This week at Digital Land

It’s been an exciting week! On Tuesday we found out that the Find an Energy Certificate or Assessor alpha, which Jake and Emily worked on, has passed the GDS assessment and can move onto beta.

Another exciting milestone is that the updates to our Digital Land website are live. Michael has been writing the new content for the website, working on our team vision, mission statement, about us and user pages. He’s also been working with Helena to update the local plans project page. Michael, Emily and Jake have been updating the website over the last few weeks and demoed the new site to the team on Thursday. Everyone decided the updates were ready to go live and we’re all really pleased with the results.

Website screenshot

This week the Local Digital Collaboration Unit (LDCU) had a visit from Lincoln Council senior management team. Rebecca joined them to talk about her experiences of introducing agile ways of working into an organisation that hasn't worked in that way before.

Rebecca has also been working on introducing communities of practice into MHCLG Digital, preparing for a session at the upcoming MHCLG Digital annual away day, plus also working with the delivery manager community to develop what we see as the delivery manager role in this context.

Paul D has been continuing to analyse the current brownfield site registers, but mostly helping to frame our work for the spend review. He enjoyed hearing from Connected Places Catapult on their recent discovery into data standards for PlanTech, and reading the If discovery report for Homes England on using housing data for good.

Ed attended the MasterMap steering group that aims to open up geospatial data. The group expressed confidence about delivery of the programme. He also prepared an internal status update on our work which accompanied Paul D's presentation at the Digital Planning and Housing steering group.

Natalie and Ed met with MHCLG colleagues working on the Beyond Whitehall Project to discuss how digital practices can be incorporated into the policy profession. Natalie has also been working on spending review documents and working with policy teams in the department. She went to a roundtable at Geovation with Jess and met PropTech startups, and also participated in a workshop regarding the Oxford-Cambridge Arc.

Christine has been working on a new prototype for the register editing tool, including a database to store draft entries. Colm has added his great new frontend work to the repo too.

Jake has been iterating the brownfield sites validator for the brownfield sites status page that Adam and Colm have built. The validator runs nightly to check the brownfield site registers that local authorities publish.