# Monitoring & learning

It is important to monitor the adoption and use of standards: particularly those with a policy goal. Through monitoring, and reflecting on adoption, there are opportunities to identify ways to improve the standard, it's documentation and associated tools, and to develop interventions that create a thriving ecosystem of publishers and users around a standard.

There are many different aspects to monitoring and learning:

- **Pipeline and publishers** - tracking how many organisations have expressed interest in the standard, started adopting it, or successfully published.

- **Validation** - tracking how much of the data produced is valid against the standard's schema, or against additional rulesets, and identifying common interoperability issues.

- **Coverage** - tracking the relative levels of use for particular fields, data elements and codelists, as well as looking at the use of extensions or additional fields in standards that support this.

- **Quality and usability** - tracking whether data is clear, accurate and usable, and being put into use.

- **Community** - tracking the size and levels of activity in the community around the standard, identifying whether a market is emerging around it, and looking at the range of contributors to standard development.

## Components

The following components are often used as part of a monitoring strategy.

- [Online validator](../components/validator)
- [Publication statistics dashboard](../components/publication_statistics_dashboard)
- [Registry of datasets](../components/registry_of_datasets)

## Patterns

The following approaches can form part of a monitoring strategy:

- **Quality frameworks** - that can judge the 'level' of publication, and incentivise publishers to improve their data.
- **Setting targets** - for the number of publishers, valid data, or number of community contributions. Measuring against targets can help keep engagement and implementations on track.
- **Individual publisher feedback reports** - offering an opportunity for regular deep-dive engagement with publishers.
- **Tool certification** - either self-certified, or with external certification - as a means to engage tool developers, check and learn from the way data is being used.