Participate in user testing of IATI’s new publishing tool

This post was written by Wendy Thomas, IATI Technical Lead at Development Initiatives.

Since February, the IATI Secretariat and Technical Team have been working with Young Innovations to develop a new tool to support organisations publishing IATI data. We are pleased that the development of the tool, “IATI Publisher”, is nearly complete and soon ready for user testing.

What is IATI Publisher?

IATI Publisher will enable organisations to publish their data on development and humanitarian activities according to the XML format required by the IATI Standard. The new tool aims to be simple and intuitive, making publishing easier for organisations. From a technical point of view, the tool should also help to improve the quality of IATI data as it is fully aligned with the IATI Standard schema and rulesets.

Who is the new tool for?

The tool has been built to support organisations that publish a limited number of development and humanitarian activities. Such organisations typically represent small and medium sized non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Large organisations, such as donor governments or UN organisations delivering 100+ activities need to use an alternative technical system that automates the publication of large volumes of data.

Who can participate in user testing?

We specifically want to reach our target users for the publishing tool, i.e. small and medium sized organisations that deliver development and/or humanitarian activities. We aim to test the tool with the following types of publishers:

1. Organisations that have previously published IATI data (using an alternative publication tool); and
2. Organisations preparing to publish IATI data for the first time.

We of course welcome members of our highly technical and experienced community to also participate in user testing.

Register your interest

If you would like to be involved in testing IATI Publisher, kindly send an email to pubtooltest@iati.zendesk.com. Testing will be remote and involve undertaking a series of predefined tasks necessary to publish IATI data and should take no more than a couple of hours to complete. We are hoping for around 10-15 testers from within the IATI community.  We will also make a link available to access the entire tool for those who want to review and provide feedback.

Once you register your interest, the Technical Team will then reach out to individual participants to discuss and schedule your testing session. Testing is due to commence in the next month. Please get in touch if you have any questions about participating, or if you have questions on the development of IATI Publisher.