On Friday, June 14th, I had the
opportunity to attend a technology salon on the International Aid Transparency
Initiative and international development. Among the 30 participants were
representatives from Interaction, PACT, Development Gateway, World Bank, and
others who design and implement international development projects.
For a review of Sonjara's experience migrating an existing USAID project database to IATI, check out our blog series ICT Inventory.
Most of us in the room were already familiar with IATI, but it is useful to outline what it is and why should we - as international development professionals - care
I think most people would agree that being able to find easily all the projects going on in a particular sector or country would be incredibly valuable, especially if this data is captured over time. Right now the development sector is particularly poor at capturing historical data about its projects, and IATI is one step in helping correct that issue.
Secondly, IATI at its core is about transparency, which everyone in the development community I have spoken too are pretty passionate about. We all want to share our work and make sure that we are using resources wisely.
But the final point I think is the most important. Open interoperability data will soon no longer be a nice to have but a requirement for any organization or business to run its operations effectively. Open data and IATI can force your organization to get serious about knowledge management as a tool for performance improvement.
Yep, KM - which is at the heart of open data.
Good KM systems tells you easily (aggregated, accurate, quickly)
Great KM systems tell you just as easily
The HOW in designing these KM systems revolves around your data - what format, structure, validity, completeness, accessibility, etc - all of which are also key open data questions.
For international development organizations, IATI gives a structure to your data to answer one. It also gives you an exercise to focus on the wrangling of your existing systems with a defined outcome- publishing your IATI data. The benefits to your organization - if you approach this exercise as one intended to help you improve performance across your entire firm - will be outweighed by the expense in making your data IATI compliant.
If you open it, the data will flow, mingle and expand with other data, giving you back more than you gave.
During the discussions on IATI, we talked a lot about some of the challenges in implementing it, and cost is always an issue. Many specific issues included:
The group experience was that the technology component of the exercise was actually pretty straight forward; the other elements listed above were the vast majority of the delays and challenges.
And of course, feel free to give us a call (571-297-6383 ext 503) or email me (info@sonjara.com) to talk through your needs and your questions. As you can tell, we love this stuff and love working with companies on how to make their transition to open data effective, efficient, and not (very) painful.