TL; DR
Marketing work during December and January came to fruition with at least two University courses agreeing to publicise and use our resources with their student cohort. Our update process led us to publish a comprehensive list of UK coronavirus laws. We completed our V1.0 when the code that generates data for various classification schemes worked! February is focused on delivering to our new student users, continuous improvement and our usual new law and update processes.
________
Where does the time go? The weeks whizz by. I feel like I've not had a shorter January. I enjoy what I'm doing. What's not to like about starting and running a social enterprise with a mission dedicated to biodiversity loss and climate?
DO GOOD, BE HAPPY
Student & New Supporters
Last year we realised that our resources would be of help to students of sustainability, environment and safety subjects. We reached out to course leaders and directors through LinkedIn. We're always truly grateful that people take time in their busy day to read our messages and connect. The outcome is that we are spinning up a dedicated Airtable Base for two programmes. Just like the Coronavirus one (see later in this report) but populated with our full environmental law dataset. Really pleased, if not a little nervous, to have supporters and lots of students peer reviewing our work.
1.0 Design Complete
A major milestone that we completed on 31st January were the classification schemes (models) we apply to laws. Click through to the public coronavirus base to see them in action.
This marks an important milestone. We now have our v1.0 schema for the Legal Register and Legal Article Tables complete together with all the underpinning software needed to create and update the content. Time to breath and take stock. There are bugs of course and we'll iron those out over time. And the quality of the content will also improve as happens with everything that's new.
Therefore, we move with renewed confidence into February and on to user testing (see student above). Any organisation wanting to be an early adopter should get in touch. This is a good time to get involved.
Have we created value? We've used a few systems over the years and they have always been proprietary and hard to change. The Airtable platform gives the user the power and control to arrange things exactly as they want them. Practitioners can build what they want rather than use what they are given. Yeah, we're creating value.
Technically, reaching this milestone was a couple of long days refactoring code (one day starting at 4.30 am!). The workflow reads our Airtable records and then loads the corresponding law(s) from legislation.gov.uk. We then parse the .html. This is a three step process. The .html gets turned into text using the Floki library. The text then gets cleaned (all manner of weird fish turn up in the text). Before being passed to a function that turns the text into an Elixir data structure. We then run the models against that data structure. The model data is then aggregated to create the content suitable for the single line record of a law in the Legal Register Table. The model data is then patched back into Airtable. Running this workflow for about 300 coronavirus laws took about 3 minutes to process (literally before I stepped out the door to go to the theatre [80 minutes of the most wonderful mime exploring what it feels like to lose our memory as we age]).
Coronavirus
Our Public Health family was updated in January. Unexpectedly we found ourselves pulling on the coronavirus thread - and kept pulling - and pulling - and stopped at over 500 laws later. Many of these are still wholly or partly in force. Far too many laws to remain inside the Public Health family and so we created a new Coronavirus family. And then pushed the whole thing into the public realm. Okay, we've rather missed the wave for this pandemic, but next time (I rather think it's a when and not an if) we'll be ready to ride the wave in real time.
Here's the link:
https://airtable.com/app4wfGddiaosZ5TE/shr7ozRwQdqkj8kMF
And the same thing on the Airtable Universe:
https://www.airtable.com/universe/expEnBZK1EUJPDLX5/uk-coronavirus-law?explore=true
The records can be downloaded as a .csv or copied into Airtable if you've got an account. At fewer than 1000 records it'll copy over into a workspace for anyone on the free Airtable plan.
Message Jason for a sync link (auto update into your Airtable Base just like the Base we have shared) and with a commercial creative commons licence.
Marketing
Marketing work during December and January came to fruition with at least two University courses agreeing to publicise and use our resources with their student cohort. Our update process led us to publish a comprehensive list of UK coronavirus laws. We completed our V1.0 when the code that generates data for various classification schemes worked! February is focused on delivering to our new student users, continuous improvement and our usual new law and update processes.
________
Where does the time go? The weeks whizz by. I feel like I've not had a shorter January. I enjoy what I'm doing. What's not to like about starting and running a social enterprise with a mission dedicated to biodiversity loss and climate?
DO GOOD, BE HAPPY
Student & New Supporters
Last year we realised that our resources would be of help to students of sustainability, environment and safety subjects. We reached out to course leaders and directors through LinkedIn. We're always truly grateful that people take time in their busy day to read our messages and connect. The outcome is that we are spinning up a dedicated Airtable Base for two programmes. Just like the Coronavirus one (see later in this report) but populated with our full environmental law dataset. Really pleased, if not a little nervous, to have supporters and lots of students peer reviewing our work.
