Inclusive Growth Communities: New Strategies for Prosperity

DataStorm: Stepping Towards Interoperability

Giving Compass' Take: • DataStorm (via Feedback Lab) talks about how we collect data and share it, while cultivating a true spirit of collaboration across organizations. • How can we break through obstacles in achieving this interoperability? Building trust is essential. • Here are ways to make data more available and accessible. When you collaborate on writing a document or on filling in a spreadsheet on Google docs, you are doing it. When you get together in rooms to talk strategy, you are also doing a version of it. But in the first case you’re co-creating data and in the second you are trusting the other people in the room to interpret their data correctly. We are asking: What would it take to drive down the cost of team collaboration on a data level, instead of just on a strategy level (where we trust the other’s interpretation of data)? Lack of trust is a big deal. Here are just a few of the perspectives in any room of collaborators: Data Scientist: “About 90 percent of the work is cleaning data and preparing them for computers to analyze.” Aid Actor: “About 900 percent of the work is getting management to understand which numbers affect reality.” Local Change Agent: “Leaders live in their own world and their numbers don’t reflect our reality.” In today’s international development world, the local change agents are usually excluded from the room. The data people are usually called just before the meeting and again long afterwards, to prove an idea worked. Aid actors swallow up the seats and control how and when others participate. This guarantees failure. The solution is to change the way teams work together, so that everyone contributes in a meaningful way to what is created and how we define “success.” Recent efforts from USAID (Localworks) and DFID (UK Aid Connect) are heavily focused on this approach.