An introduction to the Data Landscape Playbook
How can understanding your data landscape help you to deliver more impactful publishing initiatives?
The term ‘data landscape’ can refer to a specific market, sector, or community, as defined by the goals of your publishing initiative. For example, your initiative might be focused on a sector, such as ‘connected and autonomous vehicles’; a cross-sector challenge, such as ‘childhood obesity’; or a place, such as a specific city. A clear understanding of your landscape can help you effectively prioritise and plan activities for delivering impact against social, economic and environmental challenges.
To help organisations conduct a review of the landscape in which they operate and to plan effectively for delivering impactful data initiatives, we have developed the Data Landscape Playbook. The playbook is designed for organisations which are considering designing and delivering projects or programmes of work which focus on collecting, using, sharing or publishing data with the aim of addressing a common social, environmental or economic challenge. We refer to these organisations or collectives as ‘data access initiatives’ throughout.
The playbook consists of five sections:
'Play one: Explore the problem and how data can address it' provides guidance on how to identify how the problem your initiative is seeking to solve can be addressed by designing or strengthening data infrastructure in order to improve access to data.
'Play two: Map the data ecosystem' takes you through steps to identify and list stakeholders and map them against the key data and value exchanges within the initiative’s data ecosystem. This brings to light the gaps, barriers and opportunities in the data ecosystem to which your activities can align.
'Play three: Assess the policy, regulatory and ethical context' offers guidance and tools to help you understand the ethical context of your project, and assess any legal, regulatory and policy considerations that might impact the data access initiative.
'Play four: Assess the existing data infrastructure' takes you through steps to assess the relevant data infrastructure, including understanding what data assets you will need, how to access them and how to look for available open standards. It will also encourage you to reflect on the data skills relevant to the initiative.
'Play five: Plan for impact when designing your data initiative' gives recommendations on how to design a programme of work and activities that achieves the initiative’s desired impact. A logic-model approach will help you organise your inputs, activities and outputs to address gaps, barriers and opportunities, and achieve the desired impact of your initiative.
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