Making #opendata More Accessible and Transparent
,Time is passing quickly and YourDataStories (YDS), our research project on making #opendata more accessible and transparent, is already beyond the first year of its three years project duration.
As projects go, the first year was full of first steps: Setting up the consortium, creating the necessary project structures and communication lines as well as establishing a basis for the actual development. Activities ranged from setting up the technical infrastructure to gathering and analysing the main user requirements for the envisioned application.
The YourDataStories consortium also created an early version of a prototype, incorporating many of the first requirements. This allowed for much more detailed feedback rounds with end-users through dedicated focus groups. Theses evaluation sessions were conducted by the user-partners for each of the three use case scenarios the project is working on:
- Follow Public Money all the way in Greece
- Tracking Development Aid in the Netherlands
- Cross-Europe Financial Comparability
They were arranged in close cooperation with the technical partners and involved a range of possible end-users from different targeted user groups.
After having successfully passed the first year review in April this year, the consortium is now concentrating on the next steps. The main focus will be on creating a second, more stable version of the prototype for web, but also adding mobile applications, covering all user requirements. These enhancements will include analytics features and an improved data layer, and aims to guarantee more stability to the system.
Furthermore, the consortium is going to increase and enrich the data-basis, identifying more stories within the data and engaging a broader audience in the project's activities for further evaluation and cooperation.
For more information on our work, you may visit our website or connect with us on twitter or Linkedin. We'll keep you updated on the project's progress and tell you more about what's happening in the area of #opendata, #dataviz and beyond.