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Building on success for the year ahead

January is always a good time to reflect on the year that has just finished and the year ahead - learn from the failures, celebrate the successes, and develop the plan to make it all happen again but faster, louder, bigger, etc. It's no different here at ODI Leeds. 2018 was an incredible year for us in terms of innovation work, data projects, and new clients (across venue hire, coworking, and innovation). This success has allowed us to grow - our core team has now expanded to include a dedicated events and community manager and additional developers and data wranglers. Owing to the runaway popularity of our transport data projects Open Transport North was created to help meet the demand for innovative approaches to challenges within transport. And our space gained an additional room with The Huddle - a flexible room with everything needed for workshops, breakout space, and more.

Our dashboard for 2018

This success was amplified with the support of our sponsors, so we'd like to say 'Thank you'.

In 2018 we gained another 5 sponsors - aql, Open Data Soft, Transport for the North, NHS Digital, and Yorkshire Water - taking the total to 15. All of our sponsors share similar goals of solving problems for people by leveraging the potential and power of open data and innovation. Their support has enabled us to work on side-projects that have then become unique opportunities in their own right, such as responding to Parliament's 'Health of the Bus Market Inquiry,' or developing the data mapper tool which further fosters a collaborative data ecosystem. Sponsorship has always been about mutual benefits. To demonstrate the value generated from their sponsorship - and to show them the breadth of activities and projects that their sponsorship has enabled - we put together an Annual Review for our sponsors, covering how many projects we had delivered, innovation days we hosted, events held at our space, etc. Much of this is summed up on our dashboard but the review allowed us to go into more detail and reinforce the value of everything that was put in to and came out of ODI Leeds last year.

You can read the review for yourself and see how we did, and if you feel like you want to be a part of what we do in 2019, here's how to get involved: