Weeknote 1

Welcome to the data standards team weeknotes. We’re starting things fresh here but the team has actually been around for a little while. Previously we went by the name of Digital Land and you can read about what we got up to in our old set of weeknotes.

Why the change

In September 2022 the Digital Land platform moved into public beta and as a part of that change we migrated to a new site: https://www.planning.data.gov.uk/

Moving into public beta has put more emphasis on the need to operate a robust and performant platform, that combined with an increasing set of emerging datasets we decided to split Digital Land into two distinct teams to help manage the work.

Data standards team

The standards team are responsible for discovering and prioritising data that is needed by users of the platform. We’ll define and test new standards with local planning authorities and other publishers of land and housing data. And we’ll create guidance to help those publishers meet the standard.

Data operations team

The operations team responsibilities fall into two areas:

  1. Collecting data at a national level inline with the data standards
  2. Building and maintaining a production level data platform

Getting ourselves established as a team

This week a main priority was to focus on some team planning, agreeing what our priorities are, and how we want to work together.

Ways of working

As a relatively small team we’re keen to keep our governance as light touch as possible. A part of that will be working in the open wherever possible. We’re aiming to publish weekly updates as well as documenting our decision making as we progress.

Immediate focus

We’ll talk more about these in coming weeks, but our immediate focus is to come up with a draft working specification for local plan timetables and planning decisions.

Working with the operations team

In splitting into two teams we have some ideas about how this should work, but in reality there’ll be a few things that we need to figure out and we’re not expecting to get it fully right from the start! We’ll keep working closely with the operations team to establish the right ways of working between us.