IATI Developer Community

What’s already in place?

We recognise that some of the services above need servicing and attention or re-thinking completely.

Background

The ‘Developer Community’ is a subset of the broader IATI community with it’s own specific needs. The IATI technical team is well positioned to help develop, support and drive this community. Our working methods are already fairly open, but the team recognises that there is room for improvement and that more could be done to pro-actively engage other developers.

Who are the developers?

They may be data users and/or data publishers, but generally they are the ‘coders’ that work with IATI data. This is a technical audience.

Communication

Currently you can contact the IATI developers via the IATI discussion page, or if the issue is a recommended code fix, through the IATI GitHub account.

Documentation

We will build Developer Documentation using the same approach as the SSOT - this means taking material from the wiki and slowly closing that down, and building better documentation specifically targeted at developers. We should also link more prominently to our developer documentation that we currently do to the wiki. This would also then be available on the iatistandard.org website. See http://iatistandard.org/developer/

Each software project in our GitHub Organisation repositories should have information for developers about how they can be involved in that project.

Data Quality

Our current approach is advise people to report data issues to our support portal - support@iatistandard.org - and to use the Dashboard to help us monitor and work with data issues. Unfortunately we do not have the resources to fix everything, but we try to act quickly where possible.

Feeding into other structures

  • Questions, feedback, ideas from the developer community should be fed into weekly IATI team meetings/calls. How we recording those requests, questions, and the responses should be considered.
  • The Developer Community should be an agenda item at Quarterly IATI Tech Team meetings. There could be an opportunity for direct representation at such meetings.
  • The Developer Community should be seen as a subset of the Technical Advisory Group. As such future TAG meetings may need to take this groups needs into account.
  • There should be a Developer Community manager role. This does not necessarily mean a new post, but it is a role with specific duties. Again, the Developer Community should be seen as a subset of any other ‘community engagement’ ideas.