Introducing Open Data Communities Knowledge Base

One of the themes from out User Engagement Review earlier in 2017 was that the help and guidance could be better. Over the last few months we’ve identified and implemented a way to make our supporting guides and help easier to access and use. We really wanted to avoid the typical sequential description of features and tools. Our aim was to adopt a more user-centric approach focusing on helping users complete tasks along the lines of “How do I do something”.

The released product is available at - http://guides.opendatacommunities.org/ and it can also be accessed from the homepage of Open Data Communities. We’ve made a really good start but we do want to add more material as the platform evolves and we release more functionality, improving the service offering.

How can I use the ODC Knowledge Base?

Once you access http://guides.opendatacommunities.org/ you can search for something. You can access one of the most popular articles. Or you can browse one of the themed topics.

Each article you navigate to allows you to search again or browse through the themes using the left hand side navigation panel. Each article will take you through the journeys to complete your task.

What are your future ambitions for the tool?

We’ve made a very good start to populating the tool by creating lots of guides but we want to add more. We want to foster a spirit of collaboration between our users. For example we’d like to hear how you have used our data to create a visualisation with your own open source tools? We'd even like to capture the story and use it to help other users.

We’d also like to hear your feedback on the tool ODC@communities.gsi.gov.uk