Mapping grassland fires: our next steps

 

The Welsh Government has been supported by Y Lab's Digital Innovation Accelerator to develop a tool to help prevent deliberate fires on areas of open grassland in Wales. This is an area of concern to policymakers, police, the fire and rescue services and more.

We've taken the opportunity to reflect a little further regarding the key requirements, our management of the project, and we are now digging deeper into a specific procurement option.

From our current standpoint there are several key factors that have now become apparent:

Two priorities

Both prevention and response need to be addressed in order to satisfy our stakeholders.

Timing

The cycle of deliberate grass fires peaks each year around Easter time. This means we can work backwards from March 2017 in terms of our business and development planning.

Existing data flows and services

The prevention use cases may be satisfied using WG's existing architecture.

The new requirement

The response use cases will need to consider restricted view access (restricted to a group of authorised users) which will be a useful feature for Lle.

As our understanding has deepened we've acknowledged a slight deviation against our original plans and timescales. However, an agile approach allows us to be flexible in our execution and no additional costs will be incurred as a result.

Our first approach is to consider short term hire of a skilled contractor. The person with the right skills and capabilities might be able to provide the solution using an extension to our existing Lle, a data and information platform in partnership with Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales. Investigations have began on what frameworks currently exist within WG to facilitate this.

Additionally, we are planning to start with the (easier) preventative use cases will fit better with the timing constraints.

Author

Mason Davis

Mason Davis is a Project Manager and Digital Technology Analyst working with the Welsh Government. He works in the field of knowledge and platform development using a range of discipli…