What next for the TAG?

Love these ideas, John, and in fact I did look up IATI meetup groups in DC (There are none! Though perhaps it’s better to link up IATI/TAG to the much more established open data community? Still debating that one in my head.)

As important as it is to create multiple entry points, I think there’s still value in the global events that bring everyone together - just as important for community building as addressing regional/sector-specific/parochial interests. That means bringing together a group with a wide variety of skills, interests, and technical depth. In Dar, many first-timers arrived with more questions about IATI than answers, and some were explicitly expecting some kind of training to be on offer. My thought: some pre-TAG homework, suggested reading, maybe a MOOC or some kind of training opportunity to help newcomers engage from day 1? Not all would participate, and there would still need to be separate training events, but it might help to level the playing field.

At the TAG we held a session to debrief from the OpenAg IATI Tool Accelerator (catchy title, I know) event we held in London, over four days in Feb 2017.

I tried to tell the story of the event through tweets people made (which is also interesting in terms of many perspectives that can be gathered, after the event)

We quickly got - I think - to an important point: just making space for people to get together is an important thing, but also quite difficult. In the London event, we made sure we could bring in some of the key people making tools around IATI, but also worked to ensure that the environment, dialogue and learning opportunities were optimised.

In the session at TAG we were very keen to avoid the idea of a “flying circus” of IATI wonks turning up on spec, and talking/doing IATI - so many people expressed a preference for establishing a local/regional TAG. I’ll even say that Yohanna Loucheur and [~379] volunteered their locales!

In terms of stimulus for these groups, we ranged between “open space” (turn up and just organise) through to the “global list of things that need fixing in IATI” (people organise to fix them), which also seems important. I dont think there will be a fixed formula or set menu for any group to follow. What will be important is visibility, transparency and sharing between communities - hopefully as they grow and diversify.

I’m sure this idea has come up elsewhere, but there was discussion at InterAction this week about the potential for a “mini-TAG” on humanitarian data and the Grand Bargain. Of course DI is already doing their traveling roadshow to introduce and support implementation of the GB, but this would be an event limited to NGOs (not necessarily InterAction members) where we could put our heads together and work through some key challenges as a community.

I think the key questions would be:

• “What are the best strategies for getting GB and WHS signatories to publish IATI data?”
• “How do existing tools, systems, HXL, etc. fit into the large ecosystem?”
• “What’s different about humanitarian data/humanitarian use cases (as opposed to development data/use cases)?”
• “Are they reeeeally that different? Do we reeeeally need a new set of tools, elements, guidance, etc.?”

Roderick Besseling - I imagine the CSO Working Group will be involved!

Thoughts? Suggestions? The natural location for us is DC at the InterAction offices, but if there’s something else brewing out there we can talk about how to link up.

(No promises yet, I’m jumping the gun a bit;-)

I heard through the grapevine that John Adams is considering a traceability mini-TAG sometime in July. We were actually thinking about a bit of IATI-related coworking in June/July in the UK, possibly even something as official as a second Shoreditch Workshop at Newspeak House.

Why?:

1. Good chance to get tool devs and donors together for some active building/testing/iterating.
2. Opportunity to discuss some of the trickier technical bits of things like traceability and results, with maybe some evidence of progress from DevInit/Tech Team, OpenAg, and others on locations, classifications, and general IATI-vangelizing?
3. To Steven Flower ’s point from his TAG session and slides linked above, what’s to stop us from doing this?

Who’s up for it? [~379] shi Tristan Vaessen Vincent van 't Westende Dale Potter Rory Scott Tim Davies Yohanna Loucheur ? What dates look good? Week of June 26 and July 10 would work. Week containing July 4 isn’t a good look (can’t very well ask US participants to show up in the UK over Independence Day now can we;-)?

Sounds like an interesting idea! Especially if it can be combined with a traceability mini-TAG.

Week of July 4 is also week of July 1 (Canada Day), all the more reason to avoid it…

I’m game!

In addition to Reid Porter ’s points above, I’m aware that several organisations are currently doing user user and community research in IATI, so this could be a great opportunity for them to catch a bunch of people at once.

cc. Dale Potter - we spoke about something like this last week, I think!