Standard Management Consultations

The recent CEB workshop mentioned a mapping between the OECD and UN regions, as well as between the GEM marker and OECD gender policy marker which would be great to see public Henriette Keijzers

Commenting from the CEB Secretariat side: we already started exchanging with OECD-DAC on a more granular mapping of the country / region codes between DAC list and M49, so that differences can be clearly communicated in next year's version of the UN data standards. Above document link is useful.
Also, would be useful Michelle if we you could explain what you mean with getting 'the real codes' on a public website. Thus, we can take this into account in the plan for the next phase of improvements.

I agree with you Michelle on the identifiers that are issued by IATI. These identifiers are a problem anyway: the IATI Secretariat is not a registration agency and sooner or later, the existence of these identifiers will come back and bite the organisations using them. Including a geographic reference to them would at least give them some value from a user perspective, a more immediate sense of where the organisation is located.
Regarding the XM-DAC identifiers, nobody is forced to use them. However, as far as I know, very few governments have a well-governed list of identifiers for their public organisations. We did it for Canada and it's way more complicated than one would imagine... Whereas the DAC identifiers already exist, they're already used for DAC reporting, so it made sense for the donor agencies to use them. As long as aid data continues to be published in a silo (rather than becoming part of a broader open data ecosystem), there's no imperative to move away from these identifiers.
TL;DR I'm afraid you'll continue to end up with more grey hair.

Yohanna Loucheur To be clear, I have no issue with the DAC reference. It is the use of XM before it that makes no sense. Why not use LU-DAC for the Luxembourg government rather than XM-DAC. While the DAC code itself does number the countries (22 for Luxembourg), the numbering scheme is not a commonly known identifier. The 2-digit ISO codes are.

As for the lack of interoperability of the code between standards or even cleaning up the mess we have within IATI today, I still firmly believe that there needs to be a tool that summarizes all of the codes (not just publishers) used for participating organizations so 1) we can see if more than one code is being used for the same participating org and 2) if a publisher needs a code they have a place to get what is already being used rather than make one up. Even if the code isn't 100% in accordance with a standard at least we have consistency and not 5 codes for one donor as we did (and perhaps still do) for GIZ.

And it is very much appreciated that Canada did number their government ministries and make that code list publicly available for use. We recently pointed one of our donor contacts to it as they were unaware that they had their own number. It helped as we are often able to get the org reference IDs into our donor agreements. Ours is always stated so there is no ambiguity but that in itself was a process that took time to work though legal and templates.