The Technical Advisory Group for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is currently soliciting for comments on a consultation paper about a new standard for opening up data on international development:
More on IATI:
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a new initiative which aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand.
This will help those involved in aid programmes to better track what aid is being used for and what it is achieving – from the taxpayers in donor countries who provide the money, to those in developing countries who benefit from aid spending.
Improving transparency also helps governments in developing countries to manage aid more effectively, so that each dollar goes as far as possible in fighting poverty.
The deadline for comments is 21st May 2010 – so if you have any suggestions about how the standard could be improved, there is still a week left to get them in!
Many involved in IATI strongly support opening up aid information (for more on this see our Unlocking the Potential of Aid Information paper from 2009). Several people involved in the initiative are also on our Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development!
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
