[ckan-discuss] Building CKAN's user community?

[Jonathan Gray]

Hi all,

I've recently been speaking to some of the core CKAN developers and
have suggested that the project could benefit from a more proactive
approach to growing and strengthening its community of users. Rufus
and I and others try to do as much as we can to tell people about the
project, but I think it might arguably be time that we had a dedicated
person to help to do this (and I for one am not able to do as much as
I'd like, due to other commitments!).

I've put together a few notes on what a dedicated CKAN community
person might do, which are pasted below and at the following URL:

  http://ckan.okfnpad.org/community

What do people think? Good idea? Bad idea? Is the project ready for
this? Should we hold off for a bit?

If people think this is worth pursuing, I'd be most grateful for ideas
on how an extra pair of hands could help support the project (all
ideas - however big, small or outlandish - are most welcome!). If
there is general support for this, and we can make a strong case for
why this is needed, then I may try and speak to some people to see if
there is any way we could get funding to bring on a dedicated 'user
community' person.

All the best,

Jonathan

### CKAN Community Coordinator

CKAN aims to be a key point of reference for people interested in
working with open data and open content - from governmental or
scientific open datasets, to bulk downloadable library catalogues, to
big collections of public domain documents or legal texts.

A crucial measure of its success will be having large numbers of users
who use the service to help them to find and reuse open material. In
this sense it aspires to be a 'Debian for data', and ultimately aims
to provide users with basic tools for working with datasets in all
kinds of clever, machine-assisted ways.

We are currently thinking of how we can actively support the growth of
a flourishing community of CKAN users, including (but not limited to):
web/mobile developers, researchers, data journalists, scientists,
librarians, data literate citizens, public servants, and NGOs.

As the project is expanding, we are thinking of adding a dedicated
'community building' person to our core team of developers. The role
of this person might include:

  * Being a first point of contact for people interested in using CKAN
  * Keeping a regular rhythm of conference calls / virtual meetings
for CKAN users
  * Helping to facilitate the i18n process - to help make CKAN
available in many different languages around the world
  * Helping to liaise with users who maintain an instance of CKAN, to
help them to add more datasets, to understand their needs from the
system and to advise them about how to engage with prospective users
in their community
  * To proactively gather information about feature requests or
experiences from the user community, to be relayed to the developer
team via the trac system
  * To start to approach prospective users in different domains more
systematically - and look at useful features that could be introduced
to support working with content and data in different domains (e.g.
for chemical datasets, for geospatial datasets, for legal texts, and
so on)
  * General CKAN evangelism - at events, on mailing lists, and talking
talking to core stakeholders and potential users (who might use the
software, or integrate it or make it interoperable with other systems)
 * Start a regular CKAN announcement list for (approximately)
bi-monthly project updates and major feature announcements
  * Starting to map core stakeholders more systematically and making
sure we are engaging with as many of them as possible - including
identifying current spots where more could be done (e.g. mobile
developers)
  * Helping to define discrete 'micro-tasks' with respect to cleaning
up, or working with datasets on CKAN
  * Liaising with others in various open source and developer
communities to make sure people know about the project


-- 
Jonathan Gray

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

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg