Making Open | Innovation Program & Design Kit
Helping people who want to make the world a better place.
Making Open is for community advocates and government and industry leaders who want to learn about and apply new approaches to improving transparency, access to information, and transform systems.
It started out as a content library and design kit for people who don’t have time or resources to simply explain and advocate for data initiatives and the policies and systems that can be put in place to make positive change.
Making Open has now evolved into a design innovation program to help organisations improve their data, governance systems, communications, and community engagement.
Workshops include ways to improve data and connect systems, increase transparency and improve community participation in decision making in government funding, contracting, land use development, natural resources and energy projects, and climate change planning.
We’ve shared the Making Open explainers and storytelling guides with over 100 advocates and government changemakers who participated in our research and content development phase.
We are seeking funding to launch the kit, making it accessible to everyone. In the future people will be able to add their own stories, case studies, and design assets representing different countries, cultures and contexts, and connect with others who can help.
To help us get the kit online, you can make a tax deductible donation via the Australian Cultural Fund.
If you are interested in a content design partnership please get in touch with Mel.
make paths | pathway design tool
Helping people demystify complexity and follow processes.
Make Paths is a content design and collaboration tool to help people design beautiful, engaging, interactive, animated, and printable pathways of processes, policies, plans, and project life cycles.
Visual pathways help people navigate complex processes and can show a journey in the past, present or future.
We’ve created pathways for legislation and regulations, exploration and mining licence applications, environmental laws, consultation processes, and procurement and contracting pathways.
Pathways have proven to be a powerful communications, educational, and engagement tool. We design workshops to bring people together to collectively interpret and improve laws or processes.
If you are interested in a workshop, content partnership or becoming a funder, please get in touch.
make platform | reporting and engagement tool
Make data meaningful and connected to improve transparency and community engagement.
Workshops, training and engagement platform combining data, storytelling, design to help governments and companies publish and connect data about programs, mining, oil, gas, natural resources, renewable energy, infrastructure projects, land uses and climate change plans.
Most government data platforms are technical and lack contextual content. Open data is out there but not in formats accessible for non technical people. Platforms publish information but rarely have feedback loops. We’ve identified a global need to help inform and engage communities and industry, and deliver transparency commitments.
In 2014 we created a revolutionary community engagement tool, Common Ground, in collaboration with the NSW Government. You can read more about the background to this project and our participatory design approach from in this article.
Our work has been internationally recognised as best practice and inspired other governments. Many people have approached us with a similar problem - wanting a way to connect and present data and policies in a community friendly way.
Over the last few years we've been in research and development to further this work by exploring different uses, themes, audiences, ways to connect more relevant data and create content assets to drive citizen engagement, often in a fast paced deadline driven environment.
Our vision is to use our experiences and collaborate with governments, companies and communities across the world to create a reusable open source platform for everyone and anyone who wants to connect and share data, publish useful contextual content, and enable public participation in decision making.
We're looking for content and funding partners, if you are interested, we’d love to hear from you.