Spotlight: supporting adoption of the OpenActive standards

This section outlines some of the key components OpenActive uses to support adopters of its standards

OpenActive is a community-led initiative that designs standards for information-sharing in the physical activity sector. Encouraging and maintaining adoption across such a large sector is challenging, and requires a wide range of support tools for different audiences.

Incentives for adoption

One of the first questions that needs to be answered when considering how best to support adoption is to consider why organisations are adopting it in the first place. Often there will be a range of motivations, as in the case of OpenActive.

• Financial: OpenActive allows gyms and other commercial organisations to publicise their activities more widely and make them available to third-party sellers. Accordingly, additional customers and revenue can be generated.

• Compliance: In some cases, conformance to OpenActive standards is a contractual requirement embedded into public-sector contracts. This obviously forms a strong motivation to engage with OpenActive.

• Social goods: On the whole, physical-activity participation in the UK is too low – and it’s generally lowest amongst disadvantaged groups. For charitable and third-sector organisations OpenActive standards and the data-sharing they facilitate are an enabler to realise wider social benefits.

• Relation to other standards: OpenActive has been mapped to the Open Referral UK standard, which supports social prescribing. Users interested in supporting Open Referral UK may thus also have an interest in OpenActive.

Being aware of, and enabling, different reasons for adoption is crucial to ensuring the wide and successful adoption of a standard.

Stakeholders and developers: different resources for different audiences

As with many standards, OpenActive standards can demand considerable technical capacity and knowledge to be implemented. This gives rise to two distinct types of audience that need to be addressed – broadly, technical and non-technical. Typically, software developers won’t be able to do their jobs if they’re not immersed in technical detail – while managers, CEOs, and other stakeholders won’t be able to if they are.

As a result, OpenActive provides very different resources and communication channels for these two groups.

Stakeholder resources

• Public-facing website

• Newsletter and blog

• Twitter feed

• Webinars

• Biweekly meetings for:

  • the community at large

  • highly-invested members of the community

• Slack channels

Technical resources

• The OpenActive Developer Site
• Biweekly technical calls
• Biweekly technical drop-in
• GitHub repositories (a platform for open source code collaboration, where developers can work together and communicate on technical matters)

Lowering technical barriers

In addition to maintaining communication channels for technical discussion, OpenActive also provides tools to help developers integrate OpenActive with their systems. These include:

• the standards themselves (for example, the Opportunity and Open Booking API standards documents)
• a validator to confirm implementers’ output conforms to the relevant specifications
• a test suite, ensuring that business logic is correctly implemented
• a large number of software libraries in a variety of languages (for example, PHP, Ruby, and .NET) to ease integration

The extent of technical tooling supplied reflects the complexity of the OpenActive specification; simpler standards would require less library support.

It is worth noting, however, that validators are almost always useful: developers attempting to conform to the standards typically require fast and reliable feedback on their output to determine whether it is correct.

Monitoring adoption

Monitoring adoption can be difficult with open data; precisely because it is open, people and organisations are free to use and reuse it without informing its publisher about what they are doing. However, information about usage and uptake is often valued by public sector organisations and funding bodies.

Accordingly, OpenActive approaches adoption monitoring in two ways.

• For publishers, it maintains a ‘data dashboard’ listing everyone known to the organisation to be publishing OpenActive data. Note that publishers are incentivised to appear on this dashboard, because it can potentially drive traffic to their sites.
• It works with data consumers to collect analytics and application flow information (from eg Google Analytics) about any OpenActive data they republish on their sites.

While monitoring in this way can be time-consuming and inexact, it can also be extremely useful – not least in demonstrating the value of open standards to drive further adoption.