Progress as of 16 August
We are behind schedule for two reasons:
- Firstly, there have been a number of private communications questioning the content of this upgrade and requesting a postponement until after the Members' Assembly. My response to these requests has been to ask those involved to voice their concerns in public on this site. Furthermore decimal upgrade rules require consensus for items to be included and it is thus the prerogative of any IATI member to object to any or all proposals. (A paper destined for the Members' Assembly on revised upgrade proposals will be published on this site next week. I trust we can thrash it into a workable agreement before we get to Rome.)
- Secondly discussions have been ongoing on a number of the new proposals relating to Results and Humanitarian issues. Our rules allow for an extension of the consultation period in order to try and reach consensus.
Here is a link to a table summarising progress we have made to date.
[Update - 18 August. Rows with consensus (Yes) or (No) in parentheses show the expected outcome based on current interactions.]
To explain the table:
- The first column shows the type of change
- Management (of codelists and organisation identifiers)
- Modifications to the existing standard
- New content
- The second column is a thematic description of the content
- Codelist management
- Humanitarian
- Miscellaneous
- Results
- Traceability and Hierarchies
- The third column is the state of consensus
- Yes = consensus
- No = objections have been received that have not been resolved
- ? = item requires further subject matter expertise input or clarification of queries that may lead to objections
Before moving ahead I would like to point out that we are lacking consensus on all humanitarian proposals. If we are to go ahead with the upgrade at this stage, excluding all proposals on which we do not currently have consensus, what message is this going to send to the world about IATI's commitment to being fit-for-purpose for humanitarian publishing?
I would also like to point out that the community committed to improving results publishing is divided and consensus has not been reached on a couple of new proposals. The bigger pity is that many of these divisions are not being aired in public.
(As an exercise in transparency this upgrade has had it challenges ...)
Can we make one last effort to find common ground on some of these issues?