Agreement: Use The need to use country codes for storing and analysing data, rather than names, are obvious: country names vary by language, have variations within the same language, can be ambiguous, and change from time to time. PSI has historically used 2-letters ISO codes, which normally are part of the internet domains for a country.
But 2-letters iso codes have shortcomings, including many collisions with the actual country name/ sound. 3-letters ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes provide a lot of combinations when compared with 2-letters codes, resulting in more ‘guessable’ country codes. It also eliminates the “NO” (Norway) and “NA” (3-letters ISO code for the country)ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are three-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1.Namibia) cases, which in computer code could be misinterpreted as logical operators. Last, the FHIR community, the standard that PSI is now deploying across its digital interventions, primarily uses 3 letters ISO codes.
Agreement: PSI will use from early 2023 ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 for:
Storing country as a property/ value on its databases
Naming of databases/ storage instances
Naming of workspaces in the different management system: MS Teams, Confluence, Monday.com
Setting user security at row level for data analysis
Folder and File naming
Summary - reasoning behind the decision to move to 3-letters ISO codes for countries
Enhanced readability across user bases
most used coding system across the FHIR community
3-letter codes are harder for machines to misinterpret
Further reading:
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