At the end of IODC16, Roderick Besseling of Cordaid asked me a simple question: hurricane Matthew has hit Haiti, with well over 800 casualties reported already. Can we see in the IATI data which humanitarian responses have been started? Can we make that data available on HDX, the Humanitarian Data Exchange?
Sure, I thought, with the data stores and interfaces available, that should be possible, right? It turns out to be “more complicated”.
Yesterday I attended the first Accountability Hack in The Netherlands, at the Court of Audit in The Hague. With a bit more than a week to go before the official publication of the government budget of 2017 (already leaked to the press the day before the #AccHack), and an election year coming up, it’s a great time to have a go at using the government’s open data to see if we can find out how the money is actually spent.
Today I had the privilege to present at the “Big and Open Data for International Development Workshop” at the Centre for Development Informatics of the University of Manchester. In my abstract, I anticipated deep research into traceability of activities in IATI data. We’ve certainly made great strides, and, as one participant of our IATI Learning Workshop of last week remarked, the level of discussion on IATI is high, and although there still are things to fix in today’s data, a lot of it is fine-tuning. So I made a pitch for IATI as a possible field of research.
By now, most of the have published their first data sets in the IATI Standard. This is the start of mandatory publishing of data to replace written progress reports, and, as the Partnership programmes are also just starting up, allows everyone to first focus on traceability. The provide details and examples on how to create proper links between activities of your organisation and those of others.
Publishing data in the IATI format can help organisations and their stakeholders get a better grip on the quality of their information and on their impact. Organisations in a Strategic Partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to publish their first data sets before May 1st.
How did the process go, and what insights and learning points did it bring?
I’m some two months into exploring traceability in IATI data, spending free hours (days…) on developing tools to do more. In April, the Strategic Partnerships funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs are expected to publish their first data, so that’s a good chance to see how well they managed to tie all their activities together.
Dozens of new organisations are getting ready to publish IATI data: the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs made it a requirement for the grantees in the strategic partnerships programme on lobby and advocacy that started this year.
The Ministry has published their guidelines on how to create a useful IATI data set, and part of those guidelines (chapter 3) is an overview of how to represent the structure of funding and activities.
I’m helping organisations get their data in order, and so I was looking for an easy way to see the structure of activities in their data. Browsing through XML data only gets you so far…
A while ago I bought a new laptop, and it has a mini DisplayPort to connect to a monitor. The mini DisplayPort rose to fame thanks to Apple users: when doing a presentation they always ask “does anyone have a spare adapter so I can connect to the projector?”.
( image Aurélien Selle, via Wikipedia )
I’m one of those people now: my Dell laptop (with factory-installed Ubuntu!) has a mini DisplayPort. When I ordered, I could add an adapter, to connect to my VGA monitor. But why pay around €35 for an adapter when I saw them elsewhere for more like €15. With no apparents difference.