Overview
A focus page will be a saved search (of any kind), with a custom title, focus visualisation, and simple URL—on the technical and design side, nearly all the functionality to support focus pages already exists in HDX, so the effort would be mainly on the data team and communications sides.
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Live mockup (dummy data for key figures and map): https://feature-data.humdata.org/crisis/malaria
About the name
The Latin word focus means fireplace (becomes Italian fuoco and Spanish fuego). The modern English usage of focus comes from the idea of people gathering around a fireplace or hearth, the same way we'd like humanitarians to gather around our "focus" pages.
What we have now
For listing datasets, we already have the functional equivalent of focus pages on HDX via tags and related searches, e.g. https://data.humdata.org/search?tags=malaria
Unfortunately, our current tag pages have three significant problems:
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While we have a strong statement of interest from one partner, we don’t know how big the demand would be for this feature. (Hypothesis: more popular among donor and HQ policy specialists than in the field)
Twitter (the industry leaders in tag-based topics) has a special URL syntax for hashtags — https://twitter.com/hashtag/malaria — but they don’t provide custom headings or text; instead, they just use their normal search-result layout (it’s exactly the same page layout as https://twitter.com/search?q=%23malaria )
CJ has mentioned that a short experiment with a Topics (plural) page in the past did not generate a lot of interest (though that is somewhat different from having a landing page for individual focus topics).
Creating a custom focus page creates the expectation that the data team will work to solicit up-to-date data for it.