[open-development] New method? Using charity tax filings as a source of int dev data

Thu Mar 20 21:32:59 UTC 2014

Hi all,

This is a topic that we were discussing at the last IATI steering committee
meeting in Montreal this winter - and hacking on at the open development
challenge (http://www.open-dev-ouvert.ca/<http://www.open-dev-ouvert.ca/fr/>)
that
preceded the meeting.

We built a proof-of-concept site using charity filings from our (Canadian)
charity registrar to feed the site. The data is very limited, but it's
about a lot of organizations - both foundations and charities. There is a
ton of data which I don't believe that IATI measures will ever collect
(smaller orgs). And there is some more data in the charity filing that we
are not using but which I think would be relevant.

Check it out:
http://charityaid.poweredbydata.org/

We believe that this approach is interesting because it is data required by
another arm of government and therefore it requires no added work by the
charity.

We're still considering the idea of creating (very incomplete) IATI feeds
from this data and how to leverage this data to encourage charities to
adopt publishing more IATI data. If anyone wants to discuss either or both
of those, please get in touch.

Thanks to Michael Roberts for helping us come up with this idea.

------------

If you're interested, you should check out the team responsible. In order
to do specifically public interest projects, our company (Ajah) has created
a non-profit arm called PoweredbyData. Our mission is to "help funders and
government regulators around the world publish more and better data about
the non-profit sector" i.e. work on the supply side of open data about the
sector. Our focus will be domestic civil societies, though, not
international development. There's lots of very smart folks (you all)
working on that already).

We'll be sending out a proper launch announcement in a few weeks.

http://www.poweredbydata.org

Cheers,

Michael Lenczner
CEO, Ajah
http://www.ajah.ca
514-708-5112
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