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Hello IATI Community,
I’ve used the IATI Dashboard quite a lot recently to answer internal queries about our published data.
I was able to use the DFID dashboard graph for Activities and the JSON data, which is slightly easier to analyse, to answer a question on publication dates - as DFID don’t record this information internally,
Does anyone else have examples of using the Dashboard to create reports or answer questions about their published data?
Hi @r_clements - good question
@bjwebb and I have been using some of the dashboard data to look at traceability (with Pontus at UN-Habitat).
Hence, this report: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/OpenDataServices/iati-traceability/blob/master/unhabitat.ipynb - helps us see where the external references to an agency might appear, in this case looking at participating-org and transaction/receiver-org | provider-org for either 41120 or some strings (“Un Habitat” or “UN-Habitat” for example).
This “reverse mapping” (as I call it) data is already underneath the dashboard. It would be good to polish this for general use (the scripts are here: https://github.com/OpenDataServices/iati-traceability/ - we will document a little further) - but thought it also answered your query about ways people are using the dashboard …
Hi @stevieflow, that’s really interesting!
It’s something that we have been thinking about in DFID as there are organisations that are publishing IATI activities which sit a few removed from the direct allocation of DFID money in our funding chain, but do not appear on DevTracker as they haven’t met our minimum data publication requirements.
In many cases the organisations have produced data which is very close to meeting the requirements, but just haven’t quite got it correct. An automated tool to help identify these activities & organisations to provided the necessary nudge towards full complaince would be extremely helpful.
Interesting stuff! It’s great to see the the Dashboard has the potential to inform decisions around traceability and publisher support.
I have a more low-tech example of how it can also help sidestep the barriers to analysis raised by data quality: when Development Initiatives was writing the 2015 Investments to End Poverty Report I helped in the construction of a budget analysis segment, which aimed to demonstrate how IATI data could use forward looking data to help recipient countries plan and manage funds.
Unsurprisingly, the forward looking component of the Dashboard was great for scoping; helping us to evaluate how informative a given publisher’s data is, and guiding the analysis itself. The resulting section can be found on p.58 of the report pdf.
Very interested to hear other uses!