Reduce COFOG/GFSM requirement

[openspending]

Reduce COFOG/GFSM requirement

[markbrough]

Broadly agree with this. IATI has been working for some time on a methodology for linking donors' functional classifications with partner countries' administrative classifications. This is derived from CRS and COFOG and based on some quite extensive analysis of the functional components that tend to occur within different partner country budgets. That might also be quite useful here. Happy to talk further about that if it would be helpful (including why COFOG itself wasn't used). See also: further background; mapping table.

[rufuspollock]

+1 on making this RECOMMENDED rather than MUST.

@markbrough very useful comments.

[trickvi]

@markbrough that would be hugely helpful. This is not an easy decision to make because we kind of sacrifice the cross country comparability with this but it might be something we need to do. We haven't begun discussing this but would really love to have a chat when we have wrapped our heads around it.

[pudo]

What is the design idea here, are you making a budget data standard, or a budget standard? If it's the former, I don't feel that a requirement (or even a recommendation) towards COFOG has lost anything in it. Mapping is cool, but after it has been done the result is no longer the given budget but an unofficial re-interpretation of the budget. Is that a valuable thing to standardize?

[rufuspollock]

FIXED. At the moment no COFOG in there and even where we introduce content in #34 we will likely keep this less strict.