November 2013
ODI Leeds (Open Innovations Ltd) was formed.
We signed the Node Charter and became one of two official "Pioneer Nodes" (along with ODI Queensland) of The Open Data Institute.
10th March 2014
We took a space on the top floor of Munro House and officially opened it on 6th May. Our space had three initial purposes:
- Collaboration space for projects in the Civic Lab
- Hosting of member teams working on Open Data and Technology Projects
- Events and Training
We were able to open our space with some funding from our founding sponsors.
June 2014
We hosted an opening party for our space.
February 2015
Over December and January we ran an innovation pathway with WYCA (Metro) and Leeds City Council leading up to the #Hackmyroute Data Dive.
July 2015
We hosted and delivered the eagerly anticipated Data Dive with Yorkshire Water at ODI Leeds where we had nine teams and six themes.
March 2016
Nearly a hundred people came to ODI Leeds to pool knowledge, share ideas, and build solutions to flooding for #FloodHack16.
April 2016
Amy and Stuart became the first ODI Leeds employees. Their first week coincided with Leeds Digital Festival and ended with an Algorave!
18th July 2016
We launched our own website at odileeds.org and created an open dashboard to share our progress.
#radicallyopen
1st August 2016
Yorkshire Day 2016 saw us relaunch Leeds Data Mill as Data Mill North. This helped it grow into an open data platform for the entire region.
October 2016
We hosted #HighwaysHack on Friday 21 & Saturday 22 October 2016 with the Department for Transport Digital Team.
Photo: Lisa Jeffrey
December 2016
We officially launched the Leeds Bins App using data published on Data Mill North to help remind people when to put their bins out.
We subsequently made Rotherham Bins, Luton Bins, and Fenland Bins.
January-March 2017
We worked with Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council and Bradford University to build a flood sensor network in Bradford using LoRaWAN. Several flood sensors were mounted over parts of Bradford Beck to monitor the levels.
February 2017
On Friday 24th and Saturday 25th February 2017 we hosted a 2-day hackathon - #AirHack - to challenge and tackle air quality. It was sponsored by Defra, Leeds City Council, Bradford Council, the University of Leeds, and Highways England.
May 2017
We created our first UK constituency hex map for the 2017 General Election.
We went on to use it on the night of the election. As did many others.
October 2017
We hosted our second TravelHack with more than 70 delegates throughout the day; these consisted of representatives from governmental departments, local authorities, national transport operators, globally recognised consultants and top-class developers and coders.
November 2017
Our obsession with buses perhaps started with our All Aboard the Data Bus events in collaboration with the Department for Transport and Transport for the North. We hosted events in London, Birmingham, and Leeds around the then impending Bus Services Act 2017.
January 2018
We relaunched our space having improved the heating, lighting, flooring, acoustics and through the creation of flexible workspaces.
15th March 2018
We organised a data and innovation workshop with Ofcom designed to get conversations started about the future of data for them.
April 2018
As part of Leeds Digital Festival 2018, we held a full day event on The Future of Transport in the North.
May 2018
#WaterData18 was the first innovation event of many to explore Yorkshire Water open data. Held over two days - Friday 18 May and Saturday 19 May - more than 50 people gathered to work together to come up with solutions to the challenges posed or just explore better ways to present and use the data.
June 2018
We launched our Data Mapper tool to visualise geographic datasets published on Data Mill North and Calderdale Dataworks.
July 2018
We created a simple web-based tool that attempts to convert a CSV file into GeoJSON . It has proved to be very popular over the years.
It, along with the likes of our CSV Cleaner and Hex map editor, make up the Open Innovations Toolbox.
October 2018
We launched Open Transport North which aimed to deliver open innovation with data to improve the transport network.
October 2018 - March 2019
We created the UK's first podcast dedicated to transport, data, and innovation - All Aboard. It ran for five episodes.
March 2019
Our petitions hex map tool went viral giving our website more visits in a week than it had had over its entire lifetime to this point.
2nd May 2019
We held the first Northernlands Data and Startup Summit event in partnership with The Kingdom of The Netherlands.
We would go on to host a further three Northernlands events.
Summer 2019
In July we launched #OpenGovTech - our push at making the public sector more innovative, agile, development-oriented.
In September we went on tour to Hebden Bridge to launch #OpenGovTech as part of the Wuthering Bytes festival.
September 2019
We worked with Northern Powergrid to visualise their Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) data. First we had to build an electricity network geography so that we could create heatmaps for the visualisations.
We've worked with Northern Powergrid on their DFES each year since. Our visualisation tool has also been used by National Grid ESO, UK Power Networks and Electricity North West.
29th November 2019
We held our very first #PlanetData event as our response to the climate emergency.
January 2020
We launched #OpenDataSavesLives at two innovation sessions in Bradford (23rd January) and Leeds (24th January).
Initially we thought that we'd meet quarterly but, within a couple of months, the Covid-19 pandemic made #OpenDataSavesLives far more urgent so we hosted regular sessions online throughout 2020.
Covid-19
From the beginning of the pandemic we started making visualisations of Covid data at a local level. By the end of the summer we'd created a local authority-level covid dashboard that could be customised.
