Overview & current situation
Why data access is important
The community needs accurate and open access to the data involved with Catalyst so that it can make tools, insights and improvements to the governance and funding process. As well as being able to read data the community will also need to be able to control their own data and make additions and updates where it makes sense so that the community can start to move away from the existing centralised platforms such as Ideascale. For example a proposer should be able to add media content about their funded proposal as they progress the execution of their proposal so the community can verify their progress.
What data access is currently available
Data access is roughly as follows:
- Insight sharing data - Data collected at the start of the process in Ideascale is not made available outside the process however is not data used in the rest of the funding process.
- Proposal data - Currently the community has partial access to proposal data submitted into Ideascale when the data is pulled by IOG and pushed into a community repository like in the AIM community advisor tool. Other ways to access the data would be to scrape the Ideascale website.
- Assessment data - Assessments from community advisors and reviews of assessment data from veteran community advisors are made available in Google sheets.
- Voting results - Voting results are made available in a PDF file and Google sheet format
- Reporting data - An overview of whether proposers are reporting progress on their proposals is recorded in Google forms and overview information is shared in Google sheets.
Recent progress
- Google sheets - IOG have improved the data access by ensuring much of what gets released is made available in Google sheets. The benefit of Google sheets is you can access that data via the Google API or download it as a CSV file to import elsewhere programatically.
- Open data plan - IOG has shared they are in the process of improving access to the Catalyst data for the community to use more easily.
Issues & blockers
Data access issues