Visualization Literacy

As part of the progressive erosion of RCUK’s initially excellent open-access policy, barrier-based publishers somehow got them to accept their “open-access decision tree“, which you can now find on page 7 of the toothless current version of the policy. The purpose of this manoeuvre by the Publishers Association is to lend an air of legitimacy to continuing to deny citizens access to the research they funded for up to 24 months after publication. It’s to the House of Lords’ enduring shamethat they swallowed this, when they must know that there is no justification for embargoes of any length.

More recently, as commentary on the Australian Research Council’s open access policy, the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) published its own rather better decision tree.

But it still doesn’t go nearly far enough. So here is the SV-POW! decision tree, which we encourage you to print out and hang on your office door.

Learn how to use charts and graphs to communicate your message clearly and effectively.

Upon discussions with many in the Open Data community, an initial analysis of their own project needs and preliminary research on existing public resources, the Web Foundation believes that the community at large would benefit from a central entry point to Open Data related resources at a neutral source, the Open Data Directory (ODD).

This ODD will help to produce clear evidence base of the benefits of Open Data holding a wide range of resources types such as: use cases, case studies, stories and anecdotes, methodologies, strategies, business cases, papers, reports, articles, blog posts, training materials, slide sets, software tools, applications and visualisations. The directory will not focus on compiling a vast number of references; instead it will give priority to high-quality references endorsed by the Open Data community.

As a first step towards the ODD, we are making public the Use Cases and Requirements Draft in order to get comments from the wide community, not only on the content of the document itself but also on the overall idea of the ODD. We’ve published it as a Google Document with comments turned on. This is a tool for you, the Open Data community, so suggestions, feedback and comments are very welcome.

Après deux ans d’existence, data.gouv.fr, le portail du gouvernement dédié à l’open data, va faire faire peau neuve. La plate-forme entend dépasser le stade de simple répertoire de données publiques pour devenir un outil collaboratif ouvert.