Projects
Working on data projects to deliver tangible outcomes is at the very heart of our mission and purpose. Find out more about our latest work below. You can get a list of our projects as a CSV file (on Github) from our dashboard.
Find my area
November 2025 onwards
A simple Javascript tool to find which UK area you are in based on your GPS location or provided coordinates. It preserves privacy by keeping your location in the browser.
DFES comparison tool
July 2025 onwards
A tool to compare future energy scenario data (FES/DFES). Provide CSV files (they can be the same), select a scenario from each, and get a dashboard showing how they compare.
Bus Open Data archive
June 2025 onwards
Our prototype to create an archive of BODS data.
National Data Library
March 2025 onwards
We've had a go at starting to build a National Data Library.
Constituency dashboards
March 2025 onwards
We use the API from our hex maps site to create dashboards for each UK parliamentary constituency covering topics such as energy, environment, health, society, and transport.
Culturedale audience tool
January 2025 onwards
The Culturedale Audience Tool helps convert lists of attendee postcodes to summarised lists of attendees by Local Authority, Calderdale Ward and ONS Lower Layer Super Output Area. This summary is useful for the Culturedale Evaluation Team in understanding the reach of the events that were put on during Culturedale.
The Power of Local
January 2025 onwards
Working with the Local Government Association in a #radicallyopen way to demonstrate the power of local government.
Bus journey times
January 2025 onwards
A prototype using the UK's Bus Open Data Service (BODS) to visualise real bus journey times versus the timetable for routes in Yorkshire & The Humber and the North West.
Northern Powergrid DFES 2024
January 2025 onwards
An interactive visualisation of Northern Powergrid's potential future energy scenarios (DFES) updated for 2024. This allows you to explore predictions of parameters such as number of electric vehicles and power generation each year until 2050.
North East Culture Connect
September 2024 onwards
We brought together culture data from a variety of national and regional sources in the north east into an open access data observatory.
CSV editor
September 2024 onwards
A web-based tool for editing CSV files
oi.csv.js
September 2024 onwards
A lightweight Javascript library for editing CSV files
Edit hex layouts
September 2024 onwards
A tool to help design and edit hex layouts stored as HexJSON.
Liverpool City Region Bus Tracking
September 2024 onwards
Working with Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA) to build the data infrastructure that enables them to evaluate the effectiveness of the buses that actually run vs the buses that were timetabled across Liverpool.
techUK Local Digital Index
September 2024 onwards
A tool to aid policy makers and a way to see the impact and value of the tech sector for the national and regional economies.
Add UK geography codes
August 2024 onwards
Take a CSV file that only has, say ward names, and add a column of GSS codes. It can also convert some dates for you.
Housing Data
July 2024 onwards
For many young (and not so young) people in the UK, the dream of owning a home has never felt more elusive. Soaring property prices, stagnant wages, and a shrinking supply of affordable housing have turned what was once a common life milestone into an increasingly unattainable goal. Our housing data was created to explore to identify some useful insights.
UK Hex Maps
July 2024 onwards
Hex maps (technically, cartograms) are useful when each area in a visualisation should have the same visual contribution. For instance, a standard geographic election map of the UK over-emphasises the winners of rural areas because they are much bigger, geographically, even though they are the same size electorally. In this case a hex map would give a better impression of the result although at the expense of accurate geography. We've brought together openly licensed hex map layouts (of UK geographies) that are available for reuse.
General Election 2024
July 2024 onwards
We worked through the night to deliver a live hex map for the 2024 UK General Election, our results were published quicker than the BBC and we tripled our website impressions and social media statistics on the day. For lots of reasons we think that our approach and hex maps were some of the best.
Lume Expo
June 2024 onwards
A showcase of useful techniques in building data-intensive Lume sites
Bradford 2025
June 2024 onwards
Creating a dashboard for data around Bradford 2025 year of culture
Leeds City Council Culture Dashboard
May 2024 onwards
A dashboard for Leeds Cultural Investment Programme (LCIP)
True North Data Explorer
May 2024 onwards
A data hub for the True North network exploring economic data and owner-managed businesses in the North of England.
Workplace Parking Levy
May 2024 onwards
We created a tool to help local authorities explore workplace parking levys. The demo uses the fictional county of Borsetshire (from The Archers).
Hexviz
April 2024 onwards
Show a CSV file or Google Sheet on a hex map (cartogram)
ONS GeoJSON Fixer
March 2024 onwards
A tool to convert old-style GeoJSON from ONS that has Eastings/Northings.
Institue for Government Charts
February 2024 onwards
Visualisation component library for Institute for Government
Population Calculator
December 2023 onwards
A reworking of Tom's 'population around a point' tool which adds the ability for end-users to define the area they want to find the population for; it doesn't have to be a circle any more.
Leaflet Place Name Layer
November 2023 onwards
A Leaflet plugin to generate a layer of place name labels that can be customised with CSS. The aim was to make a lighter-weight labels layer than one based on image tiles.
Geography Lookup Builder
August 2023 onwards
Sometimes you need a lookup between two different geographies and the ONS don't know about one (or both). This tool helps you create your own lookup table.
UK Constituency Data
August 2023 onwards
A collection of data about UK constituencies mapped on hex maps (cartograms). We have created several themes (economy, energy, environment, health, society, and transport) and have filled those with separate pages for each data aspect. That makes it possible to link to individual maps and make sharing easier.
