Does FTS have any requirements for IATI data?

Community Zone Using IATI Data
#1

Maybe @ximboden or @Wendy can help with this?

We know the UN OCHA Financial Tracking System (FTS) ingests IATI data

There’s some narrative about the compatibility of the two initiatives, and then an API to get data out of FTS.

But - I wanted to check if FTS has any requirements on IATI data in order to reuse it?

Any info , links or follow up gratefully recieved.

Help develop IATI’s humanitarian reporting guidance
#2

Thanks @stevieflow and I can confirm that in order to use published IATI data, FTS needs an organisation to be publishing at (at least) v2.02 of the IATI Standard and they require that the following fields are used for any activity that the publishing organisation considers to be a ‘humanitarian’ activity:

iati-activity @humanitarian attribute
humanitarian-scope Glide Number (for relevant emergency or crisis)
humanitarian-scope Humanitarian Plan (for relevant UN appeal and/or Humanitarian Response Plan )
sector @vocabulary = 10 for associated Clusters

There is also some initial guidance for using the IATI elements referenced above.

However, as part of the work for the Grand Bargain Transparency Workstream (and also for the IASC HFTT) FTS are going to be running a pilot during the first half of 2018 to start processing published IATI data and they are planning to further develop the existing guidelines as a result of that process. However, the intention is not to develop any ‘bespoke’ publishing rules for FTS if at all possible.

#3

Thanks Steven for starting this useful post.

Wendy, the guidance you refer was published in August 2016. At the time several people provided comments (some on Discuss, others apparently via other channels). You said then that revised guidelines would be available within a few weeks, but I can’t seem to find a revised version. Post 530 still links to the original guidance, with its problematic instructions about splitting humanitarian and development activities.

The guidelines really ought to be revised before inviting people to use it, even as a pilot. Could you indicate when a new version may be available, at a minimum addressing the concerns raised in September 2016 through the post?

#4

Thank you @YohannaLoucheur and the guidance was actually last updated in Feb 2017 although you are quite correct in that in that the document still has its original date of August 2016 which I can only assume is an oversight?

Therefore in order to avoid further confusion for now I have created an updated version of the guidance which hopefully addresses the majority of the issues raised on the original discuss post (which I have also updated ) . However, as I also mentioned above, new guidance (based on this initial work) is intended to be developed as part of the planned FTS / IATI interoperability pilot.

Also, some issues still remain. At this stage there is not an obvious approach for how to better report on activities that are considered both development and humanitarian. In addition, this situation also raises another of the highlighted problems of how to use the DAC sector codes to report a humanitarian education programme eg running schools in a refugee camp ?

Therefore it would be good to continue to work with the community on some real life examples for these so please do post (links to?) examples here or contact the IATI Technical team directly at support@iatistandard.org so that they can also be used as an input to the FTS /IATI pilot.

#5

Thanks

SSOT hat on: there is a guidance page on the IATI standard site, that doesnt seem to link to this Google Doc. Are the two documents the same, or do differences need to be synchronised ?

#6

Thanks for flagging @stevieflow and the link on the guidance page of the IATI Standard does link to the relevant Discuss post. However, I accept that a user would need to scroll to the bottom of the Discuss post to see that a later version of the guidance has been made available.

We’ll therefore look at this to see if we can make it clearer