The Statistical Information System) SIS Collaboration Community workshop is in its 9th year and continues to go from strength to strength with a greater demand and increased importance of the collaboration on statistical activities between statistical organisations, both at national and international levels.
At this year’s workshop the Community will officially launch, in open source, the .Stat Suite product, a modular set of components that aims to progressively cover the full data lifecycle (GSBPM: Design; Collect; Process; Analyse; Disseminate), and with SDMX compliant APIs (on both the input and output side), as well as connectors with main market tools, end-to-end integration with other data processing platforms already in place, including excel, is greatly facilitated. This is helping teams in statistical organisations to manage in a much more cost efficient way the different data sources they need to aggregate and set up the proper workflows ensuring quality outputs.
During the 2017 and 2018 workshops, but also in several other fora and related initiatives (especially: the UN organised SDMX Conference in Addis Ababa, October 2017; UNSD workshop on National Reporting Platforms in NY, January 2018; United Nation Statistics Commission 50th (UNSC50) Annual Session in NY in March 2019; UNSD and GPSDD Data Interoperability Guidelines; and the pilot project Advancing dissemination of SDGs and other indicators using .Stat Suite in Cambodia) we have seen a greater demand for common statistical tools and common data modelling approaches that
help to resolve many of the limitations observed today by providing a set of back-office components that can be assembled in a way that is tailored for a specific context and processes, and can bring about sustainable and standardised data management practices in each organisation.
The SIS Collaboration Community, guided by 4 principles (Community Driven; Open Source; Component-Based; Full Data Lifecycle), believes it can help to support a better and more coordinated effort to bring about a change of paradigm becoming the Reference Community for Official Statistics, and sharing, for free, the .Stat Suite that is emerging as the Reference
Plug-and-Play toolkit to build common solutions for statistical data management and dissemination.
As a first step to realising this vision, and taking into account this year will mark the official launch of the .Stat Suite as open
source, we will spend two and half days building capacity together through a series of presentations, discussions, and hands-on workshops, with an objective that each participant returns to their organisation either with a working .Stat Suite or with the knowledge to carry out the necessary steps to suitably prepare and disseminate data for use in a native SDMX solution such as the .Stat Suite.
The first two and a half days, as with the previous workshops (held in March 2011, March 2012, April 2013, April 2014, March 2015, April 2016, April 2017 and April 2018), are open sessions and the OECD extends the invitation to interested groups and organisations who may be considering using .Stat Suite for their own organisation, interested in becoming part of and contributing to the open source community, and share similar objectives as outlined above.
The SPC Statistics for Development Division is a member of the SIS-CC and currently implementing .stat to replace the NMDI database and to store the 132 Pacific Sustainable Development Indicators which will feed the Pacific Data Hub SDG Dashboard.