Other observations

While the characteristics of purpose, enabler and collaborative method have appeared as the most consistent in our observations, there are some other important characteristics to observe too

These other characteristics impact how open data user communities attract new community members, the focus that they take, and how useful the data you publish might be to them.

1. Geography

The primary location of an open data user community can impact the focus of its activities, particularly if the community is trying to address problems that are content-specific, such as an environmental or behavioural challenge that is unique to a specific country.

1. Scale of operations

Some communities may be operating on a global scale, while others may be operating within a specific region, country or local area. Communities operating at different scales may face different challenges. For example, a community which is focussing on global challenges may be looking to access data from multiple sources and potentially integrating that data with other datasets. In turn, this means the data will probably need to conform to the same data standards to be interoperable, or that the community will have to ensure the data is standardised.

Meanwhile, a local community may have much smaller samples of data to work with. This makes data integration less time-consuming, but may create challenges around the availability of the right type of data to reflect the context-specific nature of the work they are doing.

1. Size of community

The size of a community can impact the scale that the community is able to work at, the challenges that members are able to tackle and the resources available to do so.