About

Our principles

Clarity

We strive for an economy of style in all of our data visualisations. We've designed a Lab theme that maintains a consistency of output and we have restricted the number of typefaces and colour palettes used. All of our visualisations are designed to work across platforms: print, desktop, and mobile.

Openness

We are committed to the publication of open data because it helps promote transparency and increase trust. We aim to ensure that all the open data we publish has a minimum 3-star openness rating. Our data must be accessible on the Web in a machine readable non-proprietary format, published under the OGL v3.0 licence which permits anyone to reuse it.

Reproducibility

We are strong advocates of reproducibility: the ability to copy methods and achieve similar results. We have adopted a completely reproducible workflow by using open source code (R, JavaScript etc.) and publishing it on GitHub, a software development platform. Our code is published under the MIT licence and other programmers are welcome to fork any of the repositories containing our code and adapt it for their own purposes.

What we do

We publish data and visualisations to inform citizens and those responsible for decision making in Trafford.

The Lab is using R, an open-source programming language for statistical analysis to import, tidy, transform, visualise, model and communicate data. R is central to the Lab's workflow because it provides an efficient and reproducible way of working that encourages both openness and collaboration. We also code in javascript, particularly using the Leaflet and D3 libraries.

Using our outputs

You are free to use our outputs however you wish. All we ask is that you preserve any attributions which are present and include a link to the Trafford Data Lab licence along with a credit somewhere within your work.