Collaboration Call: April 6, 2018

1. Technical Updates

UK team

Still recruiting developer
Now have mapping tool available for two indicators 3.9.1 and 4.2.1, scoping work to expand - available now on the live site
Search functionality has been improved to allow both keywords and the UK indicator description to be searched alongside the global indicator itself
55% global indicators now available
Starting to draft a self-assessment against the UN guidelines and principles for national reporting and dissemination platforms
Held planning workshop to decide focus of next developments. A key piece of work will be splitting the data side of the repository from the web presentation. This will help with workflow (easier to push data live while still have code developments in progress) plus should streamline process for copying our platform and taking on updates to it. Other developments will include expanding mapping functionality to support further boundary definitions and enabling customisation of x-axis.

CODE team

Investigating Carto as part of a subnational solution
Decoupling the platform from the data: proof-of-concept of providing the platform as a “Jekyll theme”, which allows countries to override files while still pulling in ongoing improvements/fixes
Working on CircleCI integration for builds, to allow for future improvements like: tabular data packages, SDMX, and data format pre-processing (wide to tidy, etc.)
US platform pull-requests that need to be run past Kali:
- Validation of date_metadata_updated format (pull request 902)
- Validation of Github users (pull request 898)

Country/subnational interest in cloning the NRP

Ghana - no new update
Rwanda - There will be a visit from Rwanda to ONS Newport in May. As part of this visit, ONS hopes to facilitate a ‘clone your own’ session where we fork a version of the NRP for Rwanda as they did for Ghana recently.
Bristol - no new update
Tanzania - no new update
Germany - Positive update from Germany on the back of the UNECE expert meeting. Sounds like they are still interested in open source approach but are awaiting senior sign-off.
Jamaica - no new update
San Jose - will be using open-source approach based on NRP

UNDP meeting in Beirut as part of Arab Development Portal bringing 14 countries together. UK team will be presenting there. UNDP is very supportive of open-source solutions.

CODE to set up call with Eduardo (UNSD)/Edgardo (ILO) re: SDMX. Topics includes:
- Reasons and motivations for implementing SDMX output in the platform
- How everything with the DSD (data structure definition) will be done, and metadata.