If you didn’t see, we are changing the methodology of the Global Open Data Index - Introducing The New Proposed Global Open Data Index Survey
this methodology change will affect the local census instances and the survey that you used so far will be changed to the Global Index survey.
What does it means?
You will not be able to compare between years anymore. Changing of the methodology means that they can not be compared.
If you collected data for this year, or thinking of collecting, you should either do it before August, or after September to make sure all is in the same format.
I am therefore encourage you all to look at the proposed new survey and comment on it and how it can affect your local efforts!
As a publisher, I want to explain to contributors why their entries/scores have changed mid-way through the year instead so that contributors have confidence to keep contributing and have “faith” in the scoring method.
Providing confidence in the census is very important as some governments have used their current ranking to partially justify improvements in their open data practice.
As a viewer of the census I want to see how ranking has changed over time so that I can tell a story about progress. Ideally the story doesn’t include, “this drop/spike here is when the method changed in mid-2016”.
As a contributor I don’t want my contributions to be made incomplete due to changes so that my existing contributions are included in the scores.
I would appreciate the user stories being written for the proposed changes. At present, I am not convinced of the value in making the proposed changes. Perhaps the user stories will explain what new insights you’re seeking or how problems from past census will be resolved.
So we can still use the City Census before August, anyway? I have two guys that will hopefully help with the Census starting from the 4th of July. @Mor
My idea is that we should keep the census as it is, until the end of the year. My concern is that with the current City Census we should keep the list in alphabetical order. The ranking that is visually generated during the data entry process causes a bit of confusion at least in the Italian case, as you know from our last conversation @Mor
@Stephen - can you elaborate on this?
As a contributor I don’t want my contributions to be made incomplete due to changes so that my existing contributions are included in the scores.
I don’t see how can include these in the new survey (meaning push them to the new survey) if we are changing some of the questions. Why are we afraid to go from blank in the new version? Users can always refer back to the old data manually… (or am I missing something?)
there is a good reason to change the survey questions
and the benefits from the changes outweighs the impact of scores being reset mid-way through the year
and this change is clearly communicated to everyone involved.
At present, I can’t find:
where the reasons for the changes have been documented
any identified benefits from the changes
and, I’ll assume, local and regional census admins will need to update their FAQ, Tutorial, and Contribute pages to reflect the change.
If a change like this is to be implemented, then it should be done at the start of the census year.
Regarding the user story, If you change the questions, then my current contribution is no longer counted towards the score. That means I need to made another contribution and that’s annoying. As a user, I don’t what to be annoyed so that I’ll think about making another contribution.
So that’s raises another question and development-
The Australian census is a real time score, right? Other local censuses expressed the idea of not making the local census a live score throughout the year, but like the global open data Index, to move to a site where the results are fixed. Did you ever considered this scenario for Australia? If we can provide a solution for the presentation of the census results, will that help?
I am also a bit confused, in the blog post we explain why we are changing the questions and what are the benefits. Did we missed something? Are these changes of adding findabillity to not apply for the local census?
About the update of pages - yes, but we might provide some update to the censuses (at least for the tutorial page).
NI have not considered changing the Australian census to reflect the global model. I adopted what Open Knowledge provided for all local and regional census.
Whilst the blog did talk about requirements, there is no traceability between these and the proposed changes. That’s what’s missing for me.
