IATI Canary – A bot that alerts publishers about serious data issues

[andylolz]

Rationale

Currently, publishers aren’t alerted in any way when their data breaks. So in many cases, they’re probably unaware there’s even a problem.

Proposal

• Use the dashboard to get all download errors, XML errors and validation errors
• Create a github issue for each, including the date that the problem started
• Alert the relevant publishers to the problems, using the contact email address on the registry

• The email should include some way for the pubisher to flag:

  • We are aware of the problem
  • We are dealing with the problem
  • We are aware, but don’t have bandwidth to deal with the problem (something like that)

  This information from the publisher would then be auto-added to the github issue.

[andylolz]

First issue here: the dashboard hasn’t kept track of download errors since July 2017.

IATI-Data-Dump now tracks them here: https://gist.github.com/andylolz/6b558e96422016e3f8639faefda21848

[andylolz]

This exists now! See: https://iati-canary.herokuapp.com/