Weeknote #6: w/c 2023-09-18
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Hi all. It’s Simon here again with another tariff data standards weeknote.
This week we had our first meeting of the open stakeholder group! Yahoo!
What the stakeholder group is
The stakeholder group is a set of key posts in the international trade domain who we think collectively represent the needs of all of our users. It includes key data consumers like government system owners and data producers like tariff data managers.
The group also includes private sector representatives and people who are bringing the information in tariff data to a wide end-user base. One example is the team that runs the Online Tariff Service. The team provide key tariff information to many traders, operate their own API and also host a discussion forum. They’re well positioned to represent the views of people using their service.
We’ve proposed that this stakeholder group is responsible for making decisions on how to evolve the standard. The decisions need to be unanimous because we can’t operate a working system if any implementers diverge. The standard wouldn’t work if everyone agrees to make a change apart from a key border system for which the change would be very expensive and troublesome.
Whilst we’re proposing the stakeholder group has a finite set of named posts, that doesn’t mean that other people with an interest in the data can’t take part. Anyone will be welcome to join discussions and we’ll advertise them openly.
What happened at the meeting
The first meeting kicked off with an introduction and walk-through of our proposed governance arrangements.
I’m really happy with how engaged everyone was in the meeting! We already had insights being shared about the difficulty of keeping systems operational if the UK Tariff and EU Tariff contain the same data elements but with different semantics or function. This was a great way to start because the value of engaging with a broad stakeholder group was immediately clear to everyone on the call.
The group was happy to accept the governance proposals we made. This is significant because it means the teams who traditionally have had free reign to set up data as they see fit have seen the value in the standard and are willing to take part in delegating some decisions.
There were some stakeholders who weren’t able to make this first meeting so we can’t call the proposals fully ratified yet. I’ll be following up with them separately to get their views.
Next week is the Peer Review Group where data experts from around Government will hear about our work for the first time. I’ll hopefully be writing next week about their feedback and what the next steps are on this journey.