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Project Cygnus - Starting with the Data

As announced in our recent blog post, ODI Leeds have recently partnered with Icebreaker One on their Project Cygnus initiative, aimed at supporting regions and countries with their economic recovery from Covid-19 whilst accelerating their net-zero carbon emission goals.

We know that there's so many questions to answer, tools to build, and modelling to be done - but all of that requires data. So, we think that the first questions we need to answer are:

  1. What data is available?
  2. Where is the data?
  3. Do we have enough data to build useful tools and answer questions?

Making a start

I'm Patrick, a data science apprentice at ODI Leeds and I've been attempting to answer some of those questions. As a starting point, I've put together a simple, open, collaborative Google Sheet and began to capture useful data sources, tools and other resources, including ODI Leeds own tools and projects, such as Tom Forth's excellent regional economic data explorer.

However, we can't do it all ourselves - there's plenty of data out there we do know about (our own data, data from the ONS, Data Mill North etc.), but there's so much data out there that we might not even know exists. So, that's where we need some help.

Call for help

We have one request - get involved! The 3 main ways you can help are to:

  • If you know of relevant data/tools/resources, add them to the Google Sheet
  • We know lots about data for England, Wales and Scotland, but not so much about Ireland (both Northern Ireland and the ROI). If you do, please help us out by adding data to the Google Sheet, or get in touch with us
  • Take a look at the data we have available, and tell us what questions you would like to see answered

What happens next?

Our hope is that this becomes a useful open catalogue of data and tools which we can all contribute to and benefit from - ultimately, more data = better, data-driven modelling, more questions answered, more tools built, and most importantly: giving people open access to the data they need to make better decisions.

ODI Leeds will be running our first open online Economic Recovery working session on the 22nd October, where we are inviting anyone to come and talk to us, share data, resources tools, and ask questions. If you are interested, you can sign up free via Eventbrite. Please feel free to share the event details too - anyone is welcome!