Things we have learnt…

Andy and I were chatting this morning about what the benefits of doing R&D are, aside from the obvious desire to create a “thing”, the body of knowledge, improved understanding and strength in a group of people are so very important.

So in the spirit of that, here are three things we now know, which the great and good of the data world probably already had sorted ages ago:

• Only use data you can touch, smell and roll around in. If you can’t see it, or someone doesn’t give you the magic codes to make it work it doesn’t exist. You can not do anything about that. Go home.
• Know your data intimately, get up close and personal with it, trying to bring meaning to something you don’t get won’t work.
• Ward boundaries are darn hard to draw on maps and boy do they look a weird. It’s a shame we couldn’t this cool flickr thing to help us draw them.