Giving Tuesday Network Data Model

This document describes the data model for outward-facing representations of the Giving Tuesday network.

The immediate spur for the creation of the model is a proposed tool (known internally as “the wiki”) primarily intended for the use of Giving Tuesday Campaign Leaders, but it also serves as a data store for internal use by GT staff.

The rest of this doument describes the five “Content Types” of the wiki: Movements, Campaigns, Activities, Leaders, and Organizations. These constitute a working “ontology” – a description of the kinds of things that exist – for our network. As our understanding of our network deepends, this ontology may also change.

A final tab describes our “Taxonomies” – the categories we use to classify individual entries in the Wiki. These taxonomies are in flux, and may of the individual terms have yet to be determined.

A reminder: the model does not completely describe the representation of entities withing a (planned!) centralized store of network data, and the addition of a graphing db mayb result in changes to our internal representations.

A “Movement” is our top-level category for Ggiving Tuesday activist groups. A Movement is usually located in a specific place – a country, a province or state, or even a city – and persists over time, from year to year. Movements run Campaigns, and usually have Leaders associated with them. Often they are sponsored by Organizations, but not always.

Giving Tuesday collects many types of data about Movements, but most are not visible on the Wiki. Here we track the following fields:

Field	Type	Req’d	Description
Title	String	Y	Name of the Movement
Description	String	Y	The Movement’s self-description, hopefully provided by them
Scale	Taxonomy	Y	Geographical scale: Global, Regional, National, Local, Network
Focus	Taxonomy	N	Thematic focus of movement, if any. This taxonomy needs restructuring
Hashtag	String	Y	Hashtag associated with the movement
Active/Inactive	Boolean	Y	Whether or not the movement is currently active
Logo	Image	Y	Logo associated with the movement, if any
Location	Geotag	N	Location, if any; use gazeteer service to parse location and provide geographical data (e.g. GeoJSON)
Website	String	N	URL for movement
Facebook	String	N	URL of Facebook Page
Instagram	String	No	Instagram user
Twitter	String	No	Twitter User
Tiktok?	String	No	Is Tiktok ID important? Stored?
Organization	Relationship (2-way 1-to-1)	No	ID of Sponsoring Organization
Leaders	Relationship (2-way 1-to-many)	No	ID’s of one or more current leaders of the whole movement

We also link to information about the lead Organization, known Activities, and past and present Leaders associated with campaigns and activities that the movement has run.

Movements may also include attachments, such as PDF’s or Word documents. The main purpose of any such attachments is to help leaders of other movements organize their efforts.

While the word “campaign” has a number of meanings throughout GT, we use this word to mean an organized, sustained drive, usually taking place over a period of weeks or months, always associated with a Movement, and generally consisting of a number of Activities. The official syntax uses similar wording: “Coordinated efforts that leverage the GivingTuesday brand to boost generosity”. We track the following information about Campaigns:

Field	Type	Req’d	Description
Title	String	Y	Name of the Campaign
Description	String	Y	The Campaign’s self-description, hopefully provided by them
Movement	Unique ID	Y	associated movement (should we allow more than one?)
Leaders	Unique Ids	N	leaders of the campaign, if not already part of the Movement
Start	Date	N	Approximate Start Date of Campaign
End	Date	N	Approximate End Date of Campaign
Location	Geotag	N	Location, if any; use gazeteer service to parse location and provide geographical data (e.g. GeoJSON)
Hashtag	String	N	Hashtag for the specific campaign (especially if distinct from the hashtag of the campaign’s Movement)

Note that most details are already provided by the associated Movement.

An Activity is a well-definied, time-limited action undertaken by a Campaign. Very focussed Campaigns will often only have one Activity, but large Campaigns may have many. For Activities, we track the folowing information:

Field	Type	Req’d	Description
Title	String	Y	Name of the Activity
Description	Text	Y	The Activity’s self-description, hopefully provided by them
Campaign	Unique ID	Y	See below for complexity issues
Leader	Unique ID	N	Campaign leaders, if distinct form Campaign and movement leaders
Start	Date	N	Approximate Start Date of Activity
End	Date	N	Approximate End Date of Activity
Hashtag	String	N	Hashtag for the specific activity (especially if distinct from the hashtag of the activity’s Campaign or Movement
Activity Type	Taxonomy	N	Taxonomy terms as yet undetermeined 2022-09-08 Thu
Location	Geotag	N	Location, if any; use gazeteer service to parse location and provide geographical data (e.g. GeoJSON)
post-mortem	Text	N	Possible self-evaluation of the activity, with suggestions for improvements
Complete/Incomplete	Boolean	N	Might be a pain to update this. Leave out?

Some chance that this structure will lead to annoying data entry for one-off campaigns. Maybe when creating an activity there can be a “one-off” toggle button which either creates associated campaign/movement entities (conditionally adding relevant fields for input), or uses a dummy id that we can search on later. hte

An Organization is a formal or informal entity that helps to organize one or more Movements, Campaigns, or Activities. Some Organizations have only brief or fleeting contact with Giving Tuesday, while others have a deep ongoing relationship.

Question: Exactly what information about Organizations should the wiki display? Will depend a bit on what we expect this tool to do.

Field	Type	Req’d	Description
Title	String	Y	Name of the Organization
Description	Text	Y	The Organization’s self-description, preferably including their commitment to generosity
Organization Type	Taxonomy	N	Type of organization. Terms TBD
Location	Geotag	N	Location, if any; use gazeteer service to parse location and provide geographical data (e.g. GeoJSON)
Logo	Image	N	Logo
Active/Inactive	Boolean	N	Is this org actively engaged with GT?

Leaders are the heart of the GT network. Leaders are individuals who have taken responsibility for a particular Movement, Campaign, or Activity. GT works with many leaders, and we Have a somewhat elaborate classifications system for them.

One of the main reasons the Wiki exists is to allow leaders to discover each other more easily, so this content type is in some ways the backbone of the Wiki.

For Leaders we track the following information:

Field	Type	Req’d	Description
Title	String	Y	Name of the Leader
Description	Text	Y	The Leader’s self-description, hopefully provided by them
Leadership Group	Taxonomy	?	Global/Country, Community, Spark, other?
Interests	Taxonomy	N	Where do we get this? Should this taxonomy be shared with Movement/Campaign themes?
Active/Inactive	Boolean		Is this person still working with GT?
Profile Picture	Image	N	Self-selected profile picture
Contact Information			What ought we to provide here?
Website	String	N	URL for leader’s personal site
Facebook	String	N	URL of Facebook Page
Instagram	String	No	Instagram user
Twitter	String	No	Twitter User
Tiktok?	String	No	Is Tiktok ID important? Stored?

Note: We track other demographic data about leaders in a private DB, and GT staff should use the private DB to record this information. The Knowledge Base gives leaders an opportunity to describe and promote themselves within the community of leaders; GT can export this information to use in internal analyses.

We use several taxonomies to understand our network. These may shift as we come to understand the network better. Each is listed below in a subheading. At present, none of these has an adequate list of terms.