Take Your First Steps With Open Data Pathway

We’re launching a new tool today called Open Data Pathway. It’s a self-assessment tool that will help you assess how well your organisation publishes and consumes open data, and identify actions for improvement.

The tool is based on the Open Data Maturity Model we have been developing in partnership with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

The maturity model is based around five themes and maturity levels. Each theme represents a broad area of operations within an organisation, and is broken down into areas of activity which can then be used to assess progress.

We’ve previously published the maturity model as a public draft. We would like to thank everyone from across central and local government, agencies and other organisations who have given feedback on the draft documents. Your contributions and ideas were extremely valuable. We’re pleased to announce that the final, first edition of the model is now available.

Open Data Pathway supports open data practitioners in carrying out a maturity assessment. Completing an assessment will create a report that scores your organisation against each activity. The report also includes practical recommendations that suggest how scores can be improved for each activity. Combined with the ability to set targets for improvement, Open Data Pathway provides a complete self-assessment tool to enable practitioners to successfully apply the maturity model to their organisation.

Open Data Pathway offers a useful complement to the Open Data Certificates. The certificates measure how effectively someone is sharing a dataset for ease of reuse. Open Data Pathway helps organisations assess how well they publish and consume open data, helping build a roadmap for their open data journey.

We are initially launching the tool as an alpha release to help us gain valuable user feedback. The beta version will launch at the end of April, 2015, and will have the functionality to support results sharing and organisation benchmarking.

Please sign up and explore the tool and let us know what you think.

This project has received funding from the Release of Data Fund. Many thanks to the Open Data User Group and Cabinet Office for their support.