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Collaboration Call: September 21, 2018

brockfanning edited this page Oct 16, 2018 · 2 revisions

1. Technical Updates

Pre-call technical catch-up - see below

UK team

  1. Christopher Norris, first time on this call and will be helping out with this work. Not a developer, but an extremely gifted statistical officer.
    1. Will be helping to incorporate the interactive maps on the site and helping to incorporate multilingual capacity to the site.
  2. Brock, Chris and Ann had a meeting this morning to explore options for the technical details moving forward.
    1. Talked through the changes with the proof of concept, Jekyll theme, and multilingual.
    2. Mapping tool
    3. Guidance for architecture diagrams and hosting
    4. Talking through suggestions to change the reporting status
  3. UK scheduled to do their VNR and next year and will be working on that soon.
  4. Ann put out an advertisement for a developer for the site

US team

  1. Kali asked about the update on the translation
    1. Brock sent out a list with the french translation spreadsheet page to help with the translation.
    2. Kali will take some time to review the links.
    3. What will be translated?
      1. Not the UN pages
      2. Mostly the indicators
  2. Need a logo for the new site. The one on the upper left hand corner.
    1. Don’t need the lingo in the old logo
    2. Brock- creating a contrast version would be good to make as well so that we can use it for the next site
    3. Will pull the logo for the different language from the UN website with the logos
  3. Translation should be pretty simple and shouldn’t need much instruction. But Phil will work on a few lines for instructions and descriptions for the translator position
  4. Kali - What are the outstanding issues that need to be worked on for the merge? Wants to announce it along with the data call soon.
    1. Brock and Phil will get together this afternoon and can provide more of an update after that.
    2. Data providers have changed so we may need to change part of the site to mention that.

CODE team

  1. Wrapping up documentation and blog post on wide versus tidy
  2. Working on a blog post for training on how to setup the site through Amazon web services.
  3. Also started working on a proof of concept for a local reporting platform. Brock will be speaking at a conference in NYC next Friday and will be demonstrating this platform.
  4. UT translation project
    1. Caleb has been working with UT students to translate the site into the UN-supported languages. Has translators for Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, and Spanish
    2. Will follow up with them to find a French Translator.

Country/subnational interest in cloning the NRP

  1. Ann - working with Ghana and Rwanda and they are planning on soft launching in October. Omar will be in the WDF panel so it will be good to have him there.
    1. 80% chance that Phil will get his approval to travel to the WDF
  2. Ann - still having conversations with Germany about the platform
  3. Brock looked through the Australian site and it seems like it was maybe inspired by the platform, but probably not using it. Ann will follow up to see how they decided to use it and why.
  4. Chris - a couple of members on his team have been using APIs to pull data from different sources. Has there been any work on this?
    1. Brock has worked on it before and had done a proof-of-concept to pull data from CKAN. Chris will follow up with them on it on the next technical call.

2. Upcoming events/conferences

  1. Brock will be in NYC next week on the local reporting platforms. SNSN Data Day at Columbia University
  2. IODC is coming up next week with a pre-event on SDG reporting and open data and interoperability and an conference event on SDG reporting

3. Next steps

  1. More technical calls in the mornings before these calls
  2. Brock will work with Chris to test out the multilingual and Jekyl portions of the site
  3. Angela will review the French translation sheet

Pre-call technical catch-up

1. The multilingual proposal

https://github.com/brockfanning/sdg-translations

US platform has English and Spanish and will soon have French. Jekyll plug-in pulls in all these files as data. Countries can overwrite and store a local version if don’t want to use the central version. Could consider inheritance – eg English largely the same but may be some US and UK differences. Need to consider how the permissions would work and how versions would be controlled – use open standard versioning?

Have changed templates within Jekyll to avoid hard coded reference to the various elements.

Role required for how keep this updated from central UNSD re any changes to naming etc. Could store global metadata in this repository?

Current UK repository stores stuff locally so would change to point to something central.

2. The Jekyll theme proposal

Will be easier long term to get changes delivered to countries or for countries to customise. Without using themes, if through customisations the original and forked versions diverge, then harder to pull down code and changes in future (github conflicts!) but this way means a shared resource regardless of version or customisations.

Uses Jekyll ‘remote theme’ – a plug-in. Brock sees only potential downside is if would cause any issues with other plug-ins – aim for community support if this occurs.

To note US uses CircleCI not TravisCI

Action: Brock to find out why GSA using CircleCI, so we’re aware in case other countries ask re CircleCI vs TravisCI

3. Next steps for testing (and timescales to suit international partners)

UK to create copy of repository and Brock could do pull request to put the code in.

Action: Chris to liaise with Brock re repository link for code to be added to.

4. Mapping tool

Brock – aim to have as little code as possible in the local versions so avoid putting in local repo. Briefly discussed option for putting in a shared space – similar to multilingual options. To be discussed further. UK looking to pull in contractor resource to develop the mapping template eg so usesdata format in platform.

5. Architecture diagram

We’ll share Doug’s diagram.

6. Guidance re hosting

Brock working on guidance re hosting on amazon web services. Future version could be how to host on other cloud services.

7. How the builds work

Need to force build to push through metadata changes, any issues that sdg-indicators automatically build every 24 hours.

Brock previously explored getting something to force a build of sdg-indicators when sdg-data updated but has not implemented. Chris will be exploring how the automated builds are controlled.

8. Changes to reporting status and RAG progress display

UK are exploring removing the current RAG colours from the reporting status page. This would then reserve these colours for assessment of progress towards the goals/targets/indicators. Rwanda also specifically requested removing the currently used RAG colours.

9. Future meetings

Agreed helpful to have these longer additional discussions about technical issues. Will trial having fortnightly catchups on a Friday, in advance of the wider fortnightly US/Uk catchup. Action: Ann to set up further meetings

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