Weeknotes S1E3: A week of learning, thinking and trains

I’ve spent a lot of this week going up and down on trains, visiting and learning from Defra people, and making heavy use of my Millenial’s Railcard. Here’s my thoughts on what I found out!

Defra: Making Data Findable

This week on Making Data Findable, we ran through all of the user stories we’ve defined for alpha and marked off what we’ve still got left to achieve. Good news — we’ve already done most of them by building on top of CKAN! But there’s still lots more we can do to highlight the most helpful information in search results and increase the prominence of data owners — testing of this to come. This flying start means that we’ll be able to get the tool live sooner rather than later and start collecting feedback from the wider group. We also finished deploying our alpha architecture for the first time, and have learnt a lot along the way that’ll prepare us nicely for going live.

I also visited the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) in Newcastle with Beck, Lisa and Pete. We met their data team and told them a bit about the Data Strategy that’s coming soon, and they showed us their own data portal. It was great! They’d built it themselves on top of their existing Oracle database stack using the built-in Oracle application platform. It can record some advanced metadata around data lineage and trust that I’ve not seen before and was food for thought for me with regard to what we’re doing centrally in the area. This sort of development is great to see — people recognising their own user need, and then being able to service it using the tools available. There’s some work to do here around getting an automatic harvest of their portal into ours, and more widely around how we can help them going forward.

Defra: Authoritative data

This week I was also lucky enough to visit two great teams at the Environment Agency (EA) in Bristol with my colleague Riz. It was nice to be in Bristol again — I’ve been there a bunch of times (once to run the half marathon) and really like the city’s independent vibe.

The first team we spoke to manage a large data store of geospatial data and sit in between internal and external data sources and a suite of downstream mapping interfaces and other services. This gives them some unique challenges which they’ve got impressive handling of — their maturity on how they handle their data is really high! I took reams of notes on how they run things and it really developed some thinking on what good communication looks like between publishers and consumers. It’s also informed my thoughts on what roles are needed for good data management — there are at least two distinct ownership roles that are needed (one for the money and free rides, two for the domain knowledge, all rise) and they interact together and with other parties at different times.

We also met Becky, the EA’s Data Standards Lead, and she told us about the incredible work her and her team are doing around standardised lists. It’s exactly the sort of thing that we’re trying to support across the organisation and they’ve already making real change in EA. In my opinion they’re going about it exactly the right way, working with domain experts to understand and build consensus, and they’ve even documented the process they follow which I’m looking forward to looking more at next week. Go data standards!

And aside from all that, I also chatted with Mark from the Data Access team and he described the responsibilities his previous role had around managing “thesauri” — or what I’d called a standardised vocabulary or categories. He laid out the people involved and processes they followed — another useful case study. 😀

Conclusion

This week has been mainly spent learning new things from people smarter than I am, and that’s brilliant. This brain getting bigger feeling is something I believe is really important in any role — when I stop growing, I’m not happy — so it’s great to have gone big on that this week.

Outside of Defra work, we also found time to ship our Register-powered autocomplete maker on Registers.app — yay! I’m looking forward to seeing more services powered by Registers soon.