Building a Community Platform for Open Data: OpenLocal (Part 1)
Following on from Chloe’s previous post on the beginnings of our journey with building our first prototype whilst we were still at Hyper Island, this post provides an overview of our process and activities from the end of October until mid-December 2015 including our research activities; events we have attended and product decisions made along the way.
Bolstered by the feedback we received and having developed a keen interest in open data, we wanted to take our prototype further and make it a reality. We had an idea to take our OpenLocal prototype to the next stage and at the same time use it as a case study for our Independent Research Projects for our masters degrees.
Kick-Off
Towards the end of October, Chloe and I had a kick-off meeting with FutureEverything to discuss our plans, everybody’s roles, expectations and outcomes. Chloe and I were to drive the project forward, but with support from FutureEverything where we needed.
Open Data Ecosystem
During the Kick-Off meeting we had a valuable session with Tom Rowlands in which he provided an overview of the current open data ecosystem (with a focus on Manchester) covering the main organisations, people and agencies. Being new to the open data world we found this very useful to get a birds-eye perspective of the situation.
Back to the Drawing Board
When we first developed our prototype, we had only three weeks to research, test and develop something. We didn’t feel we had completed enough research for this prototype so wanted to start again to make sure our findings were well grounded and fill in any gaps in our knowledge.
Using our map of the open data ecosystem as a starting point, we began desk research into the organisations and people involved, compiling a list of people we wanted to talk to.
Desk Research
We conducted desk research into existing platforms to understand what they are offering, to whom and why. We also researched some of the backgrounds of the people we wanted to talk to, to find out more about their experiences and to better inform our questions for them.
Desk research was also conducted on learning environments, expert/novice spaces, community participation, as well as open data topics itself.
All of this was carried out so that we could get a better understanding of the overall landscape of open data and where our platform can sit in it, it is still ongoing too.
Event: Open Data Institute Summit
On 3rd November I attended the Open Data Institute’s Summit at the BFI on London’s South Bank. It was a buzzing day with over 500 people in attendance from all over the UK and the world. There were five streams going on including a Keynote Theatre; Story Theatre; Young Rewired State Challenge Theatre; Startup Theatre and a Creative Lab.
I spent my day in the Story Theatre and listened to 18 talks of how people and organisations are using open data. Highlights for me included how people used open data: to level up local knowledge in their area; to analyse government spending; to predict floods; in journalism and Becky Hogge’s report on the impact of open data. I also got to meet some interesting people from start ups, government departments, museums, local government and software companies.
Expert Interviews
Being newbies to open data, we wanted to interview those who have had more experience with open data.
We talked to a range of people in local government, community groups, advocacy, business owners and academics in order to get their perspectives. (More details of this to come.)
Discussion Guide
To make sure our interviews would be useful, we created discussion guides to frame our questions by outlining the areas we wanted to cover with participants. Our guides slowly adapted as we interviewed more people, but the general themes of questions were around:
- Using Open Data (how they use it, what their goals are)
- Problems and Challenges they face (fairly open, not specific to a certain way of using it)
- Collaborating with others
- Civic Engagement (if they have collaborated with the public in their work)
- The role of the creative community
- Envisioning the future (specific to them and also more broadly)
- Feedback on our first OpenLocal prototype
Event: Open Data Manchester MeetUp
We got to finally attend the Open Data Manchester MeetUp on 15th December 2015. With the holiday season in full swing there was a more open agenda for the evening and so we managed to have a bit of time to present our prototype to the group attending that night. Using post-its we listened to their feedback and noted it down. It was interesting to hear the wide range of views from people who are experts in open data and those more new to it.
Product Decision: The Audience Redefined
In our initial prototype, the audience that we intended for the platform included the general public. Although we had found there was a gap in the general knowledge of people in understanding what open data is, we felt we needed to reduce the scope of our platform’s audience so we could better serve a smaller group in need. Building products and services for the general public is quite a challenge and something we did not feel we should tackle (just yet!).
With this realisation we decided to focus on what we call ‘Open Data Learners’ as our main audience, which is based on the description of ‘Data Learners’ by Rahul Bhargava, distinguishing them from ‘Users’ of open data or the general public.
Focusing on a smaller audience for our platform also meant recruiting potential users for research was easier.
User Interviews
At the heart of our degree and really for all user experience and service design projects, is the USER— or at least it should be!
Recruiting
Getting access to users is sometimes a hard task when doing research. Since we were able to narrow down the scope of our audience to ‘Open Data Learners’, we set out to try to find people like this.
We posted call outs on open data Slacks, Reddit, Twitter and used our network with Hyper Island, especially their MA Digital Data Strategy course. Our callout looked for people who identified as an “Open Data Newbie =* are beginners in open data; * have tried or are trying to learn more about open data.”
We managed to get in contact with a number of people who were willing to take part and arranged to interview them.
Discussion Guide
Our discussion guide for users was different than for the open data experts. We broadly covered these areas:
- Background (about their work/interests/tech usage)
- Open data knowledge(how they came to know about it, what it means to them)
- Motivations (for wanting to learn or use open data)
- Experiences using open data (context of use, details of how they used it, any challenges they faced)
- Learning Experience (resources for learning about open data, what they want to learn more about, experiences so far, challenges)
- Community (access to people to talk to, events)
- Feedback on OpenLocal prototype
Insights from our interviews will be covered in another forthcoming post.
Product Decision: Narrowing the Platform’s Features
As our first prototype was a (partly) interactive HTML prototype made using UXPin, it was easy to create new pages and sections. In reality, for a fully working platform, having all those bells and whistles may not have been necessary or useful. We also hadn’t had a chance to test that version of the prototype with users, although we had user-tested an earlier paper-prototype version of the site (with paper and also with Marvel). Our HTML prototype had the following features, some of which Chloe already covered in her post:
- Use Case stories (people using open data for themselves and as a business)
- Data Buddy (Finding people near you to connect with)
- Learning/Courses (Linking to external providers and also our own courses which were going to be aimed at digital agencies specifically)
- A forum
- Events
Events and forums are not unique so we decided not to focus on these features for the time being. The learning section and digital agency courses feature were added late to the prototype as we tried to find a way to financially support the platform. In practice and also based on some feedback, having the learning/courses section on the site felt a bit like an add-on didn’t quite fit with the rest of the site so we decided not to focus our efforts on that area at this time.
Slimming down our features also meant we could focus our efforts during interviews.
This is turning into a long post so I’ll end it here for now.
In my next post I will cover what we have been doing more recently including downloading our research findings, developing insights, creating personas and user stories, creating a new prototype, testing it and iterating further.
