New IATI website main topics (+ sitemap)

Agree, Siem. Thanks for bumping.

SHOWCASE: placeholder of all IATI things outside of the official IATI realm, such as: tools, portals, websites, documentation, training material, etc.etc.

What do you think the best way to source this detail is? Sitemap may be the last step, but something like a Google Doc to list out the content?

We could let the onus rest of the owners/creators of this content to add it to the list (which would be slower/require more prodding), or we could let the community point to everything that we know about (this could be quicker/more comprehensive - in fact, there’s some other recent threads/Google Docs that do a nice job of listing out things like CSV2IATI-esque tools.)

Buuuuut I’m slightly worried about expectation setting, i.e. “I saw this on the IATI site, I clicked through the ‘now leaving aidtransparency.net’ message without reading, and now I want organization X to respond to my request for support or question about their stuff, and if they don’t do a sufficient job, I’ll be sad and blame IATI.”

…but to be clear, I think we should do this, we just need to clear it with the orgs/tools we list.

SUPPLIERS: placeholder of IATI specific suppliers: advocates, trainers, companies, etc.etc.

This seems less complex (who doesn’t want free advertising?), but probably should be the duty of the providers themselves to advertise their own services, i.e. I can flag ODS as a consultant in a Google Doc, but they would need to spell out what services they do/don’t want to advertise.

Oh, and (forgive our website, it’s going to be updated/upgraded soon) at the bottom of this page there’s an IATI Data Tool Inventory that I think Laia or someone else put together a year or two ago. So there’s a headstart on a list, although some of that is official IATI stuff.

Can we be clear that there are currently two main IATI websites that provide contextual information (I’m leaving the Registry and Discuss aside for now, as I dont think they are to be “rewritten”):

• aidtransparency.net - a Wordpress with pages, news and documents
• iatistandard.org - which is a static site, generated out of the documentation controlled in various GitHub repositories

I’m unclear as to what the proposal for a “new website” is. Is it to replace the two, or revamp the former? I think we have to be very careful about the schema-generated documentation, Whilst that might not be the most “front-facing” of content, it’s very useful for those of us who are in the standard most days.

A good (imho) setup to look at is Open Contracting: https://www.open-contracting.org/ - in terms of how narrative content (news case studies) is the main offer but the documentation for the standard is clearly signposted, leading to a static site: http://standard.open-contracting.org/latest/en/ (Ben Webb - IATI Secretariat and others can explain the code behind that, but that’s probably too much of a tangent for this thread)

iatistandard.org - which is a static site, generated out of the documentation controlled in various GitHub repositories

We regard the reference section of iatistandard.org as dynamic, not static as it version specific and generated directly from the schema.

We regard the guidance section of iatistandard.org as static as it is not version specific.

Phase One of “new” is to rationalise and revamp aidtransparency.net and the static portion of iatistandard.org

[Inner conflict: contribute to the bystander effect and possibly witness a good idea wither on the Discuss vine, OR take action, start a Google Doc, and risk being seen as the point person for another thing…oh alright then!]

Go nuts, kids!

Braindump of IATI Resources (Google Doc)

If your thing is not included there, it’s because I ran out of time. By the way, half of what I just added to that doc already exists here: http://iatistandard.org/202/guidance/how-to-publish/select-publishing-tool/ - but included anyway for comprehensiveness’ sake.

We regard the reference section of iatistandard.org as dynamic, not static as it version specific and generated directly from the schema.

We regard the guidance section of iatistandard.org as static as it is not version specific.

Just want to flag this, as I think some people in the community have a different point of view:

• iatistandard.org is generated as a static site - a series of flat files
• aidtransparency.net is maintained as a dynamic offering - a wordpress database that stores content

Bill Anderson talks about how the content is governed, which is a good point. However, the term “static site generation” is very common around our circles. I dont (honest!) want to get into semantics, but just flagging that the terms static vs dynamic could have half the TAG thinking one thing, the other half something else! It might be important to clarify future directions therefore.

There’s a really useful description of static sites on this blog. Alongside a metaphor, it also highlights some of the pros and cons of the approach, which I think are evident to us already.

We’ve also tried to document the static site approach in our open data standards lab project.

Yes please. I do not want to become the owner and sole editor of yet another Google Doc (which I have a bad habit of doing;-) It’s open to all, please feel free to edit and move around!

It’s open to all, please feel free to edit and move around!

Took that injunction quite literally and moved things around to create a specific data use section, as almost everything so far was about publishing.

Since anyone using IATI data quickly runs into problems understanding the data itself (What on earth does “post-completion” mean? What are policy markers?), I added a “Reference” part (probably not the best title though); it should point to the actual owners of the various definitions, codelists etc, in particular the DAC.

Hi Bill Anderson just to confirm – are we talking about merging aidtransparency.net and iatistandard.org ?

Eventually all sites and services will be merged but yes, phase one involves aidtransparency.net and iatistandard,org.

We are currently working with a UX agency - pulling from the user research done over the past year (which was started at the TAG). An initial prototype will be shared for consultation at the end of March, a beta at the end of April, and live by the MA in June.

We are seeking volunteers from all corners of the IATI community to assist in user testing. Phone lines are open …

Great to hear, thanks for the clarification / update Bill. Happy to help contribute how I can!