fedspendingtransparency
Proposed Element: Tagging Foreign Assistance
To recap an issue raised in the Treasury/OMB considerations thread: Oxfam USA supports the comments submitted by Publish What You Fund and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network regarding the need for separate data element that designates spending as foreign assistance:
Publish What You Fund and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network submitted comments to the DATA Act consultation last November. Please see: http://publishwhatyoufund.org/files/2014/11/MFAN-PWYF-response-to-Federal-Register-Notice-on-DATA-Act.pdf
Our main concern remains "tagging" information. Tagging allows different types of information to be easily identified. For example domestic versus foreign assistance spending.
All foreign assistance information should be tagged so that it can be easily consumed by others including the Foreign Assistance Dashboard if needed/wanted. The tagging system used by the DATA Act appears to be the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). From the NAICS we would recommend all foreign assistance information to be tagged as: 928120 International Affairs.
Like Oxfam America, InterAction also supports the comments submitted by Publish What You Fund and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network in November 2014: http://publishwhatyoufund.org/files/2014/11/MFAN-PWYF-response-to-Federal-Register-Notice-on-DATA-Act.pdf.
In particular, we believe it is critical that all foreign assistance information be tagged as such so that it can be easily consumed by others, including the Foreign Assistance Dashboard.
Just to reiterate @pwyf supports this issue, related to discussion with @HerschelC under issue #8
I have added this as a story candidate in our schema workstream: https://federal-spending-transparency.atlassian.net/browse/SCHEM-230
