How about publishers that are MORE frequent that "monthly"?

Community Zone IATI Standard
#1

Hi everyone

I think there are an increasing number of publishers that now maintain and update their IATI data on a rhythm that could be more frequent than monthly. That’s good news!

This might be for those that update automatically via their systems every day - I know IFAD and Oxfam Novib (@stolk ?) strive to do this.

In other contexts, such as humanitarian, it might also be more practical to update IATI data more often.

Right now, the only indicator we have for this is the Timeliness (Frequency) metric on the IATI dashboard. However, the maximum any organisation can achieve is monthly.

I guess the key questions are:

  • do we want to know if any publishers update more frequently than monthly?
  • And if we do, how do we monitor that?

(Slight complication: as @bill_anderson whilst points out there’s no impact on monthly metrics with the changes to the dashboard update frequency. However, that would suggest it seems impossible for anyone to record as more frequent than monthly?)

#2

Hi @stevieflow , Oxfam Novib refreshes every night indeed, once automated daily publishing has many advantages. Staff see todays transactions tomorrow in IATI on Atlas and on Ministries METIS2 dashboard. Errors detected, corrected today are corrected in IATI tomorrow. And usefulness in Hum response situation increases a lot. So yes Hum data users want to know,
Guess that the metadata harvester from the registry should be a reliable source to discover the refresh rate accurately, daily or more frequently is just a matter of harvesting more often… ,

#3

I think it could be a good idea for the dashboard to reflect publishing frequency more accurately - i.e. adding logic to calculate weekly and daily refreshes.

However, as to the relevance of this and its impact on assessing quality:

  • Do development activities need updating more frequently than monthly? For whose benefit?
  • How does one work out which humanitarian activities require daily updating?

Does adding a new level of best practice imply that existing best practices become not-so-good practices? (Whether we intended to have this effect or not?)

#4

I think it is great that we are now looking at this as I have been asked about the lack of a dashboard measure to reflect publishing more frequently that ‘Monthly’ many times in the past.

I know there are now more than a handful of publishers that are already updating their published IATI datasets on a ‘daily’ basis. In addition I understand that there are also at least a couple of publishers who are essentially publishing Near to Real Time (NRT) by providing an API which extracts and formats their data from their internal systems on request? Given that NRT would be the ultimate ‘best practice’ as the publishing frequency for any data I think that in answer to @bill_anderson questions:

  • Do development activities need updating more frequently than monthly? For whose benefit?
    Given the requirement of the Grand Bargain to establish closer links between both humanitarian and development interventions programmed for a specific area, region or crisis etc. I would anticipate an increasing need for publishers to update all their data (both hum. and dev.) more frequently than monthly. It can surely only be a good thing and the action of a responsible publisher to update their datasets as frequently as they can in order that any response and/or resource coordinators etc. (both internal and external) can have the most complete picture for managing the areas for which they are responsible?

  • How does one work out which humanitarian activities require daily updating?
    It was originally recommended (by the IATI Tech team when the first humanitarian specific elements were added to the IATI Standard at v2.02) that publishers should aim for daily publishing at least in relation to Rapid On Set emergencies. However given the above I think that we should now just encourage publishers to aim for the (ambitious but!) greatest frequency of publishing for ALL their data as is possible (ie NRT?). Also, as most publishers provide both their hum. and dev. information from the same internal systems it may in many cases actually be harder for publishers to have different publishing frequency rules for different sets of data (although I would be very interested to hear from publishers on this?)

Does adding a new level of best practice imply that existing best practices become not-so-good practices? (Whether we intended to have this effect or not?)?

I guess this would therefore inevitably be the case as we aim to continually improve the usability and integrity of IATI data?

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