[okfn-help] Who owns OpenGovernmentData.org?

Wed Dec 21 15:20:10 UTC 2011

OpenGovernmentData.org is potentially a great place to point people
who are interested in open government data to.

But it seems in need of a spring clean.

In particular:

  * Too many short names with links! What are all of these pages? Do
we really need them all? Could we do some pruning to make everything
streamlined and simpler?
  * More impact on front page. Video. Sentence in big writing.
Picture. Link. Bam. There's way too much stuff all over the place at
the moment.
  * http://opengovernmentdata.org/data/catalogues/ should point to
datacatalogs.org
  * Data competitions list is probably outdated. Either we should
update it (pinging open-government list) or possibly link to it from
somewhere for historical purposes. We don't need to link to
*everything* from everywhere. We could have a list of resources /
descriptions on a 'further resources' page somewhere.
  * Bulletin - IMO either we need to dogfood this with events we know
about (so its not *completely* empty!) or retire it, or hide it. What
about encouraging people to use OKFN meetup page instead?
  * Events - same. Do we need it? Who maintains this? Do our community
team know that it exists and how to add to it?
  * Film - hooray! Great! Standalone. Doesn't need maintenance. Isn't
(yet) outdated. But link is broken ;-(
http://opengovernmentdata.org/film/

It would be really good if someone were able to give this a revamp so
we could point people to it with pride! Also think we need to have a
main contact person / maintainer who can look after this in future...

I almost feel that we should archive the current page and simply have
a one page site with:

  * Film embedded in middle of page
  * Open government data is ... [in a sentence, big crisp letters]

And little noun project icons / sentence pointing to other stuff, including:

  * Open data near you (data/catalog icon): [link to datacatalogs.org]
  * Open data meetups near you (group/people icon): [link to OKFN meetup page]

  * Connect with people interested in open data around the world (mail
icon): [sign up box for open-government mailing list]
  * Join the conversation on Twitter (tweet bird icon): #opendata

  * Learn how to open up data (book icon): [link to opendatamanual.org]
  * Examples of open data in action: [in future - link to
TheDataHub.org app/visualisation gallery]

In future:

  * Open data meetup listing on http://lanyrd.com/
  * Selection of open data event photos from Flickr group

What do people think?

J.

-- 
Jonathan Gray

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

http://twitter.com/jwyg