Discussion

OKFest - ToolSprint

Adrian Collier
Adrian Collier • 23 June 2014
7 comments

In collaboration with Zara Rahman we would like to spend some time and focus working on building out the Open Development Toolkit that aims to provide information to users wishing to work with and around open data.

Particularly working on gathering information from users and developers of open data tools on how to setup and utilise these tools in a variety of environments and use-cases.

If you would like to participate in this session or if you have information you would like to feed into this discussion, please feel free to comment below.

Comments (7)

Zara Rahman
Zara Rahman • 8 years ago

Thanks for kicking this discussion off, Adrian!

Just to outline briefly the kinds of things that would be useful:

  • documentation on open source tools that you’ve developed, especially installation instructions which will allow others to install the tool locally, and understand how to use it themselves.
  • case studies of how tools have been used by people - often these remain as anecdotal stories we pass around, but it would be incredible to have a bank of stories to show the impact of aid data
  • documentation on any prototype tools that you might have developed/seen developed at hackdays or previous sprints: so that future hackdays or events on Open Development don’t start from scratch, but rather build upon what has already been done. (I just set this up for this purpose: http://opendev.hackdash.org/)
  • More simply: a list of any prototype tools, or ideas, that were brought up at hackdays of things that would be useful to have.

Hope that all makes sense: if anyone has any of the above information lying around already, please post here, we’d love to hear from you!

Thanks,

Zara

Pernilla Näsfors
Pernilla Näsfors • 8 years ago

Can I suggest a few additions/corrections…?
Somewhere on End User Display the new Openaid.se WordPress Theme should be added. Perhaps under “Not Mature” since the source code won’t be released publicly on GitHub until the site release in September, but then it will definitely be both mature and continued to be maintained… We’re working on making it as non-publisher specific as possible as well.
Regarding the Open Aid Map it is both IATI and Open Sourced on GitHub but perhaps put it under “Not mature” as it is probably not feasible yet to deploy it without assistance of the vendor SpatialDev.
Finally, I’m wondering what platform the “Open Aid Dtata” (sic!) is…?

Ben Webb
Ben Webb • 8 years ago
pernillan:

Finally, I’m wondering what platform the “Open Aid Dtata” (sic!) is…?

I’ve fixed the typo in the spreadsheet. I’m also not sure what platform it was meant to be, as I was just transcribing from the post-its.

Ben Webb
Ben Webb • 8 years ago
pernillan:

Somewhere on End User Display the new Openaid.se WordPress Theme should be added. Perhaps under “Not Mature” since the source code won’t be released publicly on GitHub until the site release in September, but then it will definitely be both mature and continued to be maintained… We’re working on making it as non-publisher specific as possible as well.

Thanks, have added this.

pernillan:

Regarding the Open Aid Map it is both IATI and Open Sourced on GitHub but perhaps put it under “Not mature” as it is probably not feasible yet to deploy it without assistance of the vendor SpatialDev.

I’ve moved this on the spreadsheet, to “Not mature”, as you suggest.

I think it ended up in the non-IATI section, as my understanding is that most of the project level data is taken from country Aid Management systems, rather than from IATI data published on the registry.

Ben Webb
Ben Webb • 8 years ago
pernillan:

as it is probably not feasible yet to deploy it without assistance of the vendor SpatialDev.

This is is an important distinction to make, between the maturity of software as a hosted solution, and as something for other people to deploy. It might be useful for us to look at how this distinction applies to other tools.

I know for example that CSV2IATI sees a lot of use, but has been installed by very few people, and the deployment/deveploment instructions are a bit sparse.

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