2014 – what a year!

2014 has been jam packed full of great stuff for IATI. Here are some of the highlights.

87 new organisations published data to the IATI Standard. These included the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Adaptation Fund, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the European Investment Bank and UN-OCHA. The UK government brought the total number of its departments publishing to IATI to nine. We may yet hit the 300 mark by New Year’s Eve!

We launched a new Dashboard, showing key statistics on IATI data, as well as granular information on each publisher. A new section now contains tables on timeliness and forward-looking data and will include tables on coverage and comprehensiveness early in 2015. We’ll be using the Dashboard a lot more next year in our support to publishers so why not check your data and see what needs to be fixed?

In April, the first High Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation took place in Mexico City. The IATI delegation encouraged all providers of development cooperation to accelerate their efforts on transparency and to work with partner countries to promote greater use of data through a voluntary initiative on IATI.

IATI and Development Initiatives jointly developed d-portal and launched it at the Mexico City GPEDC meeting. d-portal is a country based information platform that tracks resource flows using a range of information, including IATI data. Partner countries can use d-portal to see which resources are coming into their country and where the gaps are in data provision. A new ‘generator‘ feature can visualise a data set to embed in websites and blogs.

The TAG (Technical Advisory Group) braved a chilly Montreal in January, bringing together techies, comms specialists, analysts, policy experts and @OPENGOVHULK. Kindly hosted by the Canadian government, the discussions ranged from geocoding to where to get the best poutine. We’re excited to be heading back to Canada in 2015 for some warmer weather!

Two decimal upgrades to the IATI Standard were launched and our first integer upgrade, to version 2.01, was agreed at the October Steering Committee and will go live in January. A lot of hard work from the Technical Team and some excellent inputs from the TAG community meant a smooth and inclusive consultation process. Roll on version 3…!

Three new members joined the IATI Steering Committee – the governments of Myanmar and Yemen and the INGO Accountability Charter. The government of Korea has committed to joining IATI in 2015. The Steering Committee is now a truly multi-stakeholder body, with governments, CSOs, foundations and multilaterals coming together to govern IATI.