Hi everyone
I’ve been taking another look at “traceability” - especially following the excellent presentation of Herman van Loon at the TAG (https://www.dropbox.com/s/rlb4hdoicvdwztb/linking%20iati%20data%20v7.pptx?dl=0 ) -
I have put some slides together: http://slides.com/opendataservices/traceability - which centre on org references, activity identifiers and transaction encoding to link data between different publishers.
In discussion with others - a point was raised about the use of the related-activity element to express links between activity data published by different organisations - especially the use of code 5 (“Third Party”: http://iatistandard.org/201/codelists/RelatedActivityType/).
Im not sure. Checking the dashboard, nobody is using this code atm:
http://dashboard.iatistandard.org/codelist/1/related-activity_@type.html
http://dashboard.iatistandard.org/codelist/2/related-activity_@type.html
Regardless - would others in the community utilise related-activity to do this? One of the drivers to this would be that the only other method to express direct links between activities is within transactions. At the participating-org level this is not possible (I’ve raised this here: http://support.iatistandard.org/entries/82377659-Add-activity-id-attribute-to-participating-org-element)
Coming back to this —> 18 months later!!
In December 2017, SJohns , Tim Davies & Tanaka Nyamadzawo and I held a workshop with several Bond members to start discussion around “IATI & Federated Organisations” (I’ll format the materials and such and post them online).
Anyway, we discussed the use of related-activity, in terms of making connections between activities. I recall Amy Silcock then saying that the IATI Technical Team were specifically advising publishers to NOT use related-activity to link between activities from other publishers. Can we confirm if this is the case?
I think this is in line with MFA guidance ( Pelle Aardema Herman van Loon ?)? If so, can anyone explain the purpose of code 5 (Third Party) on the RelatedActivityType codelist:
I think leo stolk was interested in this too!
Wouldn’t this be used by secondary publishers who assign their own Activity ID to a project that is already published by someone else? They should be reporting the Activity ID of the original publisher, would they not use this code? This is how we would avoid double-counting, isn’t it?
Could be. I’d expect the description to say that though, wouldn’t you?
Andy Lulham (magic man!) - any insight on who is using this code already? The dashboard only seems to report on 1.0x usage?
Yep – 2.0x codelist usage is also on the dashboard.
[If you scroll way down the codelists dashboard page, you get to codelists for 2.0x. I agree this could be clearer! Either via a table of contents at the top of the page, or (at least) by reordering to show 2.0x (i.e. current integer) first, and 1.0x (i.e. legacy integer) second. I’ve just sent a pull request.]
Yes you are right Steven. We do NOT use the related activity to show the links between publishers. As Yohanna Loucheur mentioned above, the relation with implementing partners is always through transactions.
The use of the related activity is in our case limited to making the link between the activity level and the programme level within an organization. The reason for this is that a lot of organisations, do not model their internal financial flows as transactions in their financial administration.
Thanks Herman van Loon
In the case of those three examples we found, who look to be under MFA requirements, would they fail your validation for (mis)using the related activity in their data? Interested to know!
Yes it will fail validation, but will not stop processing of the data. We have not implemented an automatic validation on this yet.
Thanks Herman van Loon
Amy Silcock IATI Technical Team is the advice you give on using the codelist similar?