Mapping the UK Data Landscape - Working Out Loud
Credit: ODI Leeds
ODI Leeds employs a method of rapid innovation to work in a radically open way to produce results quickly and effectively. Our process is purposely initially unstructured but ultimately productive to allow for communication, knowledge exchange, change & action.
We saw this at work during the open session on 29 June for the UK Data Landscape. As part of this project we invited anyone who was interested to join with us, ODI HQ and The Data City to collaborate in the open to begin to define who should be included in the UK Data Landscape.
Over 45 guests from a mixture of public sector, charities, academia, finance, data infrastructure, data SME's, and more joined in to share what they hoped this project would and could discover.
Key findings
Pretty much everyone agreed that, overall, trying to map a data landscape was a good idea, that it would create a way to navigate the data that is available, and have it all in one place rather than loads of reports dispersed across the web or - even worse - not published openly.
We already had a good idea of how we were going to tackle this project but we are always open to ideas and help from others to make something better and help to speed up the process, so we were really happy that everyone joined in by sharing ideas, resources, questions and comments.
Key Questions
Please take a look at the open Google document that recorded all comments & questions from the open session.
We split into 4 random groups and common questions were identified in all groups;
- Are the definitions - Data Enabler, Data User & Data Steward clear enough? Do we need sub categories and how do we iterate and feedback on these definitions?
- What about overlap - there must be orgs that satisfy all 3 roles, what do we do then, can we tag them with multiple roles somehow?
- Can we allow orgs to be in more than one category?
- Difficult to put a specific label on some orgs.
- What about smaller SME's?
- What about individuals rather than just organisations?
- How can we show the flows of role where orgs come under the 3 definitions. Can we show this?
Data & resources
The team and our collaborators have identified a number of resources and assets that will help us and we have added them to our Google Sheet.
What happens next?
ODI Leeds and The Data City will translate this initial open research together with our own research & insight into an exploration and classification of UK registered companies in the context of The Data landscape using their machine learning classification and insights software.
Get in touch
If you missed the open session, have any questions, think you can contribute in any way or would just like to find out more then please get in touch.
