It was created by the UN’s secretary general “to make concrete recommendations on bringing about a data revolution in sustainable development.”  It seeks to identify “the transformative actions needed to respond to the demands of a complex development agenda.” The post-2015 development agenda acknowledges the importance of usable data for “informed decision-making, monitoring of progress, and evaluation of outcomes.”

Goals:

• Improving data production and use
• Closing data gaps to prevent discrimination
• Building capacity and data literacy in ‘small data’ and big data analytics
• Modernizing systems of data collection
• Liberating data to promote transparency and accountability
• Developing new targets and indicators

Publications:

• A World That Counts: Mobilising The Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (November 2019, 32p): the report is intended to support 33 post-2015 data revolution initiatives supported by the UN. It highlights two global challenges: invisibility (gaps in what we know from data, and when we find out) and inequality (gaps between those with and/or without information, and what they need to know to make their own decisions). 

Note: This group appears to have fed ideas to other groups and may now be out of business.