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…
Imagine: you’ve produced your first data file using the IATI Standard: your organisation’s activities, partner organisations, budgets and results are neatly represented in an XML file. But before you publish that file, you’d like to show it to your team and colleagues and get feedback. XML will not get them very excited.
The IATI Standard lets you publish information on your organisation’s activities and money flows. But how would you write something in IATI? The first case already showed different ways to do things. Here’s the second case, coming from an AidStream workshop with NGOs in the Partos IATI programme.
The IATI Standard lets you publish information on your organisation’s activities and money flows. But how exactly would you write something in IATI? That doesn’t always seem obvious, and certainly not for someone new to the XML standard.
This is the first of a series of sketches of situations that I encounter (or envision), with the question: can you #IATI that for me? We’ll start of simple.
Our organisation, called Us, is going to publish data in IATI. We found out that our organisation identifier is zz-us. (Not quite as we’d like to see, but the quiz is not about organisation identifiers.)
- We receive funding from Donor A. They will contribute €20,000 to us. They publish IATI data too, and we found the IATI activity identifier for their grant to us in their file: X-A-123.
- We also receive funding from Donor B. They will contribute €10,000 to our work this year.
- We run two projects, Project 1 and Project 2, each with a budget of €15,000.
Some questions:
- How do we indicate the budgets from our donors for our work?
- If we actually receive the money (€20,000) from donor A on, say, April 1st, how can we add that to our data?
Feel free to make up more information if you need it. Post your solutions as comments below. They’ll be kept hidden for the first few days, but then will be published for further discussion.
Do we all agree? Do we have different approaches? Is there a right or wrong way of doing it?
The IATI standard is meant to make it easier to exchange and compare information about activities and funding flows in development aid worldwide. But it can be useful within a (network of) organisations as well, even if you don’t feel ready to share that data with the rest of the world (yet).
Large organisations are starting to see the benefits: adapt your internal project management system so that it contains the necessary information in the right format, then export it to IATI data from there.
You then have an internal, vendor-independent format for your data, and have a choice of tools to put that data to use.
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.
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.
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.
At “Open Data for Development Camp” in Amsterdam, Marijn Rijken of the Dutch research institute TNO presented on “open data opportunities in development”. Together, we’re now drafting a research proposal to gather answers on pertinent questions around open data in development: “What are the social, organizational, technological, financial and legal effects of open development?”. It’s part of our efforts to build network as the basis for a Dutch knowledge platform.
TNO has done similar sector-wide research around open data in other sectors, and would like to take the existing research in this area a step forward. AidInfo published a cost-benefit analysis on open data, and a framework for this. The Transparency and Accountability Initiative recently published a report on introducing open data in middle income and developing countries. And we also like to include “effective use” and impacts on e.g. privacy and security, and a possible “data divide”.
We plan to look at existing literature and research, sketch a vision on what “open development in 2020” could look like, and provide a framework for a social cost-benefit analysis, and the ground work for a road map to help organisations embrace open data and “do it right” (e.g. critical success factors, activating crucial stakeholders and infomediaries).
Of course we like to hear of other research projects with recent publications or currently underway.
International Aid Transparency Initiative
The international development aid sector is starting to get on board the “open data” train. Preparing for the Open Data for Campaigning Day in Oxford in three weeks, and our own Open Data for Development Camp in Amsterdam in May, I had a look at what’s possible already.
International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI): IATI aims to make aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand
IATI has been working on a standard to exchange information about development aid projects. In February, a milestone was reached:
Agreement on aid standards confirmed: We’re happy to report that last week’s meeting of the International Aid Transparency Initiative’s (IATI) signatories and Steering Committee members resulted in agreement on the remaining items to be included in the IATI standard.
The IATI Standard: This site contains all reference materials for both publishers and users of the International Aid Transparency Initiative’s standards.
In parallel, the Open Knowledge Foundation has been building out their CKAN software to build open data registries. A registry basically is a central place to find information about sources of data around the web.
One of these registries is the IATI registry, currently containing pointers to data from the UK (DFID)
IATI Registry: The IATI Registry is a hub for international development data published by agencies, community orgranisations and partner countries in a standard, open format.
So I tried to access the data from a desktop reporting tool:
In a reply to to that tweet, Tariq Khokhar from AidInfo pointed me to their Labs site with examples of tools and techniques to use (IATI and other) information in international development aid.
The first examples look interesting, and I hope that we can explore more opportunities as part of the Open Data for Campaigning Day on 24th March in Oxford.
Come join some 40 other people for a day of hacking and plotting on open data for campaigners: using and producing data yourself!
http://opendatacampaigningcamp.eventbrite.com