The following content is a written artifact of proposal as it has been sent by dtc innovation to the Open Data Institute call for tender.

What is the name of your proposal? (if your proposal doesn’t yet have a name, please insert a working title)

Mind the Gaps.

Please describe your proposal in one sentence

Mind the Gaps is an encouraging map aimed at solving city inequalities by highlighting the pathways to their resolutions.

Please describe your proposal in 100 words

Mind the Gaps is an idea which originates both in the fact modern cities face inequality gaps and the lack of context prevents city services to join their efforts to efficiently address these gaps. For example in the city of Bristol, women die 12 years earlier in some neighbourhoods than they might in more prosperous areas, mostly because of an inadequate access to services and informations.

Minds the Gaps is an open source web visualisation interface which aim at highlighting major inequality gaps as data narratives by showing where they happen, where the problem-solving resources are and what is the pathway between them all — and their lack of.

Minds the Gaps ambitions is to be showcased in public spaces like the Bristol Data Dome to decision makers from various city services, communities and charities to acknowledge the issues, with whom to connect to address them and to effectively engage a dialogue in this very same space.

Which organisations will be involved in this proposal? (note: we strongly encourage joint applications from city-based groups and organisations in France & the UK)

The proposal is based on the involvement of 2 City Halls as a starter: Bristol City Hall in the UK and Greater Bordeaux in France. They happen to be twin cities of a comparable size, thus of comparable challenges. Bristol is also a well-known Open Data Institute Global Node.

dtc innovation is a social innovation cooperative based in Bordeaux (France), London (UK) and Montreal (Canada). Their most recent works revolve around the user experience of the French national open data platform data.gouv.fr and the public transparency of local governments via editorialised data visualisations.

Which team members will work on the proposal? What will their role(s) be? If your application involves several organisations, please tell us about team members from each organisation.

  1. David Bruant (dtc innovation), web developer • based in Bordeaux, France.
  2. Thomas Parisot (dtc innovation), producer and web developer • based in London, UK.
  3. Clémentine Hahn (dtc innovation), product owner • based in Montreal, Canada.
  4. Alaine Burns (freelance and dtc innovation friend), graphic designer and UX designer • based in London, UK.

How will your proposal connect and/or encourage collaborative working on data innovation between French & UK cities?

The proposal is based on 2 twin cities which are Bristol (UK) and Bordeaux (France). Both cities face a different set of challenges and run for different objectives but each city has an opportunity to learn from how their twin has solved similar issues. At a city level, displaying the data narratives at a decent scale in a public space is an encouragement for people from various backgrounds and different services to gather and to initiate a dialogue to solve the problems depicted by the data narratives.

The visualisation tool is meant to be reused by other towns, which will help connect their own challenges and create an intelligent web of solutions.

Eventually, the success of the visualisation tool will be demonstrated by the mutualisation of new ideas and new features.

Timelines & Costings

Please give us a short timeline on what you hope to achieve through this proposal before the 28 February 2018.

  1. Engaging with Bristol and Bordeaux City Hall to define the priorities they want to highlight, and whom would be our correspondents on the field — Bristol 1. Quality of Life Survey and Bordeaux Wards Diagnosis might help;
  2. Sensing strategic issues as well as the current and ideal plans to solve them;
  3. Highlight datasets containing issues data;
  4. Design narratives to surface pathways between issues and their resolutions;
  5. Challenge how to visualise the pathways, the issues and their problem-solving resources with decision makers and our field correspondents;
  6. Display static mocks of the prototypes at the Bristol Data Dome and iterate over their design;
  7. Prioritizing data narratives based on their ease of implementation (availability of data, importance of the narrative for the city itself);
  8. Implementing the various narratives, as compelling, digital presentations using real time data hosted on the City’s Open Data Platforms .

Please give us approximate costings for your proposal. Costings should be at an activity level.

dtc innovation uses continuous improvement methods like Scrum and Kanban to control the costs and the risks of projects. We design small and achievable objectives in several iterations of two weeks timeframes (aka “Sprints”). Each sprint is opened by a theme, a backlog definition meeting, followed by a prioritisation meeting. A backlog is a set of user stories ought to be done during the sprint. A user story is an actionable implementation with a clear definition of done. User stories role is to spark a dialogue among the group to surface potential issues. Remaining actions are either shoved away or rescheduled for the next sprint. Each sprint is closed by a retrospective meeting to list what people liked doing, what people learned, what people lacked of and what people longed for. Demos are welcome if they have not been happening in the meantime. This closing helps planning the opening of the next sprint.

dtc innovation usual day rate is £550; Bristol City Council Open Data officer usual day rate is £200. All this translates into a minimum of 36 days of work. We are likely to fund additional days of work to give more chances to the project — especially to do outreach, perform user testing and software engineering.

The burndown of the project will rely on realistic priorities set with the partners until we either reach a satisfactory product before Feb 2018 or exhaust the funding envelope.

In February, we would have delivered a working product in less than or exactly £20,000:

  • All the features are designed and implemented within the envelope, and we do not use the remainder;
  • All the features are designed and implemented within the envelope, and new features are to go up to £20,000;
  • Features are not totally implemented within the envelope but there is still a working product.