New report on sharing aid information is now open for comments

Posted Mon, 21/09/2009 - 17:07 by simon

We’re pleased to announce the publication of a new report, Unlocking the potential of aid information. The report, by the Open Knowledge Foundation and aidinfo, looks at how to make information related to international development (i) legally open, (ii) technically open and (iii) easy to find.

It aims to inform the development of a IATI platform for publishing and sharing aid information. IATI is not about creating another database on aid activities, but developing standards and creating a platform that will enable existing databases – and potential new services – to access this aid information and create compelling application providing more detailed, timely, and accessible information about aid.

The idea of openness is crucial to creating this platform and achieving transparency. Information must be openly available with as few restrictions in how the information is accessed and used as possible. To this end, we need to design a technical architecture that enables information to be published and accessed in an open way.

There are three main recommendations in the report, which are as follows:

  • Recommendation 1 - Aid information should be legally open. The standard should require a core set of standard licenses for pubishing aid information under.
  • Recommendation 2 - Aid information should be technically open. The standard should require that raw data is made available in bulk (not just via an API or web interface) with any relevant schema information
  • Recommendation 3 - Aid information should be easily findable. The standard should require that aid organisations add their knowledge assets to a registry with some basic metadata describing the information.

 

Consultation documents

 

There are two documents available for open consultation

An International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Platform consultation note setting the IATI context, outlining the type of information the standard will cover and the main requirements the providers and users of aid information have from an IATI platform.

A technical consultation paper Unlocking the potential of aid information which looks at some issues around how this will be implemented licensing, data formats and the technical architecture

 

We would like your views on...

 

The IATI platform consultation note:

  • Who are the target users of an IATI platform and what are their requirements?
  • What are the requirements of an aid information platform from an information provider perspective?

The Unlocking the potential of aid information paper:

  • What is the best way to make aid information available, open and easy to find?
  • What other aspects should we consider?

Finally, any advice on where existing standards could be used or built on is very welcome, as are examples of similar initiatives that we could learn lessons from.

We are now welcoming comments on the report until Sunday 1st November 2009. To submit comments you can:

Directly annotate the documents with your comments:

Email your comments directly to simon on the adinfo team: simon(at)devinit(dot)org