Adding to the Organisation Registration Agency code list - push rather than pull?

Community Zone Codelists
#1

Hello

I know that this request for three additions to the Org Registration Agency codelist is grounded in a use case for the Open Contracting Data Standard. It’s a great example of cross-over and synergy between two open data standards, working in different domains.

As more organisations prepare, publish and use data across standards, updates to this list could be key. The current IATI documentation states:

Because there is a need to add registration agencies quickly, so that people can do their work, and because we anticipate many additions that will not be of interest to most people, we will add values to this list without making announcements. Values to be added will be agreed at the weekly team meeting.

It’s great that codes can be added quite quickly. However, the community might want to add and utilise codes immediately in some instances - and perhaps without the need for a sanction from the “centre”. Could such a situation exist, and be helpful?

Rather than wait for a code to be added to the central list (a pull mechanism) could we imagine a setup where a data publisher would actively inform the community of their intended code (a push)? It is then a task to maintain the publication of the list, but not approve the content, making this list chaordic ; powered from the periphery, unified from the core

I appreciate that this might sound like a play on concepts - but it could be important to position the management of this list as community-led, rather than centrally-governed. This may well be the intention already, so it would be useful to clarify.

Standardised list of local CSO's in partner countries
#2

Thanks for raising this Steven and we like the idea of publishers providing a ‘push’ of their intended code changes. We can also appreciate that some publishers will also want to get on and use their intended code rather than wait for the codelists to be updated. This has happened in the past and we have advised publishers that they can use their proposed codes albeit ‘at risk’ until the actual process for update has been completed. However, we certainly recognise that management by exception is always preferable and to date there have been few instances when we have not been able to approve proposed additions

However, I think that as much as we would like to permit publishers to just provide the updates themselves I do think that we will always have to retain some oversight just to make sure that something invalid or inadvertently incorrect does not slip through. Also the current 7 day process does allow a week for anyone else in the the community to raise any issues or concerns about a proposed update as well so it is not just a central decision as to what gets accepted. As a result I’m not sure that we would change the current update process at the moment but if publishers want to include their proposed updates via a push as part of their request for update via the update forum (http://support.iatistandard.org/forums/23076626-Non-embedded-Codelist-Amendments) then this would be extremely welcome?