29 April 2020
The Climate Emergency wasn't going away. We may have been in the height of lockdowns but we needed to keep discussions going and carry on making decisions to get us to sustainable futures. So we took Planet Data online with a series of lightning talks and interactive sessions designed to get people thinking about what they can do tomorrow to take more climate action.
July 2020
We hosted Northerlands 2 but, given the global pandemic, we tried to recreate the excited buzz and electric atmosphere of a conference but from the comfort of homes, sheds, parks, etc, around the world.
September 2020
We partnered with Icebreaker One to work on Project Cygnus - an initiative to support regions and countries in their economic recovery from Covid-19 while accelerating their net-zero carbon emission goals.
1 October 2020
#PlanetData3 was a day-long event that incorporated #AirHack2 in the afternoon and was part of the Leeds Digital Festival 2020 Autumn edition.
March 2021
The Northernlands event returned for its third year! We had two days of fantastic speakers from across the UK and the Netherlands, covering topics from transport, health, the future of work and skills, the Climate Emergency, data rights and safety, and much much more.
September 2021
We entered into a partnership with Leeds Digital Festival to build an automated, data-driven review which they could share with their sponsors and other interested parties.
21st October 2021
We hosted our fourth #PlanetData event with the Embassy for The Kingdom of The Netherlands and Arup.
1st November 2021
We parted from The Open Data Institute and became Open Innovations.
We got a new website at open-innovations.org.
November 2021
Our new logo was designed by Amy and Stuart. We crafted it to be minimal in more ways than one; the SVG file is only around 400 bytes.
It was inspired by our initials with the "i" representing people involved in innovation.
It can be used in any of our 14 brand colours...
...but the vivid pink was Paul's favourite.
We also created a snazzy version of the logo inspired by our hex maps. The hexes radiate out from the "head" of the "i".
December 2021
We launched our Levelling Up project to explore 'levelling up' from a Northern perspective, by working in the open, inviting discussion and suggestions, and developing a prototype visualisation with open data at its foundation.
March 2022
We started working with Leeds 2023 as their data partners. We created a data microsite for the festival where we collated research, reference and standards, as well as published data visualisations and dashboards.
June 2022
We introduced our 'Data Leaders' who each took up a role within their sector specialism, covering transport, health, the economy and data science.
July 2022
We started a collaboration with the Youth Futures Foundation to improve the lives of young people by making data available on a series of dashboards and reports.
November 2022
The cost-of-living crisis and rising energy prices started to hit. After Leeds City Council published a directory of warm space offers, we created and launched a search engine of warm space offers to help people quickly search through 100+ separate directories created by charities and local councils.
We've kept it updated through the winters of 2023-24, 2024-25, and 2025-26.
January 2023
Having been building custom visualisations for the Youth Futures Foundation project since the previous summer, we decided to split off a number of our charting libraries into their own reusable Lume project - OI Lume Viz.
We made common components for tables, dashboards, treemaps, maps, and charts.
April 2023
We created the Northern Insight Finder data and insight hub for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. By linking up existing open-source datasets it aimed to provide ease of access to data for the North of England that would be, otherwise, scattered across different websites, and that would require time, skills and resources to be joined up, analysed and visualised.
August 2023
In preparation for the future General Election, we started creating a collection of data about UK constituencies mapped on hex maps (cartograms) grouped into the themes of economy, energy, environment, health, society, and transport.
September 2023
Working with the University of Leeds we created a cultural organisations map, which serves as an initial proof of concept for how schools might research and identify potential groups and individuals to deliver cultural engagement programmes in their school.
October 2023
We launched our Inclusive Growth dashboard to automate analysis of key regional economic indicators for Leeds City Council.
January 2024
We helped Northern Powergrid hold their first of a kind hackathon for all things net zero.
2nd March 2024
Ten years after we opened the doors in Munro House we handed back our keys and said goodbye to the space.
Our Birmingham library desks were delivered to their new homes at CEG Forging Futures, Seagulls paint, and back home to Birmingham.
20th March 2024
We held a data & impact conference and reception at Arup’s brand new Offices to work on all the questions that flow from the big question of "How does the North (of England) win?"
April-May 2024
We worked with a UK local authority to create a workplace parking levy tool to explore how much income a scheme could generate. For fun, we created a demo version based on the fictional county of Borsetshire from The Archers.
July 2024
With our new constituency hex cartogram layout, and a willing team of students from the Universities of Bristol & Warwick, we set out to produce a live election tracker for the night of the General Election.
We also created a colour-your-own election map.
January 2025
In late 2024 we collected 10 days of live bus location data to work on a project. As a by-product we created a bus tracking tool to see how real bus journeys compared to the timetable.
June 2025
We took the data we'd collated for the constituency hex maps and used it to build dashboards for every constituency.
July 2025
Many of the projects we've worked on have needed archival information about bus locations Time matters and we like doing so, rather than wait for the Department for Transport, central Government, or an official National Data Library to start providing an archive of BODS data, we thought we'd just start building an archive ourselves.
Thanks to everyone who has made Open Innovations what it is over the years.
