The Global Impact Study

The research team at the Technology & Social Change Group — working in collaboration with the Research Working Group and Country Research Teams — has finalized the guidelines for a public access inventory and taxonomy. You can view the inventory template, the accompanying memo with instructions, and additional instructions for the local taxonomy.

The inventory will help quantify what is being studied and differentiate venues for survey design and data analysis. It is intended to capture the data that exist for facilities that are currently operating, not those planned for the future.

The taxonomy will allow for understanding of facility type without having to assign a nomenclature that may vary in definition across countries. It aims to provide data from which facilities can be mapped and selected for in-depth research. The taxonomy can be divided into two distinct parts: global and local.  Inputs that go into both taxonomies will be obtainable solely from existing administrative data for all facilities with a high confidence. They will also provide a high-level description of the venue.

The global taxonomy is composed of a discrete set of fields that cannot be adjusted in order to make the taxonomy extensible when we add new countries (ideally, a model for any country in the world).

The local taxonomy, however, will allow researchers to include data unique to their countries and vital to understanding facilities. Examples include type of NGO or the presence of infomediary services.  Although these types of data will not be universally applicable (and thus not appropriate for the global taxonomy), they may nonetheless hold high-level importance within the country context.  Again, this assumes that these data can be collected from existing sources with a high level of confidence (i.e., without any additional surveys) and will be available for all venues.  (See the PowerPoint presentation with instructions for the local taxonomy.)

Country Research Teams will submit completed templates by November 21, 2008.  We will then input the data into a data depository repository, which will likely be open to the public by early 2009.