An organisation website is its main public image or at least this is what we believe in at Open Knowledge International. For a while now, our website has needed design attention and update of content. We have therefore decided to revamp our website and give it some new look and features.
Our primary thinking behind our site is how to make the work and the people of Open Knowledge International more relatable. How can we take complex terms like open data and civic tech and make them something that anyone can relate to? Also, we wanted to see how the OKI team can use the website to connect and learn more about one another. Also, we wanted the site to reflect our how we are working towards our mission, to make “A world where knowledge create power to the many, not the few.” We highlighted our projects and how they strive towards that goal.
Our work on the site is not done, and probably will always be a work in progress. We believe in “release fast, release often” approach, and hope that you can give us feedback about the website, as well as help us to find bugs (although we tried to catch them all in advance!). Like all of our work, you can get the source code for the website here, and use it for your work if you see something that you like.
So what did we do?
A new homepage – We believe that people are in the focus of our work and we tried to reflect it on our homepage. Here you can see highlights of our work, latest projects and navigate to sections that explain to you who we are and what we are doing.
Project page – For the last two years, the OKI website didn’t have a project page. Since our projects are the core of our work, we added a project page where you can see all of our past project and all the projects that we are currently working on.
Network Guidelines – We move our network guidelines from a google doc to the website so it will be easier to find them.
New page templates – We gave our general pages a new look and improved the navigation on the site.
A new team page – We are very proud of our diverse and global team, but we wanted to make our team page a bit more than that. As a remote team, our office is our “Slack” channel (yes, yes, we don’t have a physical office!). Working in the virtual space has a lot of advantages, but it is very hard to get to know your teammates on a closer level. We, therefore, decided to use both our website and Slack to create a feature that will allow both the team and you, the users, to get to know team members better. OKI team members can update their team member page status by updating Slack in 5 categories – reading, eating, listening, working and location. This way you can know in real time where are we and what are we doing. It already provoked some excellent conversations in within our staff, and I hope it will make you closer to us as well.
What are we planning to do next?
Network page – we want to give the network page a new look so it will be easier to understand who is part of the OKI network and what different parts of the network are doing. The content there is up to date, and we will keep updating it.
Research – During the years we have done a lot of research in OKI. We want to give it a dedicated place on the site (in the meanwhile, you can find our work on our research repository).
Funding – We would like to improve our funding page and give you more information about or sources of financing. We are now examining what will be the best way to do so.
Press page – The current page has outdated content. Sierra Williams, our incoming Communication Manager, will update this page and will lead the future work on the whole website.
Let us know what you think about our site by leaving some feedback about it on our forum.
360Giving Data Lab and Learning Manager, ex OKF International Community Coordinator
