Identifying our priorities for testing data-sharing infrastructure
What we will focus our efforts on and explore in the first instance
At Data for Action, we are part of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Insight Infrastructure project. Read more about our role in this here.
Our first step of this was the workshop we held on 13th July 2023. You can read all about what we did and what people said here. Now that we've had a chance to reflect on these discussions, we’re beginning to identify some discrete areas to explore in more detail through the next stage of the project…
In terms of the priority areas for exploration that arose during the first workshop, four things stood out to us to investigate further in relation to what insight infrastructure might look like. These things were co-identified with those who either attended the workshop or fed into our Question Bank.
Minimum viable data standards.
What is the simplest way to implement a headline ‘data standard’ that enables organisations to contribute their data alongside others in a meaningful way without onerous changes to internal processes?
Are there different ‘levels’ of standard which relate to frequency of data contribution and expectations around quality or format?
Purposeful, distributed governance.
What governance is needed at an individual organisation or one-to-one level to support data sharing and what practical support or resources could enable this?
How do charities fully participate in the governance of data platforms and products when it is their data that is being used?
The power of human interaction.
How do we connect people through ‘human infrastructure’ more regularly around common interests and opportunities, as well as how they can be supported by others?
How do charities ask for and receive high quality support around data that also contributes to the development of the wider ecosystem?
Questions as gateways.
How do we support people to adopt and develop question-centric approaches as a way into thinking about data?
How might shared questions demonstrate the value of contributing data with others?
These are not the only four things, of course.
Everything, everywhere and all at once?
As an important observation from the workshop, challenges were expressed in similar ways by the civil society organisations involved, but the things they needed in response to those challenges varied based on things like the size, type and structure of those organisations. This means we need to be aware of how to factor these into what’s next. Loosely (and imperfectly), the groups can be described as:
Small, local organisations
National organisations
Networked organisations
Funders
It’s also important to think about frequency and burden of contribution. Too often when charities are asked to contribute data, the ask is onerous for the charity to respond to, or there’s a mismatch between what funders want and what charities need to be able to do their job. It’s clear from the questions people have that there are different data needs, especially when we put these needs in terms of frequency and location. So part of the next phase will also include experimenting with what ‘minimum viability’ means for different concepts.
So, what do we do with all of this next?
These themes and exploration areas form the platform for a series of workshops and prototyping cycles in the autumn where we will all experiment with and develop possible ways to respond to them. And this will, of course, be pegged in the overarching aim of understanding the appetite and opportunities for turning collective charity data into an asset.
We will be ensuring that they include participants from a mix of the organisational types outlined above. This will be the ‘prototyping’ phase of the project and there may be opportunities to support charities and civil society organisations to try things out. We will be sharing dates for the workshops and details of how you can be involved shortly so click here to stay posted on this.
In a broader sense, how do questions help guide this work and what happens next?
As you might expect from us now, we’re keen to continue framing and linking these things to the questions people actually want to focus on and what this means they can do. During our initial workshop we asked people to rank questions in our Question Bank in order of importance. Alongside the things people identified as barriers or opportunities, these questions allow us to further explore the practical infrastructure needs and and contextualise them in the practical activities people want to be able to do with data.
Any given question potentially requires improvements in one or more of the priority areas in order to answer it, and there are multiple ways to make these improvements within each infrastructure area that we can test in the next phase of our work. We have used this approach to look at all the priority questions and begin to think through which areas of exploration they fit. You can see our first attempt at doing this here, and there are some examples at the end of this blog too.
Making some connections…
One of the principles of Data for Action is to be Open by Default, which means we share our work in progress and try to connect the dots that result from this. This often means that other opportunities present themselves that complement our work and will help to maximise the value of what we’re trying to do. Some other things we are doing that may provide cross-fertilising opportunities include:
An emerging plan with Citizens Advice to continue developing the Question Bank prototype and test it in a large, networked organisational setting alongside any other prototypes that emerge through the ‘Questions as gateways’ strand. Watch this space…
We are also concurrently working with NPC to explore the Local Needs Databank which provides clear potential to explore some of the overarching data sharing infrastructure required to support data products through the Local Needs Databank 2.0.
If you want to be kept up to date with what we’re doing, or comment on it…
Pop your details in this form.
Read our stuff on Substack.
If you’d rather have a chat, email hello@dataforaction.org.uk and we’ll sort something out.
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As a sort of appendix, here are some examples of mapping questions and priority areas to each other with a view to creating prototypes in context…
Some of our top ranked questions seem to fit neatly into our priority areas…
Question: “How do we create a framework for the simply secure way of sharing data between organisations for social impact?”
Minimum viable data standards + Purposeful, distributed governance
Other questions seem to fit across our priority areas, such as…
Question: “How many people might fall into poverty over the coming year? And over the next, say, three years - under different plausible scenarios? “
Minimum viable data standards + Purposeful, distributed governance + Human Infrastructure + Questions as Gateways
If you want to be kept up to date with what we’re doing, or comment on it…
Pop your details in this form.
Read our stuff on Substack.
If you’d rather have a chat, email hello@dataforaction.org.uk and we’ll sort something out.