Piloting Skyline
We spent the summer working collaboratively with our CivTech pilot partners to test Baseline, the beta version of Skyline, using a number of topical planning use cases.
We are testing out how partners can use Skyline to unlock diverse datasets, solve problems and promote place-based innovation. We hope it will help streamline how Local Authorities gather evidence for plan making, including Local Development Plans, regeneration plans and site specific masterplans.
Last week, we shared our beta product with a number of pilot partners. In our research process, we gathered initial partners’ feedback before letting them explore the tool in their own time. Then we set them a number of tasks, in order to gain more constructive and informed feedback. This research is helping to inform the look and functionality of the tool, how we prioritise features, what datasets clients expect. We are also honing into which users will be the most active, within their organisation, and how our customers want to share their analysis.
Our Pilot partners include:
- Scottish Borders Councils
- Aberdeenshire Council
- Dumfries and Galloway Council
- Manchester City Council and
- Hometown Hub
Our work with pilot partners is a learning process and it has been intensive. It has involved identifying an analysis question relevant to each use case, exploring data, and building new workflows to support interactive data exploration (and lots of engineering work in the background!)
Sharing products is always daunting, even when you are proud of what you’ve produced, and we’ve been working with these partners on diverse projects exploring issues including accessibility.
The feedback has been encouraging, and given us the validation and insight we need to keep building and developing our product for place planning. Over the next couple of months our pilot partners will be using their own Skyline instances within their portfolios of work.
If you are interested in joining our group of Skyline Beta-Testers, let us know on our Contact page or email us on hello@diagonal.works.
