BoPS: Sprint Note 5

2/6/20 to 15/6/20

This sprint we:

• Created a basic API to make decisions data available to Planning Registers, the London Development Database or anything else that might need it. We need to add UPRNs, and we have a longer term aim to do some user research with potential users of planning data to find out what we need to expose through it.
• To test the API we asked two developers who have recently joined us from Flatiron School, Anastasia and Melissa, to create a simple one page planning register to display the dummy data we’ve been working with, which looks pretty neat:

Our dummy planning register with dummy data.

• Started laying the foundations for document management functionality in BoPS. This involved a couple of conversations with Open Systems Lab as we’ll be dependent on files and info coming through from their Reduce Invalid Planning Applications service. We can’t make any assumptions about how documents will be provided, sometimes all plans come in together in one document, others might submit them each separately. To work with this we’ll be taking an approach where documents are tagged with the document type(s) as required.
• Discussed unique IDs and application numbers, which are currently generated by individual planning authorities. Typically this will follow a syntax set by the system they’re using, perhaps with some customisation so it makes a bit more sense internally. Theoretically, that means that there are multiple planning applications in different parts of the country with the same ID number which might be problematic if a national planning register is created. For now we’re going to include the local authority code of the planning authority, but the idea of a working group to decide a standard syntax for codes in BoPS was raised at our show and tell by Peter Forest at Buckinghamshire Council and is worth exploring.
• Conducted user testing around how managers ask for corrections and officers upload documents. We tested with three officers and three managers from Southwark, Croydon, Coventry, Buckinghamshire and Luton councils.
• Started looking at how we’ll scale BoPS to work with multiple councils. For MVP we’re not building a multi-tenanted application but once we start deploying multiple councils that will become problematic quite quickly. We’re now reviewing what aspects of the application we would want to be configurable in an admin panel, and looking at what we’d need to do behind the scenes to iterate the architecture.

Show and tell slide deck

Full show and tell video