Discussion

[Added] Change the guidance on XI-IATI- organisation identifiers

Rolf Kleef
Rolf Kleef • 25 October 2016
5 comments

The guidance on organisation registration agencies says for XM-IATI (emphasis mine):

XI-IATI is a list of organisation identifiers that is maintained by the IATI Secretariat. Any publisher may apply to the IATI Technical Team for an identifier to be generated.

And so we see requests starting to come in: Solidaridad, NSO

The “may apply” sentence suggests that IATI will hand out organisation identifiers in the XI-IATI namespace to anyone who asks. I think that is a really bad idea. I propose to change it to “In exceptional cases, a publisher may be assigned an identifier by the IATI Technical Team.” (This is in line with Bill’s comment that XI-IATI is a last resort.)

The Secretariat should add more registration agencies, for instance with the https://identify-org.net/codelist/ project and using the Wikipedia list of company registers.

Comments (5)

Wendy Rogers
Wendy Rogers • 7 years ago

Thanks for raising Rolf Kleef and I thought it would be useful if I clarified the processes that the IATI Technical Team follow to allocate an XI-IATI prefix.

Generally, we are initially approached by new publishers who are seeking our advice as to what IATI organisation identifier they should use rather than for use of the XI-IATI prefix directly but the actions we take are the same. In either case, we do always initiate a dialogue with the publisher to try to determine if they are actually already registered with a recognised government or other suitable registration authority. If they are and we do not have the identified registration agency listed on the Organisation Registration Agency codelist then we will first add the registration agency so that the publisher can use their pre-existing code. As a result, we do only authorise the use of the XI-IATI code when all investigations have been exhausted and no valid or appropriate existing registration agency can be found. Also as Bill Anderson had mentioned we do have to be guided by the publisher as to what is appropriate for their organisation to use. However, I do agree that we should amend the definition to state that the prefix will only be allocated in ‘exceptional’ circumstances.

Also with regard to adding more registration agencies this is certainly something that we would want to do and we have for a long time had a work package on our books to do just that. However, it has unfortunately never as yet quite reached the required priority for us to schedule it as part of our active work plans although I would hope that as we are planning to increase the capacity of the IATI Technical Team soon this might finally be something that we can undertake?

Wendy Rogers
Wendy Rogers • 7 years ago

Just to add that as the Organisation Registration Agency codelist is a non-embedded codelist we can update the XI-IATI description at any time and outside of the Standard Upgrade process. Therefore I have moved this post from the Standard Management -> Modifications, Additions, Improvements Discuss category to Standard Management -> Non Embedded Codelist Amendments

Wendy Rogers
Wendy Rogers • 7 years ago

As recommended above we will change the line in the first paragraph of the IATI Organisation Identifier codelist from “Any publisher may apply to the IATI Technical Team for an identifier to be generated.” to "If a bona fide organisation is not registered with any recognised or appropriate registration agency they should contact the IATI Technical Team who will exceptionally allocate an organisation identifier using the XI-IATI prefix.

Please log in or sign up to comment.