Community Insight Beta launched

We have just updated the status of the Community Insight tool to “Beta”. This basically means that the majority of core functionality is live (with a funky new logo), but with some features to add and issues to iron out before launch. The development and design team are now hard at work sprinting to the launch date of November 27th, check this blog for updates.

So what has been added over the last few weeks? Quite a bit…

  • The biggest changes have been under the bonnet, and Community Insight now behaves itself in Internet Explorer 8 (with successful tests in organisations still using IE7), as well as modern browsers including IE9, Firefox, Chrome, plus smartphone and tablet browsers. We have more speed improvements lined up to go live before launch, so users should see good performance using all these browsers.
  • “Hotspots” functionality to show you the areas and neighbourhoods in which you have stock, which have the highest/ lowest values on particular indicators – with links to view these areas on the map.
  • Stock properties are now identified using Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), so you can easily reference our data against your property management system. We are also exploring with system vendors how to integrate with their property management systems, so we can receive property data directly (meaning the property data in Community Insight is always up-to-date) as well as showing Community Insight results in their dashboards.
  • As well as by drawing on the map, neighbourhoods (known as ‘stock groups’ ) can now be defined using Excel uploads (or simply copy & pasting). Based on feedback from the pilots, users can also define neighbourhoods that do not contain stock, for example allowing you to explore areas for possible developments or stock swaps.
  • Plus lots of minor additions and design tidies, such as adding in the twitter feed and this news blog.

We will update this blog when new features go live over the next 2 weeks, including:

  • Datasets and reports for each of your defined neighbourhoods – and available within 1 hour of defining a new neighbourhood
  • First Census 2011 data results will be published by the Office for National Statistics on Nov 23rd, and we will load into Community Insight the next working day
  • Help tutorials and videos available on each page
  • Downloads for the raw data on your areas and defined neighbourhoods, for more detailed analysis using Excel or other packages. Eg, we know that some users want to integrate the Community Insight data into their organisation GIS software – we’re working on it!
  • Defining neighbourhoods from any standard areas (such as wards, Super Output Areas) – for those like me who can find it tricky to draw areas accurately on the map!
  • Speed improvements for IE8 and other browsers.