Open Data Beta, How are we doing?

Question

So I am looking at the area51 page about the Open Data Beta. We currently have 3 sections that "Needs Work". Being 2/3rds of the way through the minimum 90 day beta, is this beta in danger of being ended like the Big Data beta was(note no warning was given, the site was just announced to be closing in 2 weeks).

Is there any strategy for boosting these "needs work" categories?

Answer 1

The "needs work" areas all boil down to the size of the user base. If the number of users can be increased, this will of course increase visits/day and should see a rise in the number of questions asked.

The problem is, of course, how do we increase the number of users that visit (and return to) the site. A few suggestions are:

• share questions and answers via the "Share" link using Twitter/Facebook/etc, especially if your social network also revolves around the topic of open data, data management and so on
• make a habit of visiting the site each day, read all questions and vote whenever possible
• most importantly, go out of your way to think up good questions, and/or to research and provide good answers. Remember that it's OK to ask and answer your own question!

I think it's fair to say that Open Data will never have the kind of user base that the largest Stack Exchange sites have. The programming/stats/maths sites have an almost infinite variety of questions, whereas most Open Data questions must by their nature be quite broad in scope. Nevertheless, the best questions will float into the Hot Questions list, increasing exposure, as well as appearing higher in searches. Ultimately the key to success is to draw an increasing amount of traffic from search engines.

Answer 2

82 days in the beta and no real progress on the same indicators in the red. Without being too pessimistic I don't know if opendata will pass the stage of the beta.

Now looking at data related proposal in the area 51, there is a lot that cover at least partially topics that have raised here. For example there is

• a closed proposal Big Data, and one in definition stage
• a semantic web project in definition stage
• and more specific project like the Open Transportation Technology or Data acquisition and measurements.

I wonder if a site with a larger definition like data acquisition, processing and management will not make more sense and meet requirements to be a live website.

Answer 3

Today I was thinking maybe the site would attract more discussions if it would focus on data in a broader sense. Stackoverflow does not focus on one programming language, so why focus on one aspect of data?

Thus, open data would become one tag among tags like "data-acquisition", "data-request", "metadata", and so on.