24 October 2022

Gavin Freeguard

Published in

Warning: Graphic Content

16 min readOct 24, 2022

Data Truss

If a week is a long time in politics, then the three and a bit weeks since the last edition of this newsletter…

I’m sure there are several data angles on Recent Events, but here are a few quick ones:

The Commons chaos last Wednesday night produced stories about the PM not having voted on her own confidence measure, and prompted the chief whip and her deputy to resign and unresign. The former does not appear to be true — disparities between overall and more detailed counts on the app should have been a flag that something might be up with the voting lists, the PM’s name later being added. This did not stop the story circulating, and corrections to it are unlikely to have received the same coverage. This highlights how casually reliant we are on numbers, accepting apparently definitive data without checking it and where it came from (and also how unfit for purpose some processes our democracy relies on might be). It also shows how tricky it can be to correct things once they’re out there. I faced that dilemma with my (already caveated) tweet on the whip ‘resignations’ — in that instance, it felt adding a clarifying tweet rather than delete was the best option. It can be a tricky area, although deleting widely shared blatantly wrong tweets should be more of a thing. (And… well, quite. More here.)
As for #dataviz… I’m not sure this chart shows quite what the tweeting MP wanted it to. And we also had an example of how very small design decisions can make a big difference — witness the evolution of this chart away
from showing much bigger totals than the reality.
And this is fun from Andrew Gray, on how Events drove people to previous PM Wikipedia pages.

A few other bits and pieces:

Thanks to everyone who attended our Connected by Data event on the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill — we’ve now published a summary of the discussion. Get in touch if you’d like to get involved — or apply for a couple of CbD roles if you want to get *really* involved. Much more on what’s happening to the Bill in Meta data, below — and here’s a fruit-based explainer of what ‘scope’ means when it comes to bills.
I’ll do a proper summary of the survey I ran about this newsletter soon (thank you again!). But three quick things to note: sorry this edition is so long (I know it can get a bit much sometimes, put this one down to absence and Political Events); I’ve started trying to link to things not behind paywalls where possible (e.g. a tweet with a key chart rather than the paywalled article, so you can at least see something); and since people find the ‘opportunities’ section helpful, a reminder of dedicated digital/data job emails from Ben and Matt.
You can now listen to audio from all three IfG events I chaired at Labour and Conservative party conferences. Our ODI panellists Matt (at Labour) and Milly (at Conservative) have written useful data/digital summaries of the conferences, too.
October’s Data Bites feels like a very long time ago… catch up on an excellent event here. Details of the next one are imminent — it’ll be at 6pm on Tuesday 1 November.
At a recent Data Bites, I noted DCMS could field a whole football team of Secretaries of State since 2010. That’s now also true of Cabinet Office.
On the mySociety front, I learned a lot from chairing our final Civic Tech Surgery — on civic tech in hostile environments. If you’d like to be involved in commissioning some work on that topic, apply to be on the Action Lab/working group here. And there’s an open call for proposals on driving impactful social change, particularly around climate action.
A huge thank you to Swirrl for inviting me to speak at their always-excellent Power of Data conference — they’ve summarised some key takeaways here.
If you’d like to catch me at some future events: I’ll be hosting episode 3 of The Data Game at the ODI Summit on 8 November (previous episodes here and here), and co-hosting and speaking at Think Data for Government 2022 on 29 November.
And finally… the Orwell Foundation are about to start serialising Orwell on a daily basis. Sign up here.

Have a good week, and see you for a hopefully much shorter newsletter on Friday…
Gavin

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Graphic content

Bodge it

Data Truss

Crises? What crises?

Viral content

Everywhere else

Weather and climate

Sport and leisure

#dataviz

Meta data

Deeply DPDIB

A farewell to harms

UK politics

UK government

UK parliament

Digital government

Information health

Big tech

Our surveil said

Open for the best

AI got ‘rithm

#AdaLovelaceDay

Digging geospatial data

Extremely online

Everything else

Opportunities

And finally…

Cuppa load of this