Part of my day job at DFID includes a bit of responsibility for publishing data under the government’s transparency commitments. In common with other UK central government departments, DFID routinely publish spend, contract and HR information. But unique to DFID is the publication of all aid projects.
In January this year DFID began to publish details of every aid project in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard XML schema. There are now a set of XML downloads referenced from the IATI Registry covering countries, regions and multilateral aid activities, all delivered through a RESTful API, and refreshed every month with up-to-date data. DFID also publish a more human-readable version of this information on the Projects Database on the DFID website.
The Hewlett Foundation are the second organisation to publish in IATI format, and others are following on close behind.
Eating my own dogfood
Owen Barder blogged recently that organisations publishing data should be forced to use that data on their own websites – so that “eating their own dogfood” would drive up quality. As I don’t get the chance to do this at work, I’ve been having a play with the IATI data in my own time. Just for fun, you know.
Here are a few initial prototypes. I will blog implementation details in the next few posts, and include code.
Charting using amCharts
I first saw the amCharts charting tool in ForeignAssistance.gov, the US aid portal. The tool takes XML or CSV data and generate Flash or Javascript charts – pie, column/bar, line, bubble and so on. The tool is very straightforward to set up, and data can be set up using XSL transformation of IATI XML data.
These sort of charts would be useful to:
- get an overview of what a donor is doing in a country
- use as a widget on a site dedicated to aid in that country
- (if aggregated across donors in a country), provide an overview of what activities are considered important
- show past and future aid flows for a country
There are still some challenges – for example aggregating the sectors (health, infrastructure, water) rather than the very granular sectors listed.
See with the charts in action. Use 2-letter ISO codes to look up a country you’re interested in.
Yahoo! Pipes
Yahoo! Pipes is a tool that enables manipulation of internet data feeds using a set of pre-determined tools. This pipe retrieves the country file for, in this case, Uganda (UG), filters for currently active projects, and produces a list of aid activities matching those criteria.
Note: the IATI schema needs to have the XML directive added at the top to enable it to be read by Yahoo! Pipes.
These tools would be useful to:
- aggregate information for a country from different sources (for example through the IATI Registry)
- mashup using connections between aid projects and other indicators
- transform or filter the data without using XSL
WordPress Country View
In the WordHack at last years WordCamp UK, the WordHack team developed a prototype to import aid data into a WordPress custom posts structure. As the WordHack was based on non-IATI XML, I’ve adapted this for IATI data.
In short, openaid.org.uk allows an import of IATI XML data for a particular country into a WordPress instance, creating a new Custom Post from each IATI activity (aid project), and dealing with DFID’s hierarchical project/component structure. The code regularly checks the data source for updates and creates new versions accordingly.
This could be used by a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) in a developing country to:
- aggregate all donor activities for their country,
- allow citizens to add comments on each donor activity using the WordPress commenting capability, and
- keep track of the changing nature of the projects through regular updates.
Here’s the example site with a very few test projects.
Next steps
These are just a few initial ideas and prototypes. Please add your ideas below, or, if you’re really keen, visit the new IATI Support forum and send in your ideas.
Disclosure: Although I work for DFID, these prototypes were developed in my own time and using my own equipment. Yes, I’m a geek.