Giles spent a good chunk of time automating the Youth Futures Foundations Data pipeline ahead of the launch of the data portal that we've built The launch was postponed until 24th October, due to some delays publishing ONS data This has allowed a bit of extra testing and some tweaks to the automation, including building a way of triggering the site build when the pipeline repository updates. The good news is that the automation worked well, but we are having to replan the dashboards, as ONS have paused publication pending revision of their approach to publishing economic activity statistics.
Back in 2019 we created representative polygons for Northern Powergrid's electricity network. This week Stuart has been revisiting that work to rebuild the polygons using the 2021 Census Output Areas. With four more years of experience, Stuart has been able to automate much more of the process than last time. The automated output still contains a few "holes" - Output Areas that don't appear to have enough customer postcodes to pass a threshold - so Stuart has had a working session with engineers from Northern Powergrid to make human decisions for those. The final map is primarily for Northern Powergrid's next Distribution Future Energy Scenario visualisation but it is also likely to get used in other areas of Northern Powergrid too.
The UK weather has finally started to get colder and that means people may be looking for warm spaces again. Last year we created a search tool to look for offers of warm spaces from over 100 different directories. The tool tried to solve multiple problems: reducing the number of different websites people would need to visit when they are in need; making an interface that kept bandwidth use low; make it quick to tell what was open and what was closed; protect people's privacy. Over the summer some of these directories have been moved and some have been taken offline. So Stuart has gone through the list to bring the tool up-to-date. As of now, the search tool indexes over 7,800 offers of warm spaces from 108 different directories.