Example change control document: 360Giving

[stevieflow]

Since IATI’s inception in ~2010 a number of other initiatives have appeared, all facing similar challenges in our distributed data world.

These have all developed a similar model of a centralised standard (or set of), which in turn has to be closely guarded and maintained, so that those using it can have assurance and some degree of certainty.

In terms of how any potential changes are made to these standards, we wanted to share examples that provide useful information to the SSWG. Hopefully by reading through these materials we have some important clues for the next phase of IATI.

Questions to SSWG

• What do you see as useful / interesting?
• Could similar materials support IATI?_

[stevieflow]

360Giving

Big thanks to @mariongalley at 360Giving for sharing this example.

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• 360Giving is an open data initiatives that supports philanthropy and grant making organisations to publish data about the grants they make
• The 360Giving Data Standard details how this data can be shaped and published
• 360Giving provide a shortlist of tools to access the data in various ways, alongside supporting the community to do their own things
• Alongside a core team and board of trustees, a Stewardship Committee (SC) is in place to help govern the data standard, following a set of principles and process
• SC minutes are posted here

(Disclosure: Open Data Services have worked with 360Giving since its inception in 2015. I (@stevieflow) am also a member of the Stewardship Committee)

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Example change process & documentation from 360Giving: Grants to individuals

In 2022, 360Giving started to assess how a different type of grant could be published: grants to individuals. These are common types of grant, but had not really been explicitly modelled in the standard. Various external facts combined to create a demand for this data to be considered for publication, resulting in this document to the Stewardship Committee

• Proposal: Individuals (June 2022)

This document lays out in some detail:

• out the problem statement, motivation & evidence collected
• consultation already undertaken
• the specific proposals in terms of changes to the standard
• an impact assessment of these changes --> on publishers, users and the existing 360Giving tools
• further considerations around guidance and data protection
• timeline

The committee then reviewed this, with the approval to proceed. A few months later (Nov 2022), an update paper was then provided, in relation to this topic:

• Proposal Update: Grants to Individuals

This explains to the SC that in investigating and researching the details of the original proposal, various things changed, or came to light. Hence, this paper gives an update, revised options and a refreshed impact assessment

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Apologies, I'll then skip over some of the subsequent implementation details that followed, to get to the more exciting part: how this change has benefit 360Giving and its stakeholders. To quote @mariongalley:

• There's a whole new set of publisher guidance and specific workshops for grants to individuals
• In addition to adding filters on GrantNav and Insights, we also have a badge on the Quality Dashboard which shows takeup of the new codelists
• Plus, we've worked with partners like the Association of Charitable Organisations who've promoted it in their newsletters and at their annual conferences, and had publishers write blogs for us (Masonic CF and Buttle)
• We also were able to produce a Grants to Individuals Dashboard, which visualises the new codelists and maps their ward-level data to IMD

I think: this really shows that the groundwork and assessments made in the original proposal and subsequent update were well worth it.

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This was a big addition for 360Giving (both technically, but also in terms of what the standard helps describe).

It would be great to hear from SSWG members their responses to this example.