New look for the open data index (local and global!)

Hello all,

As part of our preparations for this year’s Global Open Data Index, we are making some improvements for the Index website. These changes are also affecting the local index censuses, but we believe it is a good and necessary change that are needed.

This round of changes is in the index homepage view. In the last version, the homepage showed the index score of each dataset and in the rank of a place as a whole. However, the page didn’t show how old our those submissions are, or if there is a submission that needs to be reviewed. In this version, we added indicators about the age of the data and if a review if needed to each dataset in every place.

The design of the page is not complete, but it will be finalized and upgraded in the next couple of weeks by our talented @sam. In the meanwhile, please use this page to any questions or feedback on this topic.

@Stephen @hackyourcity

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@Mor I think we also need to revamp the layout and the content of the global and local open data censuses to reflect the new name and brand of the Open Knowledge. You can spot many places saying “Open Knowledge Foundation” not “Open Knowledge” and the old logo. It seems a bit outdated. Are you guys also working on this?

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Yes @jgkim, we will work on this as well.

BTW - local census can change the logo themselves through the admin spreadsheet.

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Specifically add a row with the value for navbar_logo set to,

 <a href="http://okfn.org/" title="" target="_blank"><img src="//assets.okfn.org/p/okfn/img/okfn-logo-landscape-black-s.png" alt="Open Knowledge logo" /></a>

We also need to consider implementing a responsive design to support viewing on mobile devices. On my iPad some census don’t render correctly e.g.

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Well that was sneaky. The census has a new look…

We now have little symbols showing that a review is needed…

I like it! Did you notice the other changes? I spotted two others.

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Hello all,

A quick update - We push the visual change into the index now. I think it looks a lot better.
Current changes include:

  1. Bars are gone and instead we have colorful rectangles.
  2. When hovering on a rectangle, a tooltip describes the whole dataset.
  3. The rectangles size changes according to the number of datasets that are the need to be reviewed. No need to scroll to the left or the right anymore to see all the dataset and the score.
  4. You can see the year that the dataset was updated.
  5. You can see if there is a dataset waiting for being reviewed.

Big thanks to @sam for all of his work on this!

If you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issue tracker here: Issues · okfn/opendatasurvey · GitHub

@Stephen @hackyourcity - heads up!

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As usual, @Stephen was faster than me!
I was just updating about it.

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Thanks @Mor and @sam - Great work.

You forgot to mention the floating dataset name header - very handy if your census has a large number of places…

and showing the year for the dataset entry is great…

Nice work. My only suggestion is there seems to be lots of different shades of blue and green used. Perhaps some of these can be made the same or removed.

e.g. I like the grey year (above) and perhaps grey could be used on the /dataset and /place pages…

This has been somewhat improved with the latest changes.

Good call on the year colour continuity.

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Could be just me but I liked the bar format a lot better. It seemed a lot easier to read than the flattened out version. Also, on the page I need to be able to contact the person who can create reviewers for the city I am working on.

Hi @cosnate,
The census can be configured to include a FAQ and Contribute page. It is up to the volunteers running the local or regional census to provide a contact mechanism (e.g. Twitter, Email or a local discussion forum) for requests like yours. A Support button was recently added that brings you to this forum.

That should be enough ways to get the attention of the local maintainers of the census.

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@hackyourcity Im pretty sure this can be sorted easily throguh the spreadsheet. Please have a look and let me know if its on our side?

The new design looks really good.