Northern Economic Data User Group

Every day across the North researchers and analysts, economists and policymakers work in silos, wrestling with finding, downloading, cleaning, formatting, and blending the same datasets over and over again, seeking the answers to both common and difficult questions about the economy of North England, before putting the results of their work in PDFs that rarely see the light of day.

The fantastic resources of these people are spent duplicating and repeating their own work as well as that of colleagues across a hundred organisations. The same data, the same analysis, the same difficult questions trying to be answered separately and individually, without easily being able to lean on others, start your own analysis from where they left off, or easily challenge what's been written before.

Our aim is to change this.

We'll build a network of willing collaborators who will share their experiences, their code, their data and their expertise to advance economic research across North England. We'll provide the forum, both physical and digital, to bring people together, share best practices and new ideas, support people to work in the open and share their code, analysis, and publish it openly so that we can all stand on the shoulders of each other, learn new skills and better help to change the economy.

Our role at Open Innovations, always working in the #RadicallyOpen, is to convene, support and amplify these people to get more done, at pace, to improve their data skills and free their time for detailed analysis and open collaboration, not data copy-and-pasting and closed research.

First meeting: Thursday 24 November, 4pm to 6pm, at Open Innovations HQ in Leeds. We'll also follow-up with a set of online events to build working groups and get things done. You can reserve a place on Eventbrite.

For more information, contact Christian Spence, Economic Data Lead at Open Innovations, at christian.spence@open-innovations.org.