Weeknote—11 August 2023
Managing our DLUHC datasets
We’ve scoped out an approach for how we can better manage datasets that are owned by DLUHC, things like lists of planning application type, use classes, types of development plans.
We’ll be moving these out of the collections and into a database and designing a basic user interface to make it easier to create new record and expire old entries. Initially this will be a tool that we use within the team, but we anticipate that it’d allow other people within the department to manage their own lists.
Versioning specifications
We had a good session where we planned out how we’re going to handle versioning of specifications. We’ve mentioned in previous weeknotes that as we’re collecting data from local planning authorities we’re learning how some of the specification can be improved or we’re uncovering new user needs that require additional data.
We wanted to come up with a way of iterating the specifications but in way that it didn’t break any of the existing data that had already been collected. We need to think through how any changes are reflected in guidance and also how we can show the history of changes, but from a technical perspective we’ve a good starting point.
A few of the team are away over the next couple of weeks, but once everyone has returned we’ll come back to this one!
City of London and local plan policies
We met with the City of London Corporation to learn more about the work they’ve been doing to model their local plan as data. Their approach has been to go broad and explore all the types of things within a plan that could be expressed as data. At the moment they’ve got an outline model and their next step is to see how much of their current local plan they can use to seed some sample data. It’s really interesting work and something that we’ll be staying close to.
Design history
As mentioned in a previous weeknote we’d recently pulled together some of the work we did during alpha into a slide deck. We’ve started moving this is a more shareable home on the website where we can record the design history of the platform and tools.