The Next Chapter
Since I started doing The Data Place full-time I’ve found that we’ve been way too busy to blog.
Running a growing business is more than a full time job — even if it is a very enjoyable one — and there’s always something to do. So if you aren’t careful, some things (like blogging) can easily end up on the back burner. Now is a good time, though, to update everyone as to where we’ve arrived as a company.
It’s probably fair to say, then, that over the last 10 months we’ve stopped being a gleam in our eyes and are now a very real thing. We’ve needed help along the way — and we’ve got it — but we’ve landed some of our first substantial contracts and we’re moving into a delivery phase with most of them.
Our developers have been busy automating the existing platform, and we’ve also been making it more usable (and easier on the eye) by refactoring the front end. There are more sites (and more changes) to come but for now you can see the fruits of their labours on the revamped Data Plymouth and Libraries Unlimited sites.
We’ve been doing research, bidding for work (and succeeding), and developing all sorts of other things we’ll be writing about soon. In the meantime our bidding success means we are growing, although not in a linear fashion: and we’re grateful to everyone who has helped us, and continues to do so, in order to keep the show on the road.
We’ve also been thinking a lot about how we work with people; we’ve been looking at our policies and governance — including how to be a better social enterprise — and developing our staff handbook so that staff and contractors know what to expect from us. We maintain the handbook on GitHub and we’ll be blogging more about it soon.
We’ve been out on the road speaking at events and looking to bring our message to new places. I spoke at a DataFest 2018 Fringe event in Inverness recently and we’ve also been at other people’s events such as the Global Marketplace launch in London; an OpenEHR event in Plymouth; and Nesta’s People Powered Health day. In June we were presenting at Plymouth University’s Sustainable Earth Institute 2018 Summit (more information about our project with them soon); and we’ve also been in London talking about the future of libraries (spoiler: we think it’s something to do with data) and in Paris as part of the UK/France Colloque.
So, we’re starting to come out of our shells again. This post will be the first of many over the coming weeks, talking about what we’re doing, who we’re working with and sharing tools and ideas.
The Data Place helps people and places thrive through better data discovery, publishing and use. We’re a social enterprise, bringing together infrastructure, data skills, human-centred design and open source development. Find out more: https://thedata.place/.
