Introduction

A toolkit to help you publish data openly, in ways that work for your users

Background

Access to data is vital in tackling the big challenges we face as a society – from the earlier detection and treatment of disease to reducing pollution in urban spaces. Data also has an important role to play in driving economic growth, by supporting the creation of new technologies, products and services.

We believe everyone can benefit from opening, sharing, and collaborating around data to make better decisions, improve efficiency, and help tackle some of the world’s most pressing societal challenges. In order to advance the cause of open, trustworthy data sharing and collaboration, such that any organisation of any size can more easily collaborate around data and realise its benefits, the ODI has partnered with Microsoft to help deliver its Open Data Campaign.

The Open Data Campaign looks to address the 'data divide', by improving access to data through collaborations such as the Industry Data for Society Partnership, which makes data collected by private sector companies available for solving global challenges, such as through the partnership's new Data for Local Environments Challenge. The campaign has enabled the development of new legal agreements to support data sharing, such as the Community Data License Agreement, and built technical capabilities to provide better access to data, such as Microsoft Research Open Data.

As part of the campaign, Microsoft has also developed the Open Data for Social Impact Framework – a tool leaders can use to put data to work to solve the challenges most important to them – which this toolkit aims to complement, by supporting practitioners.

Why have we created the User-centric data publishing toolkit

Projects, organisations and businesses are all likely to have access to a wealth of data that could be utilised to understand and tackle social and environmental issues. However, the potential for this data is often unrealised because it is not shared at all, or in a way that is accessible and useful. While the need for and value of open data is now more commonly recognised, the practice of effectively publishing open data is variable.

Through our conversations with a number of data professionals working on supporting others, across a range of sectors, to publish and use data, many felt that people broadly do not have the skills or knowledge to publish data on behalf of their organisation and that there are not many basic publishing resources available to help those individuals. In addition to this, many felt that current publishing practices do not take a user-centric approach, meaning that data often isn't meeting the needs of potential or actual users.

The content in this toolkit has been developed to support those collecting data on behalf of their organisations to feel confident in being able to publish data for the first time, and to publish data with a user focus, so that more data can be used to create socially beneficial outcomes.