We propose not to progress on this suggestion at the moment.

If a set of sector codes is shared between a number of reporting organisations it does become a candidate for inclusion. The US Foreign Assistance Dashboard refers to a system of 44 sectors grouped into 9 categories, but it is not clear whether this is in fact an operational cross-government coding system.

This was part of the 1.03 proposal. Moved back into the general Modifications, Additions, Improvements forum.

Moving into the 1.05 forum for reconsideration as part of that process.

I recommend that this is NOT included. Although there are a large number of US agencies involved in aid activities this remains a national rather than international issue. We should only recognise vocabularies that have multi-national usage.

"We should only recognise vocabularies that have multi-national usage."

In one sense I agree that it's not necessarily practicable for IATI to maintain a list of all of the different vocabularies used, although a central repository of codelists, including where possible mappings to CRS / other codelists, would be really helpful.

In the meantime, I think there's a general problem that RO-type vocabularies can't always be reported in IATI at the moment in a standards-compliant way (or that there's no guidance on this). So for example, if you have a set of sectors belonging to one reporting organisation you can use RO, but if the codes belong to another organisation, or if you want to use more than one set of codes (e.g. WBSector and WBTheme, both of which are important) then you have a problem.

In the US, my understanding is that the US Framework Sector codes are likely to be the only sector codes used by some agencies for some time, given existing data and systems issues, so they're better than nothing.

Would it make sense to alter the guidance to say something like:

• if you're using a codelist not on this list, you should use RO-[your org ID]-[name-of-your-codelist]
• if you use a second codelist, your can use RO-[your org ID]-[name-of-your-second-codelist]
• if the codelist belongs to someone else, you can use OO (other org) in place of RO above

e.g. something like this

• RO-44000-WBTheme
• RO-44000-WBSector
• OO-US-SectorFramework

Would that work as a way forward? (either 1.05 or somewhere else...)

The Technical Team recognises that more work needs to be done on sector vocabularies and that we should revisit this issue in version 2.02.

As a stop gap we propose adding a second "Reporting Organisation" vocabulary.

• Add to code list Vocabulary: http://iatistandard.org/codelists/Vocabulary/
• RO2 - Reporting Organisation (2) - where reporting organisations have more than one vocabulary that they wish to reference.

NB. that in Version 2.01 this codelist will be renamed to SectorVocabulary and codes will be made language neutral (i.e. numeric)

This is being implemented via:
https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Codelists/issues/57