Levelling Up With Open Data
A project to explore ‘levelling up’ from a Northern perspective, by working in the open, inviting discussion and suggestions, and developing a prototype visualisation with open data at its foundation.
With no solid definition, ‘levelling up’ could mean something different to everyone, and with no official ‘levelling up’ dataset to work from, there isn’t a way to currently track progress or keep things accountable. Open Innovations together with the Royal Statistical Society will be leading a project to explore ‘levelling up’ from a Northern perspective, by working in the open, inviting discussion and suggestions, and developing a prototype visualisation with open data at its foundation.
What open data will we use? Well, this is where you come in…
The project will start in November 2021 and finish in February 2022, with three key stages and events that accompany them, plus opportunities for people to contribute their feedback, suggestions, data sources, etc.
The first stage involves the launch of the project on 8 December 2021, which will be an interactive live event and will also be live-streamed. The Open Innovations team have already spent time starting to pull data sources together and possible ways to visualise ‘levelling up’.
For the event there will be talks in the morning followed by live Q&A with speakers including:
- Andy Haldane, Permanent Secretary to the Levelling Up Taskforce
- Neil O’Brien, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State
- Stian Westlake, CEO RSS
- Tera Allas, McKinsey
- Tom Bridges, Leeds Office Leader, Director Cities Advisory, Arup
- Tom Forth, Head of Data, Open Innovations (formerly ODILeeds)
- Nancy Hey, Executive Director, What Works Centre for Wellbeing
- Jodie Levy, Head of Regional Tech Policy, Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
- Alan Reiss, Director of Strategy, Communications and Policing West Yorkshire Combined Authority
- Paul Swinney, Director of Policy and Research, Centre for Cities
Find out more about the project, including launch event details and speakers, recordings of talks, open working document and blog – Levelling Up with Open Data