Blendle is a platform to read and pay for articles in all kinds of newspapers and magazines. An “ iTunes for journalism “: deposit money in your wallet, then pay typically €0.10 to €0.29 cents for newspaper articles, sometimes up to €0.89 for magazines. A story in itself. And with plans to go international.
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.
Next week, October 9 and 10, we’ll be hosting Open Development Camp at De Balie in Amsterdam. The first question often is: “what is open development?”
Today, Oxfam Novib went public with their Atlas project browser and open data.
Various people in the Open for Change network have been working with Oxfam Novib for a while now, helping to explore the potential of “open” and to transform the organisation towards “open”. The starting point was “open data”, but Oxfam Novib didn’t focus on just the technical side of things: they wanted to embed “open” more deeply into the way they worked.
A month ago, on April 8th, I helped a group of Dutch NGOs get to grips with AidStream, as part of the Partos IATI programme. As always, it’s very informative to see unsuspecting users try to make sense of a new tool. It resulted in a list of observations, often easy fixes, that can make life a little easier or more pleasant.
That same week, the AidStream code base was published on Github, and I had a chance to participate in the team check-in, and report a bunch of these observations as issues.
We’re hardly a month later, and I’m glad to see a steady flow of notifications of issues being closed:
Last week, at the Partos event for IATI implementation by Dutch NGOs, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that publishing data in IATI format would be part of the upcoming funding regime. That immediately led to many questions on how to publish, especially with respect to results of activities.
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?
Friday last week, the ONECampaign tweeted Open for Change was nominated for an Honesty Oscar. In their own words:
The Academy Awards is a time to celebrate the best films, actors and behind-the-scenes players in Hollywood – so why not do the same for the incredible videos, infographics and songs that help fight global corruption through creativity and innovation?
ONE is teaming up with Accountability Lab for the Honesty Oscars 2014, a week-long event to honor groundbreaking people and creative that make our world more transparent and hold our governments and corporations more accountable.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard for the exchange of information on activities, budgets and results. More and more NGOs are embracing the standard as well, and in The Netherlands, civil society is actively working with IATI: