Community-driven approaches building data and technology capacity to narrow the digital divide.
Creating the reference open-source community for official statistics, committed to product excellence, and tackling key challenges through collaborative innovation and shared investments.
Our journey began out of necessity, recognising the common challenges we face in the realm of dissemination and production of official statistics – especially, unavailability of tools that are fit for purpose, standard compliant (SDMX) and sustainable. This led to the formation of an alliance united by shared goals and aspirations: The SIS-CC (Statistical Information System Collaboration Community).
Our community develops open-source solutions to address common requirements, through co-investment and co-innovation. Our commitment is unique in that it is not just about sharing experience or promoting good practice, but rather delivering concrete solutions accessible to all, and paving the way for future innovation through collective experimentation.
Our community is founded on a strong open-source framework and the principle of open knowledge, embodied by its two main outputs: the .Stat Suite and the .Stat Academy.
The .Stat Suite is the reference SDMX platform supporting data dissemination, and the broader data lifecycle in statistical organisations; it is currently deployed or being deployed in more than 50 statistical organisations (national statistics offices and ministries, centrals banks, regional and international organisations). The .Stat Suite is constituted of components either developed by the community or contributed by its partners, especially Eurostat and the Bank for International Settlements.
The .Stat Academy emerges as a pivotal platform to build capacity in the areas of data management, data modelling and dissemination. It offers free, self-paced, online trainings to globally enhance data skills among data practitioners – which can be completed with hands-on sessions and coaching. By mid-2024, the .Stat Academy registered more than 850 enrolled and 900 certified learners across a growing list of courses.
Our strategy is articulated around three common goals – making our data more accessible, modernising our data lifecycle, and building an inclusive data ecosystem. Our foundational principles include component-based architecture, data lifecycle coverage, community-driven dynamics, and open-source delivery model –our activities are governed under a transparent governance involving all our members and partners.
Our innovation hub constantly strives to prepare us for the future, offering ground for joint R&D activities – in 2024, for example, took place a workshop on enhancing data accessibility with generative AI. Developing a user centric posture in our organisations is another key direction for our work, as embodied by the SIS-CC User Research Task force (UTF).
Our Community governance, our priorities and achievements are constantly assessed at technical, managerial and strategy levels, in the spirit of continuous improvement. The community contributes on an ongoing basis to international fora such the UN World Data Forum, and the SDMX Global Conference, with a view to constantly identify new ways of partnering and co-constructing the solutions for the future.
