Data are getting increasingly important to effectively manage projects in development cooperation and sustainability supply chains, to increase performance levels and to demonstrate impact. Data publishing frameworks such as IATI in development cooperation, and upcoming initiatives like UTZ First Mile Farm Data in the sustainability sector are important building blocks towards structuring, managing and exchanging data.
The IATI experience however shows that only few larger organisations have the skills and tools to pick the fruits of this data revolution. Sector wide there is a challenge with the huge amount of data available, while the ability of processing available data and getting meaning out of it isn’t developing at the same rate. Despite all of today’s advanced technology, the assembly and coordination of development cooperation and sustainable supply chains is still very inefficient. If we don’t start to do something about this situation, we face a huge problem in realizing some of the opportunities and values out of datasets.
Proposed is to develop a set of publicly available toolboxes for actors in development cooperation and the sustainability sector, that allow boosting data collections with the power of interoperability:
- Collect, maintain, validate, structure and visualise data online or offline in a private and secure environment;
- Free distribution, allowing users to further adapt the tool to own needs;
- Validate, de-duplicate and make consistent datasets based on Natural Language Processing techniques;
- Enrich own datasets with data attributes from a choice of schemas such as IATI, schema.org and industry initiatives, allowing interoperability, performance comparisons;
- Visualise to the benefit of extracting meaningful information from data;
- Interconnect with clients, peers, like minded organisations, financers, certification bodies through machine readable files.
Actors can continue using the software tool they see fit, while picking the fruits of iteroperability. All tools can be used separately and are based on Open Source Software. Data will only be available to data owners and will not be accessed/used by anyone other than by the developers for continual improvement of validation-services and finding matching Open Data sets based on theme and location.
Finance and pricing
Considering this public value of development cooperation and sustainability supply chains, we think that tool development shall be financed with public resources, and the resulting tools be published/made available under a public license. Running costs shall be covered by the end-users in proportion to the amount of data processed.
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