Data Landscape Playbook: status

This playbook is a work in progress and along with its constituent parts will be iterated based on tests with partners.

Published: March 2021

Status: Public draft for review

Licensing: The guidebook and the prototype resources included within it are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 – International License.

This playbook is part of our Innovate UK-funded R&D project aimed at helping organisations that are building data infrastructure to address common challenges. Over the course of the project, we have also published a series of blogs and reports on our progress and findings, including:

• ‘Comparing decentralised data publishing initiatives’ – a report which explores a common design pattern for increasing access to data through the adoption of open standards for data

• ‘Infrastructure for common challenges’ – a user needs report which summarises our initial user needs research on data access initiatives, sharing insights into their challenges and exploring how design tools can help them build the data infrastructure they need to be successful

• ‘What do we mean by data access initiatives?’ – a blogpost which defines the term ‘data access initiatives’ and explores how they help us tackle social, economic and environmental challenges

• ‘Can thinking about the world as a complex, interconnected system help us solve difficult problems?’ – a blogpost which explores how increased access to data can help address specific challenges such as improving humanitarian responses

• ‘Using logic models to design data initiatives’ – a blogpost which defines logic models and shows how they can help planning impactful projects and designing data access initiatives

• ‘Changing behaviour to solve challenges’ – a blogpost which explores how changing behaviour can help contribute to making positive impact within a system

The Data Landscape Playbook comes from months of desk and user research investigating the hurdles that ‘data access initiatives’ face when building data infrastructure to tackle common challenges. Some of the 'plays' in this playbook focus on our well-tested tools, such as our Data Ecosystem Mapping tool and the Data Ethics Canvas, or on well-established external approaches such as logic models. These were all tested with organisations leading data access initiatives, and feedback was collected on their sequencing, which was inspired by our resource ‘Data Challenge Prizes for Health: a Playbook’.

We invite you to use this playbook, and the tools and activities contained within it, and welcome feedback to help us make them better. In particular, we are interested in feedback on:

• which of the activities and tools are most useful and how they can be improved

• if the sequence of the plays makes sense for your data access initiative

• Which format is the most useful for engaging with the tools and activities (some of the tools and activities are likely to be more useful in a workshop or group setting, while others may be more suitable for individual work)

• additional tools and resources that can help organisations building data infrastructure to address common challenges

Please also get in touch if you are interested in working through the activities in this playbook in an ODI-facilitated workshop setting. For instance, the tools and activities in this playbook could be packaged as a bespoke series of workshops designed to help your organisation run a data landscape review.