Project Launch: techUK Local Digital Index

Launch of a new project

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new project to create techUK’s Local Digital Index for the next 3 years (2024-2026) in partnership with The Data City. In simple terms, we're going to build a tool to see the impact and value of the tech sector for the national and regional economies.

Who are techUK and The Data City?

techUK is the trade association which brings together people, companies and organisations to realise the positive outcomes of what digital technology can achieve. They create a network for innovation and collaboration across business, government and stakeholders to provide a better future for people, society, the economy and the planet.

The Data City is a Data as a Service company that believes the best description of what a company does is found on their website. Using company websites and machine learning, The Data City creates the best lists of companies in the UK's emerging economy. Their industrial classification system for the new economy allows policy makers, economists, investors and analysts to understand the emerging economy and markets in real time.

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What is the Local Digital Index?

“The Local Digital Index… offers valuable insights into key aspects of the UK’s tech ecosystem. This is a guide that describes the impact and value technology can bring to a region, showcasing its strengths and providing direction for development. It can be used by policy makers to address the challenges faced by each nation and region in the UK more confidently, using data that shows where investment should be directed. The Index helps build a strong tech ecosystem between sectors, policy makers, companies and government by providing data that encourages collaboration between regions.”

It's a tool aimed at policy makers to help them understand the current landscape of the UK's tech sector, highlighting regional opportunities for investment and collaboration in tech. Picture something similar to our work for the Youth Futures Foundation or the housing data explorer, but for the UK's tech sector.

Why are we involved?

We’re providing our expertise on open data and publishing data on the web. By combining The Data City’s Real-time Industrial Classification (RTICs) with our accessible web visualisations using OI Lume Viz, and relevant open data sources, we can create a tool that meets techUK’s needs but also benefits our wider audience. It ties in with our work on the economy and our broader and more recent theme, How Does the North Win?. This work will build on that by showcasing regional success stories and opportunities within the UK tech sector.

We’re committed to making it easy to update, and including a clear background to the “How?” and “Why?” of each data source we use. We want our work to be accessible first and foremost, so that it’s easy for anyone to understand, and reproducible, so that technical people can dig deeper into the data.

We've started!

If you’ve read one of our project intro blogs before, you’ll know we don’t wait around! So we’ve started already, building the first version of the site. We’re consistent and determined in our approach to build iteratively, openly and sustainably. It forces us to do things, and not just talk about doing things. You can expect the site to change considerably over the next few months as we add data, visualisations and features.

Some examples of open data we plan to include are:

• Proportion of students studying digital courses (HESA)
• Travel time to work (ONS)
• Broadband and mobile connectivity (OFCOM)
• Data Centres and High Power Voltage routes (Open Street Map)
• R&D spending (ONS)
• HMRC Tax Credits (HMRC)
• Innovate UK grants (Innovate UK)

Summary

We’re excited to work with The Data City to help visualise their innovative RTIC data to classify the tech sector, and to find some interesting open data on the UK tech sector. We’d like to thank techUK for choosing us to be their open data and visualisation partner for this exciting project. Take a look around the first version of the website, and keep an eye out for future blog posts on this project. Follow us on social media for updates!