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.
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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.
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?