As part of the OpenGov Hub, we’re honored to host Publish What You Fund’s launch of the 2012 Aid Transparency Index today as the Hub’s inaugural event. Publish What You Fund (PWYF) advocates for aid transparency by increasing the availability and accessibility of comprehensive, timely and comparable aid information.  PWYF’s flagship initiative, the Aid Transparency Index, monitors the transparency of aid donors in order to track progress, encourage further transparency and hold them to account and is the only ranking of donor transparency.

This year’s Index, which ranks 72 aid organizations across 43 different indicators, shows that although donor transparency is on the rise, most aid information is still not published. The report urges donors to sign and implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which offers a global common standard for publishing aid information.

Not only are we excited to see the Hub be – from day one – both a home for people and organizations working on the open government agenda and a community gathering point, but also we’re proud that our software platform Indaba could facilitate data collection for the Index.

This year, the Index used 2,952 individual primary data points collected through 43 indicators, of which 41 were collected using Indaba.  In supporting Index on Indaba, Global Integrity worked closely with PWYF to define their information and collect it with customized settings, including workflow, user and role types, survey questionnaires, and system alerts preferences. We also provided continual training on tools for managing the data collection and publication on Indaba.

If this is getting your mind churning, we’ve got good news for you: we are in the midst of going live with a series of rolling updates designed to make Indaba easier to use and faster to set up for new projects. You can read about the most recent updates in September here, and our big-picture plan for updates here. In short, we’re beefing up our capacity for other organizations to run projects on Indaba. Ultimately we aim to promote greater access to information and more widespread use (and reuse) of data for the transparency and accountability community.

You can find the full 2012 Aid Transparency Index here, and follow the event on Twitter (Monday, October 1, 3-5 p.m., ET) using hashtag #2012aidindex.

— Nicole Valentinuzzi, Publish What You Fund

— Carrie Golden, Global Integrity