Digital land sprint notes

This sprint we’ve built on our roadmap, published the learnings from the local plans alpha, and had lots of involvement in the PropTech world.

Team

Moving into a beta phase as a team, we're starting to create options, test hypotheses, test our ideas and roadmap with stakeholders, and refine the roadmap.

At the start of the sprint, we ran a roadmapping workshop, outlining at a high level what we want to achieve. We then asked how we will achieve these outcomes, and considered any risks that might block us. Euan helped by sharing his planning expertise with the team.

We also discussed with Paul Maltby how we're going to move into beta. We also prioritised our goals and discussed everyone's contribution to delivering the outcomes we want to see.

Policy

Minister Pincher spoke at Digital Housing Week, and we were excited to hear the Minister's views on the need for digital innovation within the housing sector. There were several industry examples mentioned. The speech is available on the conference website.

Minister Pincher speaking at Digital Housing week

In the PropTech world, Jess caught up with HMLR Digital Street, Real Estate Data Foundation, and digital projects in the home buying & selling space to figure out where we can support wider initiatives in the industry. We also spoke with PUBLIC, TechUK and Local Digital colleagues about feedback from startups navigating public sector procurement, and thinking about what could be feasible to help address challenges raised.

Website and platform

Jon is working on a generalised data pipeline, which is currently being used to collect brownfield land data. In the future, this will process other datasets we collect that are published by local authorities. We’re also creating web pages to show activity logs for these collections.

Colm has iterated the timeline component that is used on log pages to allow filtering. This helps users locate a specific period when the timeline is long.

A gif showing the timeline component being filtered by date

Emily wrote and published dxw’s learnings from the local plans alpha phase on the Digital Land website.

Screenshot of Digital Land website showing that the local plans alpha phase is done

Data exchange system attributes

Lorna worked on ways of presenting the data exchange attributes that the team proposed last sprint. The current instance is a Trello board that lists the attributes by phases of "data in", "processing" and "data out".

The attributes are also categorised by themes, which we hypothesise would help users to find attributes relevant to an area of focus. It will be interesting to share this with other product owners and test how useful the tool might be.

Trello board of data attributes, categorised by themes: general aspects; data input; data processing; data output.

Sharing learnings

Lorna and Loic pulled together a summary of their learnings from recent research that explored local authorities’ capabilities and experiences around accessing and using data, to share at a forthcoming retrospective with wider teams in MHCLG policy and other departments.