Season’s greetings to all you digital readers out there.

Time to wrap things up for another year at Oscar Towers and — I think — it’s fair to say it’s been an interesting, challenging, fun, frustrating, exciting, sad, and happy year. No idea on the individual quotas of each, but that seems to sum it up. I suspect we will all wish for a peaceful, calm, reflective, and ultimately enjoyable break before returning to the fray.

Aside from working with all our lovely clients and, of course, the perennial focus on our little corner of the data world concerning government, politics, change, and reorganisation, our year has essentially consisted of a series of (very) interesting projects — heavy on AI and development, and largely inclined towards collecting a lot of new data — over 100 million new data points in fact.

Thank you to those within and beyond Oscar who have assisted in these endeavours. It is now our exciting lot — in tandem with a carefully selected cohort of partners and suppliers who are kindly participating in mid-beta / early-adopter trials — to figure out the best ways of interpreting, displaying, and feeding this new data in fun, and crucially, useful ways.

There’s so much more I could add here, but it’s nearly Christmas and I’ll try not to alienate the remaining 1% of readers with too much detail. Suffice to say, we’re excited about 2026 and beyond, and about continuing to make our data a genuinely useful part of our users’ lives.

I’ve had a few requests for updates on the “house project”. It remains just that — a project — but one with a few fewer components and now boasting more than one functioning bathroom, heating, and (generally) a structure that appears to be watertight. More than can be said for our office building, but that’s another story entirely. Don’t mention the kitchen… but hey, who cares about those, especially at Christmas, right… right??

Anyway, enough of the usual waffle. What follows is the usual set of updates, arranged in the usual order.

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Updates:

The summary below is probably the best representation of change across the database in the last three months. A very big thank you to the research team — and especially to our research leads Sue, Sheryl, and Alison — for navigating the database to a position where it is the most up to date it has been in the past 26 years. A huge achievement, and one due entirely to their hard work.

I have promised the development of a brand-new, ground-up researcher admin system next year, so I suppose that’s some kind of reward.

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New:

There are so many new things I could mention here, but the one I’m probably most excited about is our new News tool. Initially, this has started with the weekly collection of the latest news and press releases from across councils (to be broadened out across public services in due course).

This raw information forms the basis for alerts, feeds, and — for fun — the early beginnings of some sentiment analysis. I’ve put together a basic front end so people can have a play, but if this sounds like something that might be of interest, do reach out.

You can play with the front-end here: Oscar News Tool (Preview)

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Interesting:

As mentioned earlier, we’re currently running some beta testing with a handful of friendly clients (guinea pigs). We do have room for a couple more — so if you’re a government supplier and a friend of Oscar, and you’d like to take part and have a tour of our new data and systems, just reach out to your account manager or to me.

We’d love to gain your feedback and thoughts — on the basis of no cost, commitment, or obligation — so a very low bar to entry. We simply want to understand what would be useful to you.

Anyway, pitch over. I wish you and yours a warm, safe, and enjoyable holiday, and here’s to a happy, healthy — and perhaps more settled — 2026!!

James and all at Oscar:
Adam, Richard, Alan, Maria, Rebecca, Sheryl, Sue, Alison, Melanie, Ali, Nicola, John, Keri, Claire, Shan, Eirian, Rhys, Jenni, Nathan, Leanne, Paul and, of course, Oscar BOT

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