Define how improving access to data can help address your problem

Every organisation has its own set of challenges to overcome. Often these challenges are not unique – for example, most new, developing companies strive to overcome the sustainability hurdle. However, sometimes a particular issue affects a whole sector, geographical area or community. We’ve been referring to these types of challenges as ‘common challenges’ – social, economic or environmental problems that must be addressed collectively, such as pandemics or environmental crises. Improving access to data is key in helping people to address common challenges. Ideally, you have already articulated the problem you want to solve – we recommend you to use this guidance to ensure it is concise, measurable and actionable, and that you properly define how it can be addressed through improving access to data.

Exploring how your ‘problem statement’ – a concise description of an issue to be addressed or improved – can be addressed by improving access to data may seem the easiest play in this playbook, but actually it needs a lot of coordination, partnership collaboration and alliance and network development to collectively define the challenge to be addressed and identify the data infrastructure that might best help.

Problems are rarely ‘solved’ with data alone, so in this play we recommend reflecting on if and how building or maintaining data infrastructure can help address your problem. Data can support initiatives in scoping the problem and finding what current interventions exist, especially if applying for additional funding to address the challenge. When defining how improving access to data can address the problem statement, it can be helpful to reflect on the following aspects:

The direct social, environmental or economic relevance

A data access initiative needs to have clear societal relevance so that stakeholders from different backgrounds will understand the problem and be motivated to contribute funding or expertise to address it. Researching and foregrounding evidence and statistics about the scale of the problem can help leaders provide motivation for addressing the problem – for example, the ‘IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC’, if your goal is greenhouse gas emission reduction.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide an internationally relevant framework for describing motivating topic areas such as climate action and public health. In other cases, national, local or even organisational strategies may identify challenges that are clearly relevant and important to a broad set of stakeholders.

How data can address the problem

Good decisions that lead to positive impact can only be made when data is stewarded effectively – in other words collected, maintained and shared appropriately. Good stewardship of data enables us to create information from that data – in the form of products and services, analyses and insights, or stories and visualisations. The information created from data helps us to make more informed decisions and plan effectively.

A data access initiative will focus on addressing an existing common challenge through the creation of new data or the use of data in a new way. This could mean using new techniques in processing and using data, combining data with other less traditional data sources, or creating new data infrastructure, such as standards, technologies and data institutions, to enable better access to data. When reflecting how the problem can be addressed by improving access to data, also think of the context in which this infrastructure will be designed or strengthened and try to assess the data literacy levels of the organisations and communities involved in the challenge.

The focus of the initiative

The problem needs to have a solution that is measurable, and that enables your organisation to set time-bound targets to measure the progress you are making. In order to demonstrate the value of these activities, you need to have something to show at the end of certain phases of the initiative which will encourage funders and partners to invest, and will galvanise further work.

These metrics do not have to be made against the ultimate goal of the initiative (such as reversing the effects of the climate emergency), but should be an understood proxy (such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a particular region). At this stage we recommend reflecting on the relationship between the data infrastructure that your initiative is willing to maintain or develop and the various indicators that you will be measuring. Some may be a direct metric, such as the number of datasets published; others may be more indirect measures, and can be related to how other organisations are using the data infrastructure.