[ckan-discuss] User feedback for TheDataHub.org

Wed Dec 7 11:02:58 GMT 2011

Here is a bit of user feedback from pottering around on TheDataHub.org
this morning!

## Groups page: http://thedatahub.org/group

  * There are currently 4 pages of results. Often where you have
multiple pages of results, you also have an option to change how many
results are displayed per page. By default there are 20 items per
page. Is there any way we could enable people to view 50 or 100 items
per page? Or even view all?
  * I guess the more groups the are, the less attractive it will be to
browse them all at once. If you look at other web services like
Flickr, there isn't an obvious way to browse groups: you can search
for them, start your own or see the ones that you follow. Which makes
me wonder if there are plans to enable users to 'follow' particular
groups they are interested in? E.g. I would like to see when something
is added to a group I'm interested in - like bibliographic data or
energy data. Could I even choose to get email notifications for this?
  * Another nice thing that Flickr has is the explore page
<http://www.flickr.com/explore/> which is presumably a mixture of
automatically selected and handpicked items. We could have 'featured'
data and groups? Or *even* a blog where people talk about how they
have used or cleaned up data?

## About page: http://thedatahub.org/about

  * While the text that is there about CKAN might appeal to people who
know about versioning, software repositories, the rationale behind a
social data hub, etc, if this is the first thing that we are pointing
new users to when they visit the site, then it might scare them off a
bit! While this sort of explanation is valuable, it might be peeking
under the hood for some users. If I'm driving a car, I don't need to
know why the choice of a certain material is good for the environment
or how it improves performance of the car. Rufus's slides from 2008
are useful background information for people who want to know more
about this - but suggest that in the medium term we could have a nice
animated video explaining what TheDataHub is, how it can help you, and
why it matters (including the long term vision of collaboration around
a decentralised ecosystem, etc).

## Page footer

  * How do I find the ckan-discuss and ckan-dev mailing lists from
TheDataHub.org?

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg