Digital land sprint notes

A lot has happened over the last few weeks, including a roundtable with Minister Pincher, lots of work on the platform and website, Kishan joining the team, and Emily and Natalie leaving.

Policy

With the Planning for the future consultation underway, we were pleased to organise a PropTech & Digital Planning Roundtable with Minister Pincher on 13 October. We were joined by a variety of tech companies across the planning space as well as individuals from the ecosystem and local authorities, with a discussion that spanned community engagement, local plans, and planning decisions.

We've also been working to make sure PropTech companies and digital innovators are able to engage and feed in through other wider events. We joined a UK PropTech Association roundtable on 15 October that surfaced a lot of valuable feedback as well, and we have been working with TechUK to support a planning consultation roundtable with a wide range of tech voices scheduled for 27 October.

Website

Emily, Loic, Matt and Colm have designed new templates for our project pages. We want the list of projects on our website to act as a roadmap, in order to show which of the following stages a project is in:

  • To explore - our backlog of datasets we want to look into collecting
  • In progress - datasets we are currently collecting, running through our pipeline in order to publish
  • Published - datasets we have collected and published to build a national picture of the data

Below is an initial prototype of our project roadmap:

Project page roadmap prototype screenshots

Below are is a prototype of what a project page could look like in each of our 3 phases of progress:

Project page prototype screenshots

Platform

Jon has been making more enhancements to the digital-land data pipeline; most notably we now have the capability to collect several different types of GIS data (including GeoJSON, Google’s KML, GML and Shape files) and convert them into a consistent CSV format for further processing.

We have changed our set of development-plan schemas based on things we have learnt from speaking to users, in particular PINS, and stress testing them with real data we have created from existing Local plans.

We hope these changes will make the schemas more flexible and allow Local Authorities to more easily produce data that reflects the real situation with their development plans. The changes include accepting other development plan document types, such as SPDs, and allowing development policies to have more than one category. Categorising policies in this way is similar to tagging something with multiple tags, which helps a user more easily find and discover the policies they need.

Team

We’ve welcomed our new developer Kishan into the team, and he’s got stuck in straight away with work on our pipeline.

Sadly, we’ve also said goodbye to Natalie, our policy lead, and Emily, our content designer. We had a fun leaving quiz where we put the big question to the test: can the team really tell the difference between the “terrible twins”?

Pictures of Emily and Natalie looking like twins, from their leaving quiz

Last sprint we published our team video in a Meet the Digital Land team blog post.

You can also view the video and transcript on YouTube.