1.0 Design Complete
A major milestone that we completed on 31st January were the classification schemes (models) we apply to laws. Click through to the public coronavirus base to see them in action.
This marks an important milestone. We now have our v1.0 schema for the Legal Register and Legal Article Tables complete together with all the underpinning software needed to create and update the content. Time to breath and take stock. There are bugs of course and we'll iron those out over time. And the quality of the content will also improve as happens with everything that's new.
Therefore, we move with renewed confidence into February and on to user testing (see student above). Any organisation wanting to be an early adopter should get in touch. This is a good time to get involved.
Have we created value? We've used a few systems over the years and they have always been proprietary and hard to change. The Airtable platform gives the user the power and control to arrange things exactly as they want them. Practitioners can build what they want rather than use what they are given. Yeah, we're creating value.
Technically, reaching this milestone was a couple of long days refactoring code (one day starting at 4.30 am!). The workflow reads our Airtable records and then loads the corresponding law(s) from legislation.gov.uk. We then parse the .html. This is a three step process. The .html gets turned into text using the Floki library. The text then gets cleaned (all manner of weird fish turn up in the text). Before being passed to a function that turns the text into an Elixir data structure. We then run the models against that data structure. The model data is then aggregated to create the content suitable for the single line record of a law in the Legal Register Table. The model data is then patched back into Airtable. Running this workflow for about 300 coronavirus laws took about 3 minutes to process (literally before I stepped out the door to go to the theatre [80 minutes of the most wonderful mime exploring what it feels like to lose our memory as we age]).
Coronavirus
Our Public Health family was updated in January. Unexpectedly we found ourselves pulling on the coronavirus thread - and kept pulling - and pulling - and stopped at over 500 laws later. Many of these are still wholly or partly in force. Far too many laws to remain inside the Public Health family and so we created a new Coronavirus family. And then pushed the whole thing into the public realm. Okay, we've rather missed the wave for this pandemic, but next time (I rather think it's a when and not an if) we'll be ready to ride the wave in real time.
Here's the link:
https://airtable.com/app4wfGddiaosZ5TE/shr7ozRwQdqkj8kMF
And the same thing on the Airtable Universe:
https://www.airtable.com/universe/expEnBZK1EUJPDLX5/uk-coronavirus-law?explore=true
The records can be downloaded as a .csv or copied into Airtable if you've got an account. At fewer than 1000 records it'll copy over into a workspace for anyone on the free Airtable plan.
Message Jason for a sync link (auto update into your Airtable Base just like the Base we have shared) and with a commercial creative commons licence.
Marketing
- We targeted Universities in December and January because we wanted to offer the resources as a tool for students to use. Graciously many people responded and connected.
- Jason's LinkedIn connections have increased from ""not an app he used"" to approaching 200.
- Total impressions of our posts on LinkedIn are over 1000 with the most popular being the recent coronavirus announcement.
- This month, in keeping with the health theme, we'll be reaching out to the health sector.
- Jason is personally targeting 500 LinkedIn connections. Ping him a request to connect.
- We'll continue publishing on LinkedIn trying to extend our readership beyond friends and family.
- And we might try Crowdfunder again. The first Crowdfunder was a resounding flop. Perhaps it's time to try again. The trick to succeeding is to fail lots. How to find two Universities who will test your service? By contacting over 95% of them. There's no magic just hard work.
2.0?
Our next major milestone builds on the concept of creating value on top of our core data. Much like our classification schemes the next thing on our list to build are audit schedules.
The design of this is in its infancy at the moment. Essentially we will extract the intent of a rule and spin-up suitable audit tests. These would then be able to be combined to create the schedule.
The intention is not to operationalise them. We're not auditors. Nor do we have anything to audit. The audit tests will exist across our full legal dataset ready to be used by anyone who needs them. And we'll cook up some recipes for operationalising them inside Airtable.
Thank-you for reading! Showing you lots of love and a happy Pancake Day.
DO GOOD, BE HAPPY
Jason
Spongl Ltd
February 2024
NB This and other pieces are written using a journaling app called LogSeq. Just giving them a shout out because we love the app.
https://logseq.com/
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