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Rolf Kleef

New publication: business intelligence in the aid sector

Announing a new publication: “An Information Platform for Business Intelligence in the Aid Sector based on Open Data and Documents; Integrated Access to structured and unstructured data using the document-oriented database CouchDB”, by Michiel Kuijper.

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Earlier this year, I was approached by Michiel Kuijper, who was working on his Bachelor degree at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and was looking for a project to combine Business Intelligence and text mining. Together, we started exploring how to apply this in the development aid sector.

A protocol for IATI implementation by CSOs: your comments, please!

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The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard to publish information on aid activities, and is intended to be used by (and useful for) all actors in development aid.

Interest is definitely growing and several organisations are investigating how to implement the standard. In several countries, national platforms of civil society organisations (CSOs) are engaging in discussions with their respective Ministries how to encourage and support implementation of IATI by CSOs. In the UK, DFID is even making IATI-compliant publication of data a condition for funding. Implementing IATI brings to the surface various issues that need to be addressed, some specific for CSOs.

Within IATI, a dedicated informal working group is discussing these implications for CSOs. This CSO Working Group has produced a Background Paper, attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of such issues, and to work towards ways forward.

DFID Open and Enhanced Access Policy Published at Long Last

DFID Open and Enhanced Access Policy Published at Long Last:

From November 1st, all recipients of DFID funded research must make their findings freely available.

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Under the new policy, researchers will be required to make peer-reviewed journal articles open access through one of two routes: open access publishing (gold open access) or self-archiving (green open access).

The policy actually also extends to data sets, video, audio, images, and software, and contains some interesting citations to rationalise this choice.

It also is intended to give a boost to the DFID Research 4 Development (R4D) portal.