Weeknotes 2024-W40

Short one this week, as it's been a heck of a time for various reasons.

Most of the week has been consumed with some rocks thrown into a project about the scope of an initial phase. Let's just say that managing expectations and getting feedback early is very important! It's a pity, as the work is progressing well overall. Consultancy is hard!

Other projects have been more productive. The Bradford 2025 data publishing programme attained automated extract from the first source system. Quite a milestone, which allows / requires getting the data governance bit sorted out. To this end, I've documented the process and drafted some risks to be discussed with the risk owner. This should lead to the data being released, with any luck. We could, by the end of next week, have an initial site sorted out. Watch this space.

One of the steps on the data release was the handling of small numbers in summaries with the risk of personal identification. Often small numbers are surpressesd in data released to avoid this eventuality, but there are other techniques. ONS has published information on disclosure control, but in our case, a simpler technique would suffice. I built a small value masker which bisects the dataset based on a clip level, then replaces the numbers below the clip with the average of the small numbers. The thinking here is that the overall distribution and totals should be similar in this case. I'll do some more detailed analysis of this next week, but for now, it'll do!