What happens on a Data Discovery Day?

On 22^nd November 2018, LORIC hosted its first Data Discovery day, facilitated by our partner Open Data consultancy, The Data Place and their Open Data Institute registered trainers. The Data Discovery Day was an intense workshop which aimed to bring people together to help to build a clearer picture of the data ecosystems in Greater Lincolnshire.

After an artistic introductory exercise, attendees were split into smaller groups to consider a range of questions related to data in the local area, as well as nation-wide.

These questions included:

• What could we change with the right data?
• What is our critical data?
• How could our own data be more useful to us?
• Who else could use our data?
• What partnerships do we need for data?

Attendees then worked with The Data Place to put the issues raised into themes and then to consider organisations who hold relevant data, and where the gaps are in the data available.

By the end of the day, the LORIC boardroom was an explosion of brightly coloured post it notes, hand drawn portraits, notes on the challenges faced by each organisation, and coffee cups. In the midst of this organised chaos was the beginnings of a map of the data landscape within Greater Lincolnshire.

The event also supported attendees to discover a range of available data sets and consider how they could be used in new ways in order to solve current data problems. Data sets discussed on the day included:

https://www.research-lincs.org.uk/Home.aspx

https://data.food.gov.uk/catalog

https://opendata.nhs.uk/home

And best of all, there wasn’t a computer in sight all day! Who says data has to be high-tech?

To find out when the next Data Discovery Day is happening, click here!