Reflections on the State of Open Data Project to Date
Creating an open research approach is a challenging task. It is not enough to plan a process that is open, but the implementation also needs to follow through. In other words — if in theory the research is participatory, but no one is participating, we can’t really say we have an open research process.
In mid-January, we initiated our open approach by uploading our Environmental Scans to our website and asked for your feedback. We have posted blogs about it, tweeted, wrote Facebook posts and sent personal emails. For some of the scans, this has helped to generate feedback, for others, not so much. While we are still in the process of curating feedback from the open data community, we thought this would be a good time to see what improvements we could make.
Are we making enough noise? We opened the State of Open Data Twitter account to promote the project. We followed some great tips from the LSE guide for using Twitter for research, but while we are growing in followers and impressions, we still have more work to do. We need to reach beyond the usual suspects.
Please retweet and interact with us on Twitter over the next two weeks until the community input stage is over. Every tweet is welcome!
Are you shy? Our authors, which are experts in their fields, want your help! Our authors can’t carry the burden of representing the whole community alone. This is a collaborative process, your help is not only needed, it is crucial! We believe that each comment is valuable, no matter how short or long it is.
If you don’t want to comment because you are shy, we encourage you to submit a comment anyway! You can even comment anonymously. Just go to the Google Doc via an incognito window, and you will be anonymous.
Maybe it’s the format? In the world of TL:DR and multiple media channels, people don’t like to read long texts. We tried to make the scans as lean as possible, but maybe they are still too long? In addition, our scans are only in English and due to limited resources, we don’t have time to translate them to other languages. We are aware that language can be a barrier to participation.
So what’s next? Open North took their Urban Development scan and gave it an even leaner questionnaire form! Also, David Eaves has created a survey for the North America scan. Check it out and tell us if this works better for you!
There are still 2 days to comment on the following scans, so take a look and help us to advance open data!
