By John Kellas
Commissioned by the Bristol Health Partners, I designed a project to engage a university student to help Bristol City Council update its city ward profile tool – at that stage only available online in a fancy Excel spreadsheet or pdf. Only people with a Microsoft office subscription or access to it would be able to see the visualisation and use the interactive functionality.
Working closely with the ‘Strategic Intelligence and Performance’ team at Bristol City Council, I designed and then supported the development and delivery of a web-based product that replicated the design of the fancy Exel tool but was available to anyone that could access the internet, not just a Microsoft product.
We recruited via advert and interview and then I, trained and coach a 2nd-year computer science student to build the online tool. Dawid Koleczko used open-source software to successfully build the data models and visualisation interfaces. Dawid proved both his own brilliance and the amazing potential of using open source software to create an easy to navigate 1000+ page website that provided data and visualisations for key data about life and living in Bristol.
Tyeth Gundry provided Dev Ops consultancy and helped get the product over the line. The online tool was used in business as usual pubic reporting for the BCC team (and regularly updated with new annual data), 2019-2022.