Making Open
Design for transparency.
Communicate with clarity.
Share stories.
Made by advocates for advocates
Nook Studios is a company of advocates, artists, storytellers, researchers, designers, and creative civic technologists.
We are a non partisan social enterprise with a big environmental heart.
We work across many initiatives to do with social justice, environmental protection, improving access to information, integrity, natural resource governance, energy transition, infrastructure, procurement innovation, and First Nations and public participation in policy, service and project design and delivery.
“Real systems change is only possible through collective action.
It’s hard to fix or improve something if you don’t
understand how it works or what you can do.
Our aim is to take people on the information journey,
create learning pathways for those new to issues and help them collaborate with other experienced
and technical people.”
The story behind Making Open
Nook are part of the global community of ‘open’ advocates, a movement of thousands of individuals, civil society organisations, academics, people inside governments, and the private sector. We all work together to make societies better, strengthen democratic processes and create healthy information ecosystems.
We are advocates who happen to be designers - and makers.
With a background in theatre, film making and creative tech, Nook’s founder Mel has been advocating and designing open government services since 2012. She is the Chair of the Steering Committee for Publish What You Pay Australia (a global extractive industries transparency coalition) and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Network.
How did we get here
Nook has been self-funding the creation of content to explain open government, data and systems needed to improve transparency, public access to information, and public participation for years.
We received $50,000 in seed funding from the international philanthropic foundation Luminate Group to research and prototype content for financial transparency advocates in G20 countries.
Since then, Nook has invested over $200,000 to continue to engage with people from all over the world to develop and improve designs, research different topics, and collect stories, ideas on what is needed to support changemakers. Over 200 advocates have access to Making Open content deck.
We’d love your help to get everything online and scale our impact. Get in touch with Mel if you’d like to support us.
“Finding clear and understandable ways to talk about
finance transparency is really not easy.
Making Open does an excellent job.
Simple terms, short explainers, focus on
outcomes and benefits for citizens but also
for governments and companies; catchy visuals...
all the ingredients for it to be useful.”
Acknowledgements
Making Open has been a monumental effort from the Nook crew: Steven Berends, Adeel Jaffery, Sarah Grosse, Gillian Moran, May Miller-Dawkins, Mike Rossi, Tanushri Saha, and Mark Tanner.
Many thanks to the University of Technology Shopfront design students, the Kaleido crew, for their design development contributions during lock down: Adeel Jaffery, Jia Jia Koh, Tristan Miller, Noor Raad, Lauren Smith.
Thanks to our research participants: B Team, Accountability Lab, Natural Resource Governance Institute, Open Contracting Partnership, Open Government Partnership, Open Ownership, Our Democracy, Publish What You Pay, Transparency International and the many other organisations and individuals who have contributed ideas, feedback and their views on what’s needed to support the broader movement. We are extremely grateful for your enthusiasm, time and knowledge.
A big thanks to Andrew Clarke and the Luminate Group for the seed funding and our other supporters.
Mel Flanagan
Design Director