Find good data sources

Web search engines are a natural first go to point in order to identify data sets, or leads that will point to data sources that might not be published.

There are specialised data catalogue engines that might list data sources relevant to a particular industry or sector (such as the Data Catalogs site) to specific countries or cities (such as the UK or US national open data portals) or sources tailored to specific professionals (Investigative Dashboard for investigative journalists, or Academic Journals for researchers).

Also some influence mapping projects in this toolbox have data available for export. These might be good sources for your work.

You can also learn more about finding data for your project in this guides and resources:

• Data Journalism Handbook : Has tips on advanced web searches, data sites and services.
• Responsible Data Handbook : Has advice on how to evaluate external data source and be aware of biases and gaps.
• Data Patterns: Focuses on how you can extract data from web sites and web services.

Have you applied or developed a practice that you would like to share with the influence mapping community? Edit this post on Github!