Like many years before, I will attend FOSDEM, the biggest open source convention in the neighbourhood: up to around 8000 attendees at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a good reason to take the train down south for a weekend.
Obviously, this year it will be (more than ever before) an online event. So from the comfort of my home, I’ve assembled a list of sessions I hope to attend:
Over the last weeks, I started exploring XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Its purpose is “ to improve the accountability and transparency of business performance globally, by providing the open data exchange standard for business reporting.”
There are clear parallels with IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, the open data exchange standard for development and aid activities I have been working on.
In essence, the data collectors benefit more than the data publishers in both cases: what can we learn?
Time to get back into the habit of capturing things on my website… First up: my calendar watch list and some events.
I’ve been keeping an “Open Dev” calendar with events related to open development and online civic space (data, standards, ethics, digital rights, and so on). I’m broadening the scope a bit to include more technical events as well. It’s “Rolf’s events watch list” now.
Last week I attended the XML Prague conference: 3 days of workshops and presentations about XML technology and tools that are widely used, but mostly invisible.
Cross posting from our Data4Development news:
With the start of public testing of the new IATI Validator, we like to briefly look back at how we got here, and our vision for the future.
It’s heart-warming to get emails from people who read one of my blog posts of over a decade ago, and took the effort to write to me that their product is missing, or that they have a nice post about something too.
Quote
Could you mention it in your article as an extra and fresh resource? It will give your readers some more useful information plus it should help you get even more engagement with your post.
A win-win!
But wait, why is there an “unsubscibe” link under your message?
While I was on holidays, my colleagues wrote a little announcement at the Data4Development site to accompany the update by the IATI Secretariat about our work:
[Originally posted by Jesse Burns at the Data4Development website]
The last few months, Data4Development, especially Rolf Kleef, has been working on IATI’s new official Data Validator. In the fall, the new validator will finally launch and help organisations check the quality of their IATI publications more easily!
For completeness, I copied my post from the Data4Development site:
The State of Open Data (Davies et al., 2019)1 is an extensive report about “all things open data”. Chapter 5 deals with open data for development assistance and humanitarian action, and highlights the crucial chicken-and-egg problem we see as well:
How do you produce and publish IATI files when you have more than a handful of projects? And when the information is spread over multiple systems? We’re now offering a “ Spreadsheet to IATI service ” to help you with that.
In 2016, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs introduced public IATI data as a replacement for quarterly progress reports for their grantees1, and so dozen of (mainly Dutch) organisations have started integrating IATI into their internal management information processes, and worked on ways to include the results of their projects in the data they publish.