For the past decade, OpenActive has focused on making it easier for people to discover physical activities in their local area.
Activity providers share information, enabling easy integration into various solutions (activity finders, apps, platforms) without individual uploads. This is achieved by publishing activities as open data, structured according to the OpenActive standard. This ensures uniform data feeds, making aggregation simpler and cheaper for organisations.
While we previously offered basic analysis on activity availability, geographic spread, data quality, standard adherence, and publishers, these tools lacked dynamic, personalised exploration for diverse audiences.
With the initiative growing and exceeding 10 million monthly physical activities being shared, we are now enhancing how we share insights about OpenActive and its published data. This improvement aims to help the community and external stakeholders find more relevant information.
We are working on a new OpenActive Intelligence Platform, to centralise analysis and visualisation. We are seeking feedback from data publishers, aggregators, and interested organisations to shape the platform around tangible user needs and determine what insights you’d like to see.
User types and use cases
We have identified three broad user segments from these external audiences, each with varying user needs:
- The Data Publisher (Activity providers, Software systems)
Publishers and activity providers must verify their data’s accuracy, technical compliance with the standard’s latest version, and completeness. The current Data Visualiser partially meets this, but is limited to one provider and requires prior knowledge.
- The Potential Data Aggregator (Developers, Product builder)
Organisations who would like to integrate physical activity information into their solutions and know about OpenActive but are unsure of its relevance need to quickly assess if the data is worth integrating. Their primary concern is value, not technical implementation. Current tools are insufficient, offering only provider and basic geographic distribution overviews. A unified, searchable, filterable, and quality-contextualized data overview would significantly speed up their evaluation.
- The Advocate (Sporting bodies, Local Authorities, policy makers)
This user segment is interested in evidence of OpenActive’s value, growth, and coverage, especially compared to contextual data like socio-economic metrics. This currently requires time-consuming manual analysis. They need data points focused on the ecosystem’s scale and the initiative’s overall health.
Possible insights
We have identified a number of metrics that could be extracted from all aggregated data feeds. We are seeking your feedback on which of these metrics you would find most valuable, as well as any other suggestions you may have for metrics not currently on our list.
- Ecosystem scale
- Number of live opportunity items (future-dated)
- Number of data publishers/data feeds
- Number of distinct activity providers (organisations)
- Number of distinct activity types
- Breakdown of opportunity counts by type of opportunity (e.g. timed sessions vs facility slots vs places / routes).
- A tool to explore the data at a more granular level, e.g. geographic boundaries (LAs, NHS, statistical/census), activity type or other data properties included in the standard.
- Coverage
- Number of opportunities divided by population of the local area
- Number of opportunities by 10,000 population within the local authority
- % of UK local authority areas with >1,000 opportunities
- % of NHS Trust areas with >1,000 opportunities
- Distribution of opportunities by deprivation decile
- % of Sport England sports and disciplines covered
- Distribution of opportunities by level of physical activity (active/not active enough/inactive)
- Impact and product adoption:
- Number of distinct sessions / unique users engaging with the data output product
- Number of recurring users engaging with the data output product
- Number of users who progress from overview to search/filter
- % of users who progress from overview to search/filter
- Number of publishers who use the record-level tool post-publication – unique and recurring
- % of publishers who use the record-level tool post-publication
- Dashboard and report feature to export subset of product usage metrics
Get involved – we want to hear from you
If you are one of the user segments outlined above, please fill in this form with your most valuable metrics and solutions.
In the next few weeks we are also hosting research workshops with activity providers, data publishers and data aggregators for detailed feedback on user experience. If you’d like to join, indicate your interest in the form. Please share this update with anyone who might be interested in providing feedback.
Your feedback will inform the design and development of the OpenActive Data Intelligence Platform, and we will keep the community updated on the roadmap.
