Summer 2024 newsletter

Always #RadicallyOpen

Our mission is to be #RadicallyOpen, we like to share - so our newsletter is a short update and an invitation for you to take a look at our latest data projects, tools and events. Despite being a small, independent not-for-profit team we fit a lot into our schedule. Everything we do is published on our website for others to use - these are just some of the most recent highlights. It's only a short read and could help you shortcut a project or task so read on…

General Election Live Results

We were all excited to work on an ambitious project to deliver live results throughout the general election night of 4 July. We recruited a willing team of students from Bristol & Warwick Universities, led by our hex map aficionado, Stuart Lowe. They worked tirelessly throughout the night populating a series of live visualisations, which were shared live via our social media networks. The team did a sterling job - beating the BBC on many occasions to announce and update the statistics through the night. It was well worth the effort, our website received more views in one day than it normally does in 40! - with many analysts, journalists getting in touch to use our data and reshape it.

This project is a fine example of how a small non-funded team can pull together something of excellent quality and deliver it quickly - we detail our approach on our blog.

It's because of the unique way we are partly funded by our sponsors that we can dedicate resources to projects like this, which show what can be achieved with a low budget but dedicated and talented team. Thank you to our sponsors and our team.

How Does The North Win?

We started the year wanting to focus on the economy of the North and how we can all collaborate, and kicked this off with our event How Does The North Win? Since then, we have been working on a project which resulted from this event: the True North Data Explorer, a microsite in partnership with Brabners, which is a wealth of data visualisations showing growth and opportunity in the North. It considers the fastest growing sectors, businesses which are owner managed or community focused and how they are contributing to the economy, how levelling up funding has been awarded across the North, and how the North is performing in terms of employment and graduate retention. Please take a look at the True North Data Explorer and share it.

World Of Housing

Housing is at the forefront of the UK's political discussion. In her first speech as Chancellor, Rachel Reeves announced her commitment to "Get Britain Building again", promising 1.5 million new homes over the next 5 years. Housing is an area that we've got quite a lot of experience in. Last year, our Head of Data, Tom Forth, appeared on Channel 4 to discuss the housing crisis

Using open data, we've created tools and visualisations for different aspects of housing, from vacant homes to brownfield site capacities. We want to build on the good work we have already done, so we are launching a new housing-specific project. Over the next few months, the team will be gathering data to create insights into the world of housing.

Read our blog to find out what we have already done and where our focus will take us next. Get in touch if you have a specific question or request, or think you can contribute.

Mapping Creative Education

We are now wrapping up the second phase of our work with the University of Leeds and Leeds 2023 creating the data infrastructure needed to understand the picture of creative education in Leeds. We are using open data to answer questions such as: How many young people are there in Leeds? Where is there a higher proportion of young people across the city? Where are the creative hotspots, with practitioners who are offering engagements activities with schools and the youth? Where are the new schools in Leeds that are offering creative and enrichments activities?

Explore the data and get in touch with any thoughts or feedback.

Toolbox

Open Innovations is all about doing and sharing. Our Toolbox is a great example of this. It demonstrates just some of the tools we have designed and built that are free for all to use, share and learn from. We love building tools and making your (and our) life easier! We've built a lot of different tools for different projects, purposes and clients, and we keep building more. So we decided to put them all into a nice and easy to find tool box so we can all save a bit of time. Our tools cover:

• Data Analysis & Wrangling tools e.g. CSV to GeoJSON
• Data Visualisation e.g. Hex Maps, OI Lume Viz
• Community Tools e.g. Warm Spaces Map, Bins App

Get in touch if there's a tool you'd like us to develop.

Coming up...

We have lots to make a start on across the summer including showcase events, another Northernlands, projects on the economy, buses, creative education and cultural data, so stay in touch and join in.

Thanks for reading. Please get in touch or visit our website.