Improving open data feature on Decidim

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Since the early days, Decidim was shipped with an open data functionality.

However, the provided files can be somewhat scary for citizens/organizations that want to work on such data:

• column titles are directly extracted from database, and can be obscure for non-tech people. As instance, columns are named following their database column title, which is not relevant for non-english platforms
• data are provided with all-locale sub-columns. As instance, if there’s 4 different languages for the platform, there will be 4 columns, with a single one filled, the one in which the object was written (by object I mean the comment or proposal body)
• many organizations may have an external tool to organize their open data sets. They would like to have the opportunity to retrieve the data automatically from these platforms.

Describe the solution you'd like

The solution is two-fold:

• Make the exportable open data CSV files more extensive and qualitative, concretely:
• having a conventional naming of the columns that are more talkative : instead of proposal_title->>'fr, having Title of proposal (fr)
• Allow Decidim Open Data to connect directly to popular open data services via an URL. Concretely, it means making available for a user (probably an admin, in order to reduce exposure) the possibility to retrieve open data dataframes from a URL.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Doing it through with an external data analysis tool like Metabase, which we use at Open Source Politics on a considerable chunk of instances. However, this alternative requires the usage of Metabase, and we think this upgrade is important enough to be integrated into the core, so we don’t want to do it via Metabase.

Additional context

No

Does this issue could impact on users private data?

No

Funded by
Partially funded by Open Source Politics clients, but dependant on the willingness of other’s to co-finance as well (let me know if you wish to chip in).