Despite the increasing number of datasets available on open data platforms, there has been limited adoption and use of open data by the public. This has consequently limited the innovation and transparency impact of open data on respective economies and governments. While literature is replete with articles on barriers to open data exploitation and use; these studies are yet to examine how affordances of open data platforms could help to overcome these barriers. This perspective is important since the platform directly mediates access to open data resources and their use. We describe a study carried out as part the Route-To-PA (Route-To-PA Project, Raising Open and User-friendly Transparency Enhancing Technologies for Public Administrations, H2020 Project, http://routetopa.eu/ .) project to establish stakeholder’s perspectives on barriers to effective use of open data and the desired open data platform affordances to address these problems. Our results provide details on what kinds of data are needed by stakeholders, the features required to support their interactions and collaboration around open data and features that could enhance the understandability of datasets available on open data platform.