IATI TAG 2017

This session is the first face-to-face meet up for the emerging IATI Developers and Tool builders community group.  The group had a well attended online call a couple weeks ago (with around 15 participants from 5+ organisations) - each sharing updates on tools that they are working on and other developments that are in the pipeline.  The group also shared news and updates which may be relevant to the technical community.

During that session it would be good to discuss the future of this group and how we would like to work together to keep informed, support each other and support development of the IATI tool and development ecosystems. This could take a number of formats and all ideas are welcome...

Any interested party is welcome to join us (either for this session or as part of the ongoing group), although be aware that some conversations may be of a technical nature!

Suitable for all levels, non-technical: anyone involved in humanitarian activities is strongly encouraged to attend.

This session will introduce three major humanitarian topics for IATI. The goal of the session is to set the scene for how IATI is being (or should be) operationalised amongst humanitarian actors, abd to give people high-level context for the more detailed humanitarian discussions later in the TAG.

1. The Grand Bargain and the World Humanitarian Summit
   What is the Grand Bargain? What does it mean for the IATI ecosystem? Who are the major players (including DI)? How’s it different from donor and agency transparency?

2. The Financial Tracking Service (FTS) and humanitarian cash flows
   What is FTS? Why do organisations report their humanitarian activities through an intermediary? How does the FTS humanitarian mandate extend beyond transparency, and how can IATI support that? What is FTS’s role in the Grand Bargain?

3. The Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) and field reporting
   What is HXL, and who are the target users? How does it overlap with IATI? What kind of HXL reporting from the field can feed into the IATI ecosystem, and into FTS?

Aid and Contracting Data: Same or Different?

In this session we will explore the opportunities for connections between the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS)

Both of these standards share many characteristics in approach and design, yet differ in key aspects.  Taking this into account, we will work through three examples of how IATI and OCDS data can be utilised to enable increased transparency and accountability opportunities.

This session will mark the publication of a draft paper, providing a chance for IATI TAG members to discuss opportunities and actions.

This session is designed to communicate how the IATI Technical Team plans to best offer useful functionality to publishers and users of IATI data.

The first part of this session will outline the long and short term plans for each of the 15+ public tools and websites that we currently maintain.  This will be based on our recent post on the IATI Discussion forums.

Thereafter, we will facilitate discussion and feedback on the direction of future tools, looking at:

• What functionality should we definitely keep?

• What should be improved?

• What should be added?

The Dutch MFA was the first donor to start requiring IATI data as a means ofreporting progress on ongoing programmes. More organisations had to represent their theory of change and M&E frameworks in IATI. What are challenges they face, and approaches they take?

I want to kick off with experiences and observations based on supporting various partnerships to improve their data quality, and on learning and consultation sessions with (mainly Dutch) NGOs:

• How to work with results on lobby and advocacy: what kind of indicators to use? What about the risk to fall back to purely “output-oriented progress management”?
• How do organisations standardise their indicators? How do they divide responsibilities in a partnerships?
• How to connect results across “theory of change fault lines”: how can you work with results data of your implementing partners when they have indicators that do not match your own?
• What about confidential results? And how to link to other data sets used as evidence?

We can do a lot with the standard: perhaps we need to develop guidelines similar to those of the Dutch MFA on how to represent for instance core funding, or partnerships, to create a common practice around results.

How do others work with results data right now? Let's share experiences, approaches, and lessons learned!

Suitable for financial and technical audiences, those with policy and information modeling interest

Unlike in the development world, financial and project reporting is already deeply embedded in humanitarian planning and operations, far beyond a desire for transparency. OCHA’s Financial Tracking Service (FTS) has a mandate to coordinate funding and project information from UN agencies, iNGOs, and implementing partners, and to trace the flow of funding throughout the sector.

While IATI’s current traceability support meets many of the humanitarian sector’s needs, there are some special cases that are either unsupported or awkward fits with the current IATI model, including the following:

• How can IATI trace funding provided to an organisation that hasn’t been allocated to programmes, projects, or activities yet (other than by creating pseudo-activities)? For example, if DFID gives $1m to UNICEF for general programming, then UNICEF allocates that to its country offices, how do we represent those steps?

• How can we show the relationship among activities that are aligned differently? For example, an organisation might divide its budget among overhead, implementation, etc., but also need to report based on individual activities, taking some money from each item for each activity. Current related-activity support may not be able to represent that situation elegantly.

• How can IATI reporting align with strategic reporting frameworks in the humanitarian sector, based on the annual inter-agency, cross-sector Humanitarian Response Plans for affected countries?

The objective of the session is to determine whether there are commonalities in the reporting approaches of different organisations, or common challenges that could be addressed through joint work or guidelines.

1. helping in decision-making between different options to improve reporting
2. gaining alignment between everyone involved
3. obtaining management commitment and approval for investment in an IATI adoption project
4. understanding the qualitative and quantitative value and cost of the estimated IATI investment
5. tracking success during and after the IATI investment

This lightning talk will outline work to build a software library for common IATI functionality. This will be a reusable tool for developers and tool builders, making it easier to obtain and work with IATI datasets.

The talk will cover the what, where, when, why, how and who of the library, then provide a more detailed overview of current and future plans.

Our post on the IATI Discuss forum gives more details on the library itself: Introducing the IATI Python Library

• How can you do this best? 
• How can you make use of the standard’s fields and which information would you like to add and how? 
• How can this relate to your existing communication channels (e.g. website) and fundraising? 

The IATI Datastore was launched in 2012 although has never progressed beyond alpha status. Whilst this tool experiences some use, it frequently suffers import problems and is difficult to debug and maintain from a technical point of view. Informal usability research has shown that significant improvements are needed to make this tool useful for wider data use, particularly for non-technical users. 

D-Portal is website which offers basic search and visualisation of IATI data.  It is developed and maintained by the IATI Technical Team.