Collaboration Call: September 6, 2019

1. Technical Updates

UK team

Lucy, Chris and Ann from ONS held a teleconference with UNSD to discuss next steps regarding support for countries in the UNSD-DfID project, particularly Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan are interested in using .Stat suite in addition to Open SDG. UNSD will produce an update on which solutions the project countries have selected. UNSD advised there isn’t currently documentation of common user needs across the countries, but that user engagement round tables as part of the project should help define these needs.
ONS are exploring how they could meet some of their more complex user needs by using a dynamic rather than static backend and the implications of this. Phil suggested DKAN as an open source option.
SDMX update: Lucy and Brock have been checking with Abdulla on SDMX specifics, as Lucy has been testing implementations of current functionality with UK and Kyrgyzstan data. The current functionality appears to be sufficient for importing these formats:
- SDMX-ML 2.1 Structure Specific
- SDMX-ML 2.1 Generic (aka “Structure”)
- SDMX-JSON
- NOTE: Additional formats are probably unnecessary, as available SDMX tools can switch between formats.
Question: What are the group’s thoughts on a revamp of Open SDG using more modern component-based front-end technologies, and potentially back-end technologies as well, to be better able to satisfy new feature requests from countries.
- Brock: This would be great, with the caveat that we want to ensure that Open SDG remains free-to-host (or if not free, then very cheap) and still primarily open-source.
- Would be good to start a Github issue about this.
  - NOTE: Savvas has started the issue here.
- Ann: The flexibility of Open SDG (ability to customise) is also a huge advantage of Open SDG over other reporting platforms.

US team

No updates this month

CODE team

Brock has started flagging issues in Github as “epic” to indicate that they are large-scale tasks. This is intended to make it possible for countries/organizations to “sponsor” a feature with funding. List of “epics” can be found here: https://github.com/open-sdg/open-sdg/labels/epic
Open SDG’s ability to serve as a front-end for something like .Stat is a big selling-point and is the reason that Cambodia (who already uses .Stat) is considering Open SDG.
One remaining technical challenge with the SDMX integration is importing translations from the SDMX. Because the SDMX DSD can contain translations, this needs to be implemented.

Country/subnational interest in cloning the NRP