFF) are in late stages, with a whole series of 'snags' listed.
We've had another productive catch-up call with the team at JRF as we continue to build-out the core technical base for the Insight Finder, a tool which will develop into a (very!) large website bringing together multiple sets of data around a broad poverty theme. We're now in full swing thinking about and implementing the core infrastructure to manage the data and navigation through a large number of different geographies, down to individual place level, which will allow users to interact with the site in different ways depending on their needs. The next week should see the start of the first "spotlight" on a theme of economic insecurity along with trials of the place-based navigation.
Christian has been busy working on better understanding company insolvency data, and trying to get a real-time track on insolvencies in Leeds on a company, sector and ward basis. First results of this should be out next week!
Stuart added a series of additional visualisations to the OI Lume visualisation library, and he and Giles spent some time making the code a bit more robust, adding type and error checking, etc. We're now using this plugin (or variants of it) across five or more data microsites, so it's important that we make it as error-proof as possible. We'll soon (hopefully) be moving to a v1 release - before which the which point the interface needs to stabilise a bit more!