Weeknotes #30, July 14th, 2023

Last week most of the team were on holiday so we decided to extend sprint 8 by one week, meaning it finished on the 11th. We completed 43 tickets, which is expectedly larger than normal due to the extension. As of Wednesday we are now into sprint 9, which is heavily focused on Leeds 2023, JRF and YFF.

On Wednesday we caught up with our JRF partners to discuss the progress we have made on the site. The big changes have been in the backend structure of the site. There are now place pages for every region, combined authority, local authority and ward in the North, with some example data on each page, such as population and number of households. We had a few big challenges to overcome, like running out of memory when generating ~5000 pages, and running our data processing in parallel to reduce computation times.

We are happy with how the geographic tree is structured; it acts as a vertical navigation through the page, whereas spotlights are a horizontal navigation. The idea is that you can view a particular spotlight for any type of place, from as large as the North, to as small as an individual ward (so long as the data exists). We are looking forward to an in-person working session over in York next week!

Thanks to conversations with Giles and Taz, Stuart switched all the Leeds 2023 hexmaps over to the OI Lume Viz hex cartograms. That means they get the updated tooltip styles which now avoid the edge of the screen.

We have also updated the council homepage CO2 emissions page. North East Derbyshire District Council has the lowest at 0.06g, while Reading Borough Council is top of the list with 5.35g. The average emissions from a Council homepage are 0.62g (median of 0.43g) which is worse than an average website (0.5g). Overall, Councils are doing OK.

Finally, we have added waffle charts to OI Lume Viz. These are a great way to visualise percentages and fractions as an alternative to the raw numbers or a pie chart, which can be helpful for people that have difficulty interpreting numbers.