Board decisions on IATI Technical Audit

This post has been written by John Adams and Leo Stolk as focal points for technical workstreams on the IATI Governing Board.

After a busy few months at the end of summer we wanted to share some updates on activities we’ve undertaken in our roles as focal points for technical workstreams on the IATI Governing Board. We’ve worked together with the technical team and several technical experts from across the IATI community to follow up on commitments we all made at the June Members’ Assembly.

On 21-22 August, 14 of us met at Oxfam Novib offices in The Hague to take a deep dive into the technical aspects of IATI and the core work of the technical team with a view to ensuring we all understood and agreed on a single set of priorities. We’re pleased to say that the Board met last week to review the outcomes of our detailed discussions and agreed the following recommendations in relation to our core products and services:

• Validation services and the datastore are prioritized until May 2019. Our senior developer will review existing validation services in 2018 and subsequently propose the best way forward;

• Other substantive work will proceed according to the 2019 Annual Plan on the proviso that overall performance is not affected, and some activities (eg additional work on the website) will be rescheduled within the year;

• Once the datastore is up and running, the previewer and CSV converter will be deprecated;

• Detailed work plans with associated budgets on a quarterly basis will be reviewed with the Board focal points to monitor progress and agree on priorities for the subsequent quarter, and issues with significant impact or budgetary consequence will be resolved by the Board.

In order to get this work done, the Board agreed on the following staff changes within the technical team:

• appoint a senior position for overall technical vision and project leadership;
• upgrade the vacant developer post from junior to senior level;
• recruit an additional business analyst.

We’re also delighted to let you know that the procurement of services to rebuild the datastore is almost complete following UN process, rules and guidelines and that work on this is expected to get underway within the coming weeks.

In getting through this body of work we have many people to thank and we look forward to seeing many of those people at the TAG 2018 meeting in Kathmandu where we can continue the good work we’ve put in place.