The Humanitarian AI meetup community is launching a call-to-action seeking volunteers to work on quickly setting up a new IATI database to support relief efforts aiding Ukrainian refugees and IDPs.
IATI is a reporting framework humanitarian organizations use to openly share information on aid activities, transactions and results in granular detail. Reporting activities in compliance with IATI helps improve operational transparency, benefitting operational planning, fundraising and coordination across organizations and crisis theaters.
The framework is managed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative, supported by the United Nations, mandated by many government development agencies and used today by over 1400 organizations and donors to store information on over 1 million aid activities. Although IATI was originally setup in 2008 to track development aid flows, it has evolved to become a general use reporting framework and the best source of highly structured aid activity information accessible to machine applications
Our new database (IATI Plus) will help make reporting aid activities by organizations responding to the Ukrainian crisis easier, make more IATI data searchable and usable compared to other IATI data sources and provide developers with a better IATI data source for applications. Uniquely, the database will also be able to handle experimental IATI elements and attributes, store both IATI and non-IATI data, and allow individuals and teams to securely view, edit, and work simultaneously on generating and updating activity files, making reporting and sharing information faster, more inclusive and responsive to needs on the ground.
On a technical level, organizations report activities by storing information on their web servers converted into XML code using the IATI Standard, then organizations share file metadata with the IATI Registry, making all the information aggregatable, searchable and usable to power a broad range of applications. For reference, an actual activity file containing information on five activities carried out by Oxfam GB in Senegal can be found here.
IATI data can be accessed through a host of initiatives but none are sufficiently capable of powering consumer grade reporting applications operating at scale for example setup to support relief efforts responding to a major crisis or to support sophisticated research initiatives and training of machine learning models.
IATI Plus will contribute to addressing these problems and help spur and support the development of new humanitarian-data-powered applications, including virtual assistants and artificial intelligent applications.
We're seeking volunteers of all levels to help work on setting up the new AWS Neptune graph database for the project and a prototype user interface for it and to help humanitarian organizations and aid initiatives responding to the war and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine channel information on their activities and needs through IATI and IATI Plus.
The project will be documented in more detail here and coordinated through GitHub and Humanitarian AI's Slack workspace and partially supported through computing credits provided by Amazon. To join or to learn more about the project, contact: team (at) humanitarianai.org
We will be using Twitter and Medium to publish updates on the project and contributions to the project can be made through [GitHub Sponsors(https://github.com/sponsors/Humanitarian-AI) and Open Collective. Stay tuned for more details.