Weeknotes 19

Ben Proctor
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read
Everything I need for a weekend in a field. It turns out that I am too old to carry this weight any distance though.

I’m writing this from a tent in a festival in Herefordshire. It’s no ordinary festival, not least because I have mains power and an ethernet connection to my tent. I’m at emfcamp. Well since they brought the festival all the way to Herefordshire it seemed rude not to. So far I’ve been inspired to experiment with IoT devices, I’ve learned about the dangers of solar storms and I’ve learned about the intricacies of programming LED light displays. I also just bumped into fellow #weeknote-r Terence Eden.

What with bank holiday Monday it’s only been a three day week.

I spent a day in Cardiff with the ODI-Leeds crew talking to Welsh folk about providing accessible bus information. This is part of a DfT consultation which is still open. In England there are proposed Open Data regulations too (though not in Wales). This prompted a lot of conversations about how things are named in Wales. The interaction of geo and language in Wales is really fascinating to me and to others it would seem. We rolled out openstreetmap.cymru this year and the Welsh Language Commissioner has released a list of standardised Welsh place-names.

Back at base we’ve been getting ready to launch an organisational network analysis project for a local government client. We’ve also reviewing our marketing strategy.

The marketing analysis is interesting (to me at least).

Basically 70% of our income this year was repeat business, 25% word-of mouth referrals and only 5% stuff that we got cold (or got in open tenders).

That’s interesting but does it mean we should work harder at getting work through open tenders or work harder at checking our previous customers are happy/need our help?

That’s the annoying thing about data… it tells you what happened but not why.

OK. That’s all for me. I’m off to find out how and why I should be using onion networking.


Please clap if you liked this, it gives me a sense of enormous wellbeing.

And please do follow me on Twitter.

I work at The Satori Lab we also host ODI-Cardiff.

We provide an exciting range of data services.

We’re on LinkedIn and Facebook too.

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