How do we put our own statistics into the NRP

In addition to hosting the NRP, you can use GitHub to collect input from data providers and maintain version control. There are five basic steps, but you can customize your approach as needed.

A) Conduct a Needs Assessment

1. To assess availability of national data for reporting SDG indicators, we convened an Expert Group. This includes:
   • policy experts who have contributed to the formulation of sustainable development goals, targets, and the specification of indicators
   • Federal statistical agency experts engaged in the production of official Federal statistics relevant to the SDG indicators or contribute to the specification of SDG indicators.
2. This is the web-based survey (USG SDG Data Needs Survey) we distributed to our Expert Group for our assessment.

B) Identify Data Providers

1. The Expert Group identifies Federal data providers for each indicator for which Federal data are available. For statistical indicators, data providers are staff from Federal statistical agencies. For non-statistical indicators, data providers are generally staff from Federal policy agencies.
2. In some cases, the US is not able to identify suitable official data sources to calculate official national statistics for SDG indicators. In a portion of these, the US reports official statistics for similar (i.e., proxy) indicators. These are noted in the NRP national metadata under “Actual Indicator Reported.” In other cases, the US examines other, non-official data sources to assess their quality. If found suitable, the US documents (or “curates”) the data source, calculates an official statistic, and provides the appropriate metadata.

C) Train Data Providers to Input National Statistics

1. Data providers submit statistics through their GitHub accounts using a spreadsheet interface.
2. For each indicator, data providers also submit national metadata to accompany the global metadata provided by UNSD. For a detailed explanation of how the US trained its data providers, watch this webinar or read this training manual.

D) Verify the Submitted Data

1. Statistics and metadata submitted by providers are routed to a non-public staging area on GitHub for review. Then, a notice is sent to reviewers by email from GitHub.
2. You authorize reviewers of submissions. When an email notice is received, the reviewer clicks on a GitHub link included in the email, and then selects a specific review (or ‘pull’) request. The data provider and her/his exact changes will be visible to your reviewer.
3. Reviewers examine submissions for incompleteness or function errors. They can then approve by clicking on ‘Confirm Merge,’ request clarifications or additional information from data providers using ‘Comment,’ or disapprove by clicking on ‘Close.’

E) Report National Statistics

1. After you have approved the submission from your data provider, the statistics and metadata will be viewable to the public.
2. In the US, we update our NRP through a clearly marked ‘staging’ or testing site before merging with the ‘master,’ or official site that the public can find online.
3. TODO: Instructions for refreshing the master site with content from the staging site are under development, and will be added here.