IATI Working Group & Community of Practice: COVID-19?

Community Zone IATI Standard
#1

It’s great to see so much discussion and activity within the community in terms of how COVID-19 relates to the IATI standard

Once again, many thanks to the @IATI-techteam for acting so quickly and efficiently to provide initial guidance and support to the community.

We now seem to have a groundswell of activity and action, along with a fair number of challenges and considerations. A lot of these are detailed in Discuss threads, but also in other discussions, webinars and non-digital channels (aka people talking to each other!).

Back in September 2019, at the last Members’ Assembly, the IATI membership endorsed the plan for us to move “beyond the TAG” as our only channel for discussion and deliberation, and into two main vehicles:

  • Communities of Practice are the fora for practitioners to share, ask, answer and support one another. Ideally, Communities of Practice are run on an open model, with some resource needed to avoid overlap and ensure engagement.

  • Working Groups are tasked by the Board (maybe at the request of Members) to research, consider, discuss and propose answers to specific challenges we are facing. They are time-bound, have resource to conduct themselves and are accountable. We might consider them to be “technical”, but they also need to speak to, and involve those, that are not so “technical”.

Right now, I can’t see any evidence of WGs or CoP being in existence. Please can someone on the IATI Board provide an update?

And of course, to round off this thread - I think we have a perfect candidate for a Working Group and Community of Practice in terms the challenges COVID-19 is presenting.

Do others agree?

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#2

Hi Steven, good to hear from you and likewise extending sincere thanks to @IATI-techteam for moving things forward so quickly particularly as I was indisposed (ironically with quite a nasty run in with Covid-19).

The Board met just this week and we’re currently working on minutes from that meeting that will be shared as usual through the website by the end of the month. The Secretariat gave an update on the progress towards standing up the COPs (associated digital platform slated to be ready in Q3) and Working Groups (some already in the works, such as planning for the 2020 Annual Event and for the Technical Stocktake) and you’ll be hearing more about these through our usual channels. There was no suggestion of a need to formalise a Working Group on Covid-19.

I’ll take advantage of this post to remind publishers to use the Guidance on Publishing Data on COVID-19 (updated Version 2 on 27 April), and to remind users to take a look at the Guidance on Accessing and Using IATI COVID-19 Data (Version 1, issued 7 May).

All the best, Annelise

#3

Thanks Steven and Annelise. Annelise, I’m glad you’re feeling better!

I think it would be great to form a working group on figuring out a long-term solution to how to best report details as to not lose granularity - this is very relevant to Covid-19, but will be an issue for other topics as well. As described in the post here, USAID is trying to figure out the best way to report in the short term (we will put detail in transaction descriptions), but we know this is not a perfect solution.

There are pros and cons to how to move forward, and we have informally been discussing with other publishers on how to best report. We’ve also discussed this in detail with the Tech Team and Secretariat where we agreed to continue thinking on how to solve this issue in the long term. I think it would be great to move these side conversations to a more formal short-term group who can come up with a proposal on how to sort this out in the long term to improve reporting.

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#4

Thanks a lot of the response and involvement so far @AVaughn.

As a starting point we will be running a consultative webinar on 30 June to explore those topics that were raised for further consultation two months ago. Please see details here. It will be great to have you join.