Creators of tools for open data? Steal this – The ODI

"One of the goals of our data innovation programme is to support the creation of a healthier open data ecosystem. Our hypothesis was that the first step towards this healthier ecosystem is to look at the barriers people face when publishing data: technical, cultural and organisational.

Our report, What data publishers need: synthesis of user-research, formed the basis of what we know about the needs and problems of data publishers. Our team listened and talked to dozens of people to learn how we can help open data publishers do their job better, faster and more competitively.

We uncovered a range of open data publishers’ needs, and the issues keeping those needs unmet. For tools, these needs are:

1. tools that are easier to use, especially for novices
2. better tools for checking and ensuring quality of the published data
3. better integration between tools in the publishing workflow.

We then used these insights to help develop resources to address some of those needs:

1. a register of tools for people starting their open data publishing journey,
2. and a range of new or improved tools for open data publishers (in collaboration with Open Knowledge International and Lintol).

As we do not want to compete with other tool makers, we made sure that every output of this work is openly licensed in the hope that tool makers would sweep in, adopt our good ideas, learn from our mistakes and integrate some of our insights – and some of our open source code – into their offering...."