The promise of community
Paul Downey — 2024-05-03
Last week we welcomed 43 new Local Planning Authorities we have funded to the Open Digital Planning community. We began with two events focused on data, both were well attended, with nearly 100 people joining us last week, and even more participating yesterday.
In these sessions we started with a background on why we’re asking for data, and how they should provide planning data.
Our approach is to work in the open, start small and build up. The LPA can begin by publishing the information they readily have, and leave blank things they don’t know. Some data being is better than no data. We can then quickly iterate and improve the data by giving feedback they value, and can easily act upon, as demonstrated in this example of our work on conservation areas in Barnet.
Many of the people on the first call were planners, and had quite a lot of detailed questions on listed buildings. We realised our specification wasn’t clear if we were asking for the outline of the listing, such as a shopfront, the building outline, or the area of land which should be considered for planning (the curtilage).
We quickly took these questions to colleagues in Historic England and were able to update our public discussion and as a result better answer similar questions by the second session. This shows our approach to identifying and designing data. Standards are agreements. We work openly, co-designing them with users: people needing data, people providing the data, and stakeholders.
Some of the data we need is big, and changes often, and is buried in documents, such as Tree Preservation Orders. Here the community can form working groups to share how they tackle common problems which we can write-up as case-studies so other LPAs can follow in their footsteps. Common problems and case-studies are a great way to identify potential software to help make data faster. Software for planners, designed by planners.
The community is how we expect to demonstrate the value of making data to the people doing the work, and help others see the value so they follow their lead. LPAs can more easily share tools which help monitoring or simplify their reporting if their data is to the same standard.
This is promise of our community: helping to design data standards which work, sharing practice, and identifying tools which make planning data faster.