Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa rely on detailed, highly structured data to answer complex queries. IATI is an open data sharing standard widely used across the humanitarian community to make granular information on aid activities, transactions and results accessible to machine applications. The XML standard gives nonprofits the ability to get who they are, who they are helping, how, and what they need across to other nonprofits, donors and to the general public through the types of sophisticated artificial intelligent applications that are emerging today.
Nonprofit staff have become proficient in leveraging social media channels to engage and inform others. Narrative control over information is shifting however as virtual assistants become part of our everyday lives. Smart devices, chatbots and other intelligent applications are becoming narrators themselves and supplanting humans in curating what we learn about. Today information is increasingly being synthesized from aggregated data and this information is being disseminated through human-machine interactions that are growing more common.
In the AI Age, nonprofits and their supporters need to understand how artificial applications generate answers to queries and how to curate and channel the right information through the right data sharing frameworks to consistently get the right message across.
IATI Studio is a nonprofit digital content curation studio. It concentrates on helping nonprofits and their supporters get acquainted with IATI, publish their first IATI XML files and curate their digital information streams exposed to question answering applications. The studio works towards "helping create a future where people involved in humanitarian situations have access to the data they need, when and how they need it, to make responsible and informed decisions" which is a prime United Nations goal and something that's valuable to nonprofits and donors alike.
Basic studio services are free to nonprofits and donors. To learn more about the initiative and about the studio's range of basic and paid services, email: team (at) humanitarianai.org.