An idea has surfaced to also host a Humanitarian Sprint on the OKFest fringe event.
This could take the shape of:
- Working with some existing 3W field datasets (OCHA and clusters/NGOs), looking as a group at the lalignments and
misalignments between that and IATI to consider recommendations for both IATI and HXL. - Looking at the draft HXL standards and their alignment with IATI.
- Reviewing any existing huimanitarian work going on with FTS.
We’ll continue to look into this as an opportunity and gather idea here.
If you’re interested in hearing more or contributing to/joining this session, please post your thoughts below.
Talking about humanitarian data brings up the bottom-up discussion that’s relevant for development data as well. Right now most (not all) IATI data is top-down — we’re getting the cooked, agreed-upon, internally-consistent(ish) data from the various HQs. We get something similar for IATI by going through FTS.
In humanitarian 3W data, though, there’s a big emphasis on the raw, imperfect, inconsistent (but fast-delivered) bottom-up data, e.g. what do NGOs actually report that they’re doing on the ground, vs what donors think they’re doing. This data is rarely financial — it’s more for forming a common operational picture than for tracking money — but it includes many other aspects of an IATI activity report. The challenges dealing with this data in the humanitarian world will be similar to the challenges we’ll face dealing with it in the development world.
I’ve been analysing humanitarian 3W templates and spreadsheets, and I’ve found that these are the top 11 fields so far (including the corresponding HXL codes):
As I mentioned on the HXL mailing list, this suggests that a minimum viable humanitarian 3W report could include just three fields: adm1, adm2, and sector. In fact, that is enough to draw a basic activity map (or one for each sector), and generally, to form a very high-level common operational picture of a crisis response.
So when we come back to the IATI side, it’s worth asking whether the “T” for transparency always stands for financial transparency, or whether it could stand for other types (e.g. transparency about what the aid community is doing and where). Fewer than 25% of the samples I’ve seen contain budget information on an activity level, and none show expenditures. Is IATI’s tent big enough to include raw field activity data like this?
One more subtopic: how should people and orgs doing IATI monitoring/scorecards (like PublishWhatYouFund) weight data completeness for humanitarian report? Some of the fields that are important for development aren’t important for humanitarian, and vice-versa. Perhaps we could work up a proposal as part of the sprint.