In the United Kingdom, as in other countries, large Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO’s), such as Oxfam UK, may have some capacities to publish open aid data. But what about the smaller NGO’s and grantees who are now required by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to share information about their project/activities in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard?

By July 2012, recipients of grants from the DFID Civil Society Challenge Fund and Global Poverty Action Fund (GPAF) will need to begin reporting in the IATI standard. That’s about 100 grantees by July 2012 according to Bill Anderson of Development Initiatives. By next year, recipients of larger grants from the DFID Partnership Program Arrangements (PPAs) will also be required to report in the standard.

At the moment there are three relatively new tools for NGO’s to share project/activity information and publish it into the IATI standard. They are:

● AidStream.org,
● OpenAidRegister.org, and
● the AVKO.org Really Simply Reporting (RSR) tool.

The table below gives a snapshot of IATI compliance and features of each of the platforms:

Lets take a look at each one in detail.

Aidstream

AidStream was designed by Young Innovations (YIPL) in Kathmandu, Nepal with the support of aidinfo. It was designed specifically for smaller NGO’s to make it easier for them to share small sets of project/activity records. Once NGO’s add their records, they can publish them and register them with the IATI registry.

Project entry form

The organizational administrators can choose which IATI fields are available for all project/activity records, and which fields can be excluded. Once the administrators have defined the parameters, organizational team members can enter their individual project/activity records into the AidStream tool.  Currently there is an internal project/activity listing for organizations and the AidStream team plans to add a public-facing project/activity listing capability in the near future as well as some data visualization tools.

Select fields to include/exclude

This tool is free to use and is fully compliant with the IATI standard.  According to Bibhusan Bista of YIPL, the AidStream code will be released as open source software within the next six months once the codebase is more stable and the documentation is more complete.  The tool is now public and is currently being piloted in Nepal where they plan to work with four NGO’s to improve its functions and user interface.   A spreadsheet import is also planned for the future.

Disclosure: the author of this article, Michael Roberts, has worked closely with both YIPL and aidinfo on other projects, but was not involved in creation of the AidStream tool.

AKVO.org

AKVO’s web site states that its Really Simple Reporting (RSR)  “makes it easy to put development projects online”.   As a paid subscriber to their service, you can have a customized page of your project/activities by filling out a PDF form for each project/activity record.  Once AKVO receives the PDF files by email they will then add those records into your public organizational space.

AKVO PDF form

The forms follow AKVO’s own project/activity format, however AKVO has mapped their RSR project/activity fields to the IATI standard.  AKVO is testing a feature to export AKVO RSR project/activity information into the IATI standard, and plans to include that feature in a release towards the second to third quarter of 2012 as well as a tool for registering those records into the IATI registry.  You can find examples of IATI export files on their test server.   The AKVO RSR tool is open source, and you can find their code base in their github directory under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

Example projects page

For NGO’s who have managed to already publish their data into the IATI standard, AKVO also offers a tool to allow their IATI-compliant project/activity records to be more easily visualized and searchable on the web.  The Dutch government is using the AKVO tool to visualize their IATI compliant project/activity data at openaid.nl

Open Aid Register

The Open Aid Register is a project managed by Ruth del Campo — a research scholar at the New York Law School — and funded by the Fulbright Commission and the Government of Spain.  Like AidStream, the Open Aid Register has been designed as an easy-to-use tool for NGO’s who don’t want to spend their time and resources publishing IATI data on their own

OpenAidregistry entry form

websites and interacting with the IATI registry.  The Open Aid Register is IATI compliant, covering the fields in the IATI Standard. The Open Aid Register also uses CartoDB to make it easy

Geolocation of project

to integrate geolocation information into project/activity records. In the near future, they will be launching a project/activity listing service.

At the moment this tool is free to use.  The tool is also open source and a link to their code base and its license is planned in the near future.

Acclar hereby releases the content of this blog into the Public Domain.  You are free to do anything you want with these writings, for any purpose, without our permission.  We offer these writings to the public with NO WARRANTY of any kind.

Since Acclar is an open aid data organization, it would be hypocritical not to make our blog (and other, future resources on our site) available as open content.  But you might notice that we’re doing things a bit differently — most open-content web sites use an open-content license, such as the Gnu Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons Attribution License.  We believe that these licenses represent a huge step forward in making information available for an open and transparent society, but they represent only a step, not the final destination.

An “open” license, whether for open-source software, open data, or open content, still attempts to do two things:

1. enforce a copyright on a resource; and
2. limit what users can do with the resource.

With an open license, the limitations are generally fairly benign — users are required to give attribution, and sometimes to share their changes on to others — but they still reflect an urge for control, and a mild discomfort around the act of sharing.

Public domain, on the other hand, isn’t a license at all — it’s a complete surrender of all legal rights over a work.  When we release our blog into the public domain, it has no copyright and no legal owner.  Of course, we hold onto ethical rights (shame on you if you plagiarize us and pretend you wrote these postings, and it’s nice to give us credit when you reprint or quote us), but we give up any claim to enforce those in a court of law.

We believe that going all the way to public domain has two significant benefits:

• people don’t have to waste time worrying about whether they’re complying with the terms of a license, so they will use our content more quickly and more often; and
• a license is a threat to sue if someone violates its terms, and we don’t think threats are nice (Canadians worry a lot about being nice).

One of Acclar’s founders, David Megginson, has had two positive experiences with public-domain sharing in the past, with the Simple API for XML (SAX) and the OurAirports.com open-data aviation web site.  In both cases, the public-domain information caught on quickly and found a large number of users and (re)implementers, and — despite the fact that there was no license requiring it — people in blogs, magazine articles, books, apps, etc. have been very gracious about attribution.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Licensing Standard strikes a good balance, by allowing a participant to use an open-data license or release aid data directly into the public domain.  At Acclar, we believe that any sharing of open aid data, licensed or public domain, is a good thing for aid transparency and effectiveness.

How we got started

Acclar is a joint venture by two Canadians who have long been passionate — obsessed, even — about open information.  David Megginson has worked with free software and open standards for two decades, including a stint chairing the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML Core Working Group. Michael Roberts has been involved in the aid community for 15 years, and initiated the International Development Markup Language (IDML), a pioneering open-aid standard that is still in widespread use.

Michael and David met during the development of the new International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), where Michael continues to assist with the development of the standard, while David created and maintains the IATI XML schema.  We decided to pool our experience and skills to help spread open aid data more effectively than either of us could individually.

What we hope to accomplish

Due to strong advocacy by CSOs, and the passion and hard work of its members, IATI has attracted an unprecedented amount of support across the aid world. There is, however, a lot of work ahead to ensure that donors are able to implement IATI and other open aid standards completely, effectively, and sustainably.

Publishing open aid data is much more than just exporting a database or spreadsheet into an open format and dumping it online.  In many cases, opening an organization’s data will require deep institutional change. Here are some examples:

• an initiative to develop a new vision with all stakeholders (not just the IT department)
• a willingness to share information that was formerly never meant for outside eyes
• an effort to align that information with unfamiliar classification schemes
• a commitment to keep publishing that information month after month and year after year, through staffing and organizational change

We have seen similar efforts in aid and other fields succeed, but more often, we’ve seen them fail. Through Acclar, we plan to work with aid organizations, not to advocate open aid data (because others are already handling that job very well), but to help organizations move from commitment to implementation.  As we explore this new and exciting area, we’ll be posting more here.

Let us know what you think.