Summer Update 2023

We're more than halfway through the year now and this year, our 10th has been as busy as ever. This post will provide an update on what we've achieved, what we're working on, and what you can expect in the coming months.

As mentioned, 2023 is our 10th year, although we only became Open Innovations in 2021. Our Director, Paul, recently wrote a post detailing what this means and how we got here. As ever, all our work is published on our website, so if you like you can track our journey from 2013 yourself!

Before we turn 10 in November 2023, we've got a couple of events we think you'd be interested in. Our Health Data project, reaches a milestone - the 40th session of Open Data Saves Lives has its next event on the 13th of September. Here, we'll be discussing health analytics as a profession. You can grab tickets via Eventbrite. This series is a fantastic example of how working openly & collaboratively can make a difference quickly.

After that, on the 28th of September, we'll be relaunching our Open Data Showcase. We created this in 2016 as our contribution to Leeds Digital Festival. 'Showing' was a big part of our early work, through demonstrating to others how they could benefit from sharing and publishing data. Lately, we've focused on 'doing' - working with our sponsors and clients to actively innovate and develop tools and resources. There is a blog with all the contributors and information you need including how to get tickets. Please come along and share with others. This leads us nicely onto a few words about what we've been up to of late

Earlier this year we were nominated for a Digital Culture Award alongside our partners Leeds 2023. We built a Leeds 2023 Data Microsite for the campaign and this has become a very useful tool. The Leeds 2023 events programme is now well underway and we're now in the wrap-up and maintenance phase of our work together. In connection with this, we've been working with the University of Leeds, LCC, and Leeds 2023 to improve the data available on how Leeds schools are engaging with arts and culture. Again, we are building a data microsite to publish this data openly.

One of our big focuses this year has been our collaboration with JRF (Joseph Rowntree Foundation). We're attempting to use data to combat poverty in the North. You can check out some insights on our website. We're about halfway through building our site for JRF, with the underlying structure in place. Our team, Luke Strange and Giles Dring have utilised our OI Lume Viz alongside DuckDB to generate data visualisations for this site.

In a similar vein, we've done a lot of work this year with the Youth Futures Foundation. They are a not-for-profit that aims to narrow employment gaps for marginalised young people. We've been helping them to automate the analysis and visualisation of open data sources on economic prospects for young people. We're wrapping up Phase 2 of our work now.

On hex maps and politics, which is some of our most viewed work, Stuart recently published an update on our plan for the next General Election. The constituency boundaries in the UK have been under review with recommendations for changes published. In response, we've built a first draft of a new layout. We've also started building a site that visualises constituency-level data on hex cartograms.

Stay tuned to check in our how we progress through the rest of the year, and get in touch if any of the work or events interest you!