A couple of weeks ago I cycled from Roscoff to Santander with three friends. What I enjoyed most was the simplicity of it. We knew roughly where we were heading, worked out the rest as we went, and didn't spend much time worrying about the details.
Community life is rarely that simple. There are lots of people, organisations, activities and opportunities around us. Finding the right ones for us isn't always as easy.
Because sometimes you know roughly what you need and want to find it, sometimes you just want to see what's available, and sometimes you don't know what you're looking for at all, but are open to discovering something useful.
So we're thinking about Made Open in three ways:
- Search: I know roughly what I need.
- Browse: Show me what's available.
- Recommendations: I didn't know this existed.
We're making some significant changes to the Made Open platform in the process, leading to a broader change in how we're thinking about navigation on Made Open. Search, browsing and recommendations (encompassing personalisation) aren't competing approaches. They help people in different situations.
In other developments...
We’ll shortly be launching our new combined stream (an everything search) on Devon Connect, Living Well Warrington and Cornwall Link. Combined stream makes it easier for people to explore what’s available without having to decide in advance whether they’re looking for an activity, an organisation or a person.
We're also making it easier to connect people, organisations, activities and interests. Imagine someone living in Lymm (Warrington) who is worried about the cost of living and happens to love board games. They shouldn't need to work out where each of those things sits in Living Well Warrington. They should be able to explore what's relevant to them and discover the connections between them.
That's an important part of where we see Made Open going.
We're not trying to build "just another directory" with more and more features bolted onto it. We're trying to make it easier for people to understand what's available in their community and find the things that are relevant to them.
Alongside this, we're continuing to invest in some of the less visible parts of the platform, including referrals, localised reporting and activity timetables. Much of this work is being shaped alongside our clients, based on what they're seeing and hearing from the communities they work with.
Ultimately, I think this is about making something quite complicated feel a little simpler.
There's an enormous amount going on in our communities. Lots of people doing good things, lots of opportunities to get involved and lots of support available. The challenge is helping people find their way through it.