First things first, a very Happy New Year to all of you from us!
We have been away for a while this time, but we promise to be back every fortnight. Now on to our ninth set of notes to share what all we have all been doing while we were away...
While Dan is busy interviewing for Data Analysts, we had Kheira join us supporting Henry with user research.
Other than Robert continuing his work on the XML API for the improved search, Michael on the ontology manager, and Samu on the new data platform; the team has been doing some really interesting stuff.
We had a very productive session with Steve on the user research that has been going on with regard to data and search findings.
Henry has some more interviews lined up which will help complete this first round of defining the issues with parliament’s data.
We then recommend a second round of research, focused on assessing the effectiveness and communication of the Data and Search team’s upcoming changes.
Robert conducted a very interesting presentation on search to the digital service on 8th November and it was taken very well. He also had a productive meeting with the teams of both Commons and Lords and the Archives team discussing how search could been done both ways- they could search our data and us theirs and on the merging of the library management systems.
Michael had the opportunity to meet Nicholas Humfrey along with Giuseppe and Rebecca to chat about Graph Object Mapping Code. He also attended a conference in Oxford about the 'Study of Parliament Website'. The conference was a combination of Parliamentary staff (including clerks) and academicians. It was a good way to make new connections and hear interesting things.
Along with the website team, Michael met up with Oli Hawkins from the Commons Library to discuss the potential for data visualisation on the new website. Michael also met up with a user researcher and business analyst at the Government Digital Service (GDS) to chat about registers.
Dia is creating a product mapping document. The aim of that is to visually represent all the Data team entails, for example what is being produced by the data platform team, and how it links to what the data modelling, the data toolkit, search and the website teams are doing.
On the 12th Jan, Aidan, Michael and Anya met up with a team from Southampton University to discuss more on ontologies and Sym Roe popped in to talk about democracy club election models which we're looking to align along with Southampton. The meeting was very productive.
Aidan organised a meeting with the Indexing and Data Management Section (IDMS) and Knowledge Applications Team (KAT) discuss options around present systems that allow staff to interact with and manage existing vocabularies and ontology, including options for changes the system’s architecture and implementing additional functionality.
Julie and Aidan met with Jim from Parliamentary Procurement and Commercial Services (PPCS) to discuss dynamic purchasing systems and establish requirements for setting a framework up for Data and Search. The duo also met with Jim and Richard from PPCS to talk about the first dynamic purchasing system that has just been implemented to assist in procurement of digital media consultancy.
Aidan met with Tori, our Director of Transformation for an initial meeting to present an outline of proposals for business transformation activities within Data and Search and to see whether these may align to the broader transformation activities being led by Tori. The conclusion was that there was good crossover here so we’d continue to liaise. Dia and Aidan will work together on this.
Samu and Aidan met to build the case to support a request for a developer build for machines. The argument has been placed into the broader picture around network requirements for new services and proposals for controlled deployment and visibility to code and the production environments for relevant parties including security teams
We'd appreciate any feedback to @DN78, nagd@parliament.uk, or via the comments.