Building community

This section provides an understanding of how to build community when developing open standards

Peer networks

Peer networks are a popular way of developing leadership and sharing knowledge across communities.

In the process of developing this toolkit we were able to bring together a diverse set of people working with open standards for data. The insight generated from those discussions demonstrated the value of encouraging more peer networking across that community.

In this section of the site we showcase some of the organisations and individuals developing or supporting open standards for data.

Who can I work with?

A variety of organisations currently support the development and adoption of open standards for data. This section profiles some of those organisations and how they can support you.

There are many organisations working to develop open standards for data. Some are international or national standards bodies. Others are smaller organisations working within specific sectors.

These organisations can help you find and adopt existing standards. They can also provide advice to help you to extend an existing standard to support new requirements.

If you have identified the need for a new standard then an experienced organisation can help you by guiding its development and driving adoption.

Some organisations may also help to host your standards work by providing collaboration tools and an intellectual property framework. For example the W3C provides community groups to help organisations across different sectors to collaborate around standards. A list of which organisations you can work with can be found in the ODI Standards Guidebook.