[Open-data-census] Feedback on configuring a new census and a request for help from Australia

[Stephen Gates]

Hello,

Firstly, thank you for creating the Open Data Census and making it relative easy for non-technical people to create a great looking site.

I’m Stephen and as a new census administrator I’d like to share my experience of setting up Australia’s Regional Open Data Census (http://australia.census.okfn.org/ <http://australia.census.okfn.org/>) by way of a number of suggestions and requests for help. I hope these notes can improve the experience of future admins and I’m happy to write something up, given some direction.

It took a while to realise that there is a delay in completing edits in Google Sheets to when the Census is able to access those changes as part of the reload process. It would be worth informing admins that changes could be instant or you may need to wait 5 minutes and that you could be presented with a variety of error messages. The worst one being the one that just happened:

Application Error
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

I have being "trying again”, as the message suggests but with no luck. Hopefully this will resolve itself by the time you read this.


I got a bit confused about where I should ask questions:

Private Google Forum
Open Data Census mailing list
census at okfn.org
GitHub Issues (especially around communication protocols e.g. can I email a contributor privately and ask for help?)
It would be good to describe what forum is used for what discussions.

I’m not clear on who to ask to get my census added to the list on http://census.okfn.org and how long that process may take and if there are any other steps required to go live.

I couldn’t find any guidance on branding and the use of social media. I made logos in the style of other regional Open Knowledge logos but I’m not sure if that’s ok. Examples at:

https://twitter.com/AuOpenDataIndex
http://australia.census.okfn.org/contribute/
In reusing some of the excellent content on the Global site for my FAQ pages, I noticed that the terms used between the Global and Local census are inconsistent:

In the Global Index it shows Contributors are, “Reviewers” and “Submitters”.
In the Local Census it shows Contributors are, “Editors” and “With submissions from:”.
Can I suggest that either “Reviewers” or “Editors” is used, but not both. This would make it easier to re-use content across sites.

I’ve had a number of challenges with the Questions sheet and trying to fixed them by making my own. I used HTML instead of Markdown in the questions - This doesn’t work successfully across all parts of the site.

I know creating a separate question sheet is strongly discouraged but I would like to make some changes to the questions:

Rewording questions to be more concise.
Rewording questions to be more local e.g. In Australia, a regions is called a “state” or “territory”.
Reorder questions to reflect order and grouping of questions in excellent explanation about scoring at http://index.okfn.org/methodology/
and fix the bugs below…
I have a number of remaining bugs in the site, http://australia.census.okfn.org/FAQ#improve 

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to resolve them (Ideally before 20 Feb so the site is ready for Open Data Day when I will hopefully have volunteers starting to complete submissions).

Once again, thank you for providing this resource and I would appreciate any guidance.

Thanks 

Stephen Gates
stephen.gates at me.com


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