This is the Data & Search team's seventh 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 any feedback to @dasbarrett, barrettd@parliament.uk, or via the comments.
Here's what's been happening over the past 2 weeks:
On 3 November Samu, Michael, Robert, Jamie and Dan went to Newport (South Wales) to visit Andy Dudfield and his colleagues at ONS Digital. We had a really good day openly sharing ideas and learning about roadmaps, governance, cloud technology and infrastructure, and challenges around data (among other things). Look forward to the return visit in the new year.
On 4 November Michael wrote a blog post about sharing lists of lists, hoping to start some collaboration and discussion with colleagues outside of Parliament.
On 7 November Chris our new Junior Developer started.
On 8 November Robert presented progress on search at our show and tell. Here are the slides.
Also on 8 November Michael met with Cristina Leston-Bandeira to talk about Parliament data models and who might be interested and/or help from the academic community.
On 9 November Paul Downey and Rich Vale from the Government Digital Service came to our planning day to talk about registers and things that we can collaborate on together. We agreed some next steps, including Michael sending Paul his work on Member data to date for review. This was a really good session.
Michael did a session with the website team on information architecture and Domain-driven design. The result was a start on website urls for people, parties, houses and constituencies.
Michael made further progress on ontologies with Anya and Silver.
Dan met with Henry and Steve to start user research activity for the new data service. Henry put together a great approach and he is now gathering a list of people to interview.
Dan met with Anya to start the roadmap for the tools that we will provide for her IDMS team (Indexing and Data Management Section). The next step is to look at how Anya's team can tag e-petitions data with a new tool set, following a meeting Aidan and Samu had with the petitions committee team earlier in the week.
On 14 November our new Junior Developer Raphael came to visit in advance of his start on 1 December. He met with Samu, Wojciech, Mike, Giuseppe and Rebecca to introduce him to colleagues so that he doesn't have a totally cold start.
On 15 November we did another show and tell. Here are Michael's slides. Afterwards Julia and Kevin from Rebel Labs came in to help the team prepare for Accountability Hack.
On 16 November Dan gave a presentation on Open Data in Parliament to a delegation from the Parliament of Ghana.
Also on 16 November Wojciech and Samu attended "DevOps with Visual Studio", a developer event showcasing cloud based continuous delivery and devops using Microsoft technologies. The talks and demos were good. What Wojciech and Samu saw validates our approach to data and direction for the future. Slides are here.
Mat, David and Noel worked on releasing new integrations, new reports, refining metrics and resolving issues with data for Members' staff records and organisation restructure changes.
Aidan worked on long-term plans for support and published his first blog post for work.