Tools and templates

As an ODI we cannot promote non-open-source applications it’s part of our philosophy of Openness and Independence.

Here are some fundamentals are guiding principles:

1. We should always promote open source and free software where applicable and appropriate. Those that provide more control over personal data and security protections. 
2. Tools and applications which are respectful of data privacy and rights - this precludes many proprietary software applications - see terms and conditions.
3. Tools and applications which do not lock users into services which they cannot afford over the longer term, or require them to loose this access upon account closures.

Sometimes we do use proprietary software and this mix is going to be around for various reasons. Where-ever possible we do try to ensure that these companies have a ‘social’ component that offers services for non-for-profits which offers the full suite without a cost. Tableau and DataWrapper do, as does Mapbox. We have previously moved away from some applications because they do not off these services - such as Carto, ArcGIS and to an extent that we still use some is because of legacy. i.e. many had free terms and then changed these policies at a later date.

• Etherpad
• Hackpad (cloud-based word processing)
• Google Drive (cloud-base spreadsheet)
• Draw.io (Flowchart/diagram-making tool. It can be connected to Google Drive, Dropbox, Device or browser)

• OpenRefine (Tutorials and documentation are availablehere)
• Workbench (Workbench is recommended workflow of data pipelines over Google spreadsheets, you can follow the tutorial here)
• DeepL

• Transifex
• Crowdin
• weblate.org

• WordPress RSS Importer (WordPress plugin)

• Webscraper.io
• wrapapi.com
• Kimono Lab.com
• Import.io

• Postman
• wrapapi.com

• Archive.is Better features and no exclusion rules for certain websites
• Archive.org

• Tor Browser Use Tor and Tor Browser to search
• DuckDuckGo
• Qwant

* IFTTT * Zapier

Visualization and infographics

• canva.com
• Chart suggestion - a thought-starter (What would you like to show? relationship, comparison, composition, or distribution?)
• Information is Beautiful (Inspirations on ideas, issues, knowledge, data — visualized!)
• Piktochart
• Infogr.am
• Datawrapper (Setting font size for title and notes is possible with html codes. The note section can be used to list multiple sources of data.)
• Flourish
• Highcharts Cloud
• Tableau Public
• CartoDB
• Timeline JS
• TimeMapper
• D3: Data Driven Documentation (JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers)
• Google Fusion Table (Fusion Tables is an experimental data visualization web application to gather, visualize, and share data tables.)
• XMind (tree diagramming, like for the taxonomy)

• VS Code
• Live Server Extension for VS Code
• Bracket Pair Colorizer Extension for VS Code
• Indenticator Extension for VS code
• JSON Prettify Extension for VS Code

• Observable Notebooks] * [[ https://colab.research.google.com| Google Colaboratory

• Amberjack
• USAblica.github.io
• Powtoon (making short animated videos)
• CamStudio (making videos by capturing on-screen activity and audio)

• Scribus Use Scribus to create reports, books and publications. Here is in depth video tutorial of scribus

Open Steps' resources and guides