Emission Factors Catalogue
July 2023 onwards
Putting up-to-date CO2 emissions factors in one place
Leeds Inclusive Growth Dashboard
April 2023 onwards
A live dashboard to help the Council exploit developments in economic data to better support the lives of people living and working in the city.
Leeds City Council Economics
April 2023 onwards
Leeds Schools Cultural Engagement
February 2023 onwards
Creating a prototype resource to map cultural engagement in schools across the city to support evidence-based policy making.
Placename heatmap
February 2023 onwards
Create a heat map of UK place names based on patterns you want to match.
OI Lume Viz
January 2023 onwards
With an increasing number of partner projects microsites, we've encapsulated a number of our charting libraries into a Lume library to make it easy to deploy our common types of visualisations.
Northern Powerhouse Partnership Tax Devolution
January 2023 onwards
A web app to see how much you can raise through different local taxes.
Toolbox
November 2022 onwards
Open Innovations is all about doing - this page proves just that - demonstrating just some of the tools we have designed and built that are free for all to use, share and learn from. Our tools include analysis and data wrangling tools that help you quickly convert data and visualisation tools, interactive dashboards and visualisations that help lookup specific information.
Warm spaces directories
November 2022 onwards
Since the winter of 2022-3 many different groups - from voluntary to local councils - started creating directories of warm space offers. All these separate directories duplicate work, they mean that any individual directory only contains some of the offers, and those who are looking for warmth have to visit more websites (that are rarely optimised for people on limited data plans). We developed this tool to index all the warm spaces directories and let people search using less data.
Northern Economic Data User Group
November 2022 onwards
We're seeking to build a network of willing collaborators who will share their experiences, their research, their code, their data and their expertise to advance economic research and understanding across North England.
Rotherham Bins
November 2022 onwards
Our app on iOS and Android gives reminders of bin collections to residents in Rotherham.
Leeds City Council Economic Data Science Discovery
October 2022 onwards
The Economic Data Dashboard (EDD) houses thousands of variables from hundreds of data sets of secondary and administrative data for multiple geographies within the United Kingdom.
Parkulator 2022
October 2022 onwards
A reworking of the original Parkulator to calculate the amount of land used for parking, golf courses, or brownfield land within a user-selected map area and how many homes or parks could be built in the space instead.
GeoJSON Minify
June 2022 onwards
A web-based GeoJSON minifier (compressor) to reduce file sizes and make web-mapping quicker.
EDD: Economic Data Dashboard
April 2022 onwards
The Economic Data Dashboard (EDD) houses thousands of variables from hundreds of data sets of secondary and administrative data for multiple geographies within the United Kingdom. It seeks to simplify the access, interrogation, visualisation and communication of complex data sources to accelerate research for policy design and evaluation.
Register of Members' Financial Interests Explorer
April 2022 onwards
Parsing and exploring the House of Commons Register of Members' Financial Interests
Housing England
March 2022 onwards
Explore housing in England and see what percentage are vacant.
OpenJourneyTime
March 2021 onwards
MSOA to MSOA journey time pairs and MSOA-centred isochrones for North England
Council website emissions
March 2021 onwards
How are council websites impacting the planet? You may not think of websites as sources of carbon emissions but they are. Data centres, transmission networks, and the devices we use to access them all use electricity which, in turn, produces carbon emissions. When your website has lots of visitors that can easily add up. We've used the Website Carbon Calculator (created by Wholegrain Digital) to assess UK local authority websites.
Coastal Economies
June 2020 onwards
Exploring coastal regions and understanding their specific needs through data.
Geography bits
February 2020 onwards
A repository to store individual areas of various UK geographies as separate GeoJSON-l files so that they can be individually loaded by other tools. Includes individual files for LSOAs, MSOAs, wards, local authority districts and parliamentary constituencies for a variety of years.
Cycle/foot Traffic Growth
February 2020 onwards
A project visualising cycle and foot traffic growth data from Data Mill North. Select cycle counters and see bar charts by hour of day, day of week, month, and year.
Local Growth Funding Tracker
July 2019 onwards
Collaborative project with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to create a tool that tracks local growth funding.
Scores on the doors
March 2019 onwards
A simple webpage that uses your location to tell you the food hygiene ratings for the nearest food premises to you.
CSV to GeoJSON
July 2018 onwards
A web-based tool to easily convert a CSV file (containing geography columns) into a GeoJSON file. It can also create choropleth maps based on LSOA, MSOA, WD19CD, PCON17CD, or LAD19CD
Data mapper
June 2018 onwards
Layering datasets from Data Mill North, Calderdale Data Works, Northern Data Hub, York Open Data, Salford Data Quay, Open Street Map and more.
Luton Bins
May 2018 onwards
Our app on iOS and Android gives reminders of bin collections to residents in Luton.
Leeds gender pay gap
April 2018 onwards
Graphing the reported gender pay gap for organisations based in Leeds.
Petitions hex map
March 2018 onwards
Visualising petiton data, from the UK Government and Parliament website, on a UK-wide constituency map.
Fenland Bins
September 2017 onwards
Our app on iOS and Android gives reminders of bin collections to residents in Fenland.
Leeds Bins
2015 onwards
Our app on iOS and Android uses open data from Leeds Data Mill to give reminders of bin days, and advice on recyling, to residents in Leeds.