Fortnight notes: Data and Search team 08/09/16

This is the Data & Search team's second set of fortnight notes. The idea is to keep an ongoing, public record of what we're doing. We'll iterate the notes with a view to making them better over time.

We'd appreciate other feedback to @dasbarrett, barrettd@parliament.uk, or via the comments.

Here's what's been happening over the past 2 weeks:

The team had planning days on 25 and 30 August in a hot loft.

On 31 August Michael, Samu, Robert & Dan spent 3 and a half hours with Department Director Rob Greig and our Director Emma Allen to show them progress on the new data service. It was a good afternoon, with Rob & Emma being very supportive.

Samu, Michael & Dan have all been interviewing people for various roles in the team over the past couple of weeks, with some success.

Michael and Silver had a great day on 2 September domain modelling with the Lords Public Bill Office as part of work to understand the bills domain. Also Michael has discussed next steps with both Commons and Lords offices to cover hybrid bills and ping pong.

Michael is publishing the domain models as they progress on GitHub.

Michael wants to plug the W3C open gov community group and mailing list he's involved himself with as part of our global outreach:

https://www.w3.org/community/opengov/

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-opengov/2016Aug/thread.html

Mike joined the team on 30 August. He is our first 'DataOps' engineer. He's already helping with his knowledge of our MP & Lords data systems.

Mat wrote a blog post about the work he does with our 'corporate' data along with David and Noel.

Mat was at Matt Stutely's Business Systems team show and tell to present the 2-week prototype for a staff directory that he collaborated with them on.

Our colleagues in Technology have delivered the 'sandpit' Azure subscription, a cloud hosting environment we (particularly Samu and Wojciech) can use for development and R&D.

Samu and Wojciech have developed a fully functioning scripted/automated deployment of GraphDB cluster using PowerShell and Azure Resource Manager Templates.

Samu worked with the Website Alpha team (particularly Rebecca and Giuseppe) on a first iteration of a content-driven prototype. It demonstrates features like dynamic routing, pages, crumbtrail, navigation menu and sitemap.xml.

Samu's performance testing is going well - we now have a script covering all the temporary data in the data-driven prototype and it shows good initial performance characteristics.

Robert was part of Julie's first 'recruitment product team' day, which apparently went well. One of the roles this team will be developing and working to bring in is for a data specialist.

Dan did some behind-the-scenes stuff, a fair amount of coaching, and even a bit of executive decision making.

(Aidan has been on holiday)