Weeknote 2 and 3

Last week we only managed to start writing a draft of the weeknotes, so we’re combining weeks 2 and 3 into one update.

Local plan timetables

The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill refers to the need for local planning authorities to report on the timetable of their local plan. This in itself isn’t something new, but we’re hoping to make the process for doing this simpler and more consistent.

We’ve been working with the local plans policy team to understand what they believe to be the key milestones or events in the plan making process, who needs this information and how it’ll be used.

As an emerging policy there are some things that we’re not able to talk about publicly just yet however we have created a draft specification that we’ll be testing over the next few weeks.

Goal setting and OKRs

Across the wide digital planning programme we’re using OKRs to establish and track goals. We’ve spent a bit of time this past week thinking about our high-level objectives from a data standard perspective. We need to refine the wording, but they’ll fall into the following four themes:

1. Progressing data standards needed by local plans, development management and open planning software
2. Provide better visibility of our process for establishing data standards
3. Tooling to aid the creation and publication of data standards
4. Establish ways of working between the data standards team and data operations

Team website

In the previous week note we explained how the Digital Land team has split into two teams – data standards and data operations.

We wanted a home for ourselves on the internet that allowed us to talk about the work we’re doing on the data standards side of things. For the time being we’ll use digital-land.github.io/data-standards/. There isn’t much there at the moment but we’ll continually update it as we start to shape our work.