Learning together: open data, open source, open design

WikiRate is excited to announce the kick-off of the ‘WikiRate Insights’ project, supported by NLnet! The project hones in on the usability of the platform to tackle some of the most crucial barriers for users when it comes to gathering, navigating and extracting WikiRate data, whilst boosting reuse of our open-source code for other purposes.

Who is NLnet?

Since 1997 NLnet foundation has been financially supporting organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It funds those with ideas to fix the internet. Check out the list of amazing initiatives here.

What can you expect?

Over the next few months, we will be releasing several open source outputs for shared learning and reuse. These will include among others:

• Improve API discoverability and accessibility: An API is an interface that allows two applications to talk to each other. They are a vital way for us to share and receive data in an automated fashion. These improvements will add functionality to profile pages so that users can easily find, generate and regenerate API keys, and access pre-populated API calls for retrieving JSON Web Tokens.
• Scope out improvements to our search function: We will define the technical specifications needed for a comprehensive search solution for WikiRate.org to incorporate search-engine-like capacities customized to help users navigate the platform.
• How-To upgrade: A reorganization of our how-to pages and inline help text to cater to the needs of distinct user groups, including updated video tutorials and step-by-step guidance.
• Code organization and documentation: Decko, the open-source platform on which WikiRate is built, organizes code into libraries called mods. For more Decko sites to make use of these mods, they need to be (a) well documented, (b) well packaged (as Ruby “gems”), and © well tested outside of a WikiRate context. Ultimately this will make it much easier for WikiRate.org and other Decko sites to create, update, and share code.
• Company categorization: A high-level company categorization scheme (reflecting the different value chain positions of companies like ‘investor’, ‘brand’, ‘manufacturer’) that organizes at least 98% of WikiRate’s 55K companies into one of these categories, and the prominent integration of these company categories into filtering and visualizations.

In support of this project WikiRate will be bringing a UX/UI designer onto the team. Interested? Check out the job listing here.

Would you like to receive updates? Join our Newsletter or stay tuned for project updates and outputs here.