Digital land sprint notes

We announced a new PropTech Engagement Fund, began prototyping our maturity model, introduced our own entity numbers to relate data from different sources, improved how we manage content, and completed the local plans pathfinders project.

PropTech

Jess and the team were excited to announce the new PropTech Engagement Fund on 3 August 2021. The fund has been set up to support the adoption of digital citizen engagement tools and services within the planning process.

The fund will begin with engagement around the plan-making process, and development management. These are two key areas of consultation where digital services can help broaden the range of voices and views being heard. We recognise there is an emerging marketplace of digital citizen engagement tools and services. The fund is intended to foster and steer these offerings to help increase their adoption.

We held a Q&A session with Local Authorities on 18 August 2021, and were delighted to have 95 people on the call. We were also pleased to have Crown Commercial Service join us as helping local authorities overcome procurement hurdles when buying digital tools and services is an issue we want to address.

This round of funding will provide 10-12 local authorities with up to £100k each to run a digital engagement pilot. The four themes for local authorities are as follows and are in more detail in the expression of Interest guidance.

  1. Working on digital services to make community involvement more accessible at the early stages of plan-making.
  2. Exploring digital services to make community involvement more accessible and engaging at the draft Local Plan stage.
  3. Making it easier for citizens to find out about planning applications and increase public participation from a broader audience.
  4. Developing innovative approaches to manage and analyse a higher volume of responses to inform decision-making. These responses will come from both digital and non-digital channels.

Local authorities will then procure a supplier and work on the engagement project together. This would utilise the range of innovative tools available on the market.

We will be focusing on selection once the Expression of Interest deadline of 31 August has passed. The expectation is to announce the selected local authorities in October.

Content pages

Publishing content on our website is currently time consuming, and requires technical knowledge. We recognised we need a Content Management System (CMS) so more people in the team are able to publish new content, and keep our guidance and other pages up to date.

We decided our CMS should be open source, keep our content under our control and be wholly owned by us. The content must be available in an open format such as markdown so it can be used in other tools or services we create. We don’t want to be locked into a proprietary product or platform.

Following these constraints, Paul S made a working proof-of-concept by combining a number of different open source tools:

We’re working on our CMS in the open, and you can follow its development by watching our github repository.

Maturity model

This sprint we collated all of the logs from our collections into a single place. We then used this data to create a prototype with three dashboards:

  1. Overall counts on the number, and size of the datasets we’re collecting.
  2. How complete each dataset we’re trying to collect is, by the number of organisations, and its geographic coverage.
  3. Information about an individual organisation, the data they have made available, issues we encountered processing it, and sources they have yet to publish, or we have been unable to find.

The main thing we’d like to show on these dashboards is movement, by which we mean how often organisations publish data, and how well we’re doing at keeping our collections upto date. This information is already helping us see our progress, and prioritise our work.

Our next step is to assess how useful this information is, and explore other ways of presenting the gaps and issues in a way we and our users can act upon.

Platform

We currently use a reference, name, or other field we find in the data we collect to identify a brownfield site, conservation area, or other entity. These identifiers appear in our URLs for each entity. We need these identifiers to be used consistently in our data so we can link data about a site or other entity between datasets. We also need an identifier to be stable so we can track and show changes over time.

Unfortunately the references we find in published data aren’t used consistently. For example “CA1”, “CA01” and “COA00000200” may all refer to the same conservation-area. Also names and references can often be ambiguous, it’s not unusual for “CA01” to refer to different conservation areas at different times and in different places.

After much deliberation, we have begun to keep and use our own number to identify each entity we collect, and add it to data as a part of our processing pipeline. These numbers will appear in our URLs and data, alongside the reference numbers and names in the source data.

Local plan pathfinders

We have concluded our work with local authorities on the local plan pathfinders, and have been writing up our user research and other findings for a report, and our project page.