IATI Organisation Model template

[Adrian (Adrian Collier)]

Continuing the discussion from Getting it Right Theme:

Getting it Right Theme

Another one from me today

Facilitating following the money in IATI

There have been many conversations I’ve taken part in and overheard within the community about the ability (or lack of) to follow the money chain within the set of published data.

I believe that part of this issue is that the process for publishing your funding chain works very effectively if you have direct connected funding within your organsiation, e.g. all incoming funds are earmarked for certain spending, allowing you to identify clear incoming and outgoing transactions as well as have direct relationships with funding and funded activities.

However many organisations seem to operate with a different kind of model. Models including core funding, where incoming funds from a donor is not necessarily targeted at a particular project or programme, but is sent to a central pot, then it is not always so obvious how to track this.

Now if you look at the IATI Standard, there are many options here for working through this within the data, that I think would fit almost any model of organisation.

What I think we need to do as a community is to work out this practically for a number of known working models to provide some publishing advice for those who are trying to do this.

I’ve been doing some work on how we might facilitate the discussion, and put my pen to paper and thought I’d share my results.

I’ve created a very simple template for mapping out how an organisation might have connections within their IATI XML file to other organisations. I’ve made it with the idea that you could drop it into a simple image editor or print it out to sketch out a small example (1 or 2 activities) from your own organisation, looking at which elements you need to include and how would you obtain that information.

Here’s a scaled down first version:

The full sized image file is available here or “interactive version” (you can select and copy text in the interactive version).

It still needs some work, this is just my initial thoughts and it probably doesn’t nearly start to cover all the potential use cases. It’s made using the online tool http:gliffy.com and here’s the template file you can use to import:

iati_organisation_model_template_public_.gliffy (100.8 KB)