Nonprofit tech analysts Idealware released a collection of resources today that anyone can use to evaluate APIs under consideration. Titled “Getting Your Systems Talking: A Framework to Evaluate APIs and Data Exchange Features,” the guide at its core is a worksheet that walks you through more than 30 different technical questions you should ask about any new data exchange technology you're evaluating. It's free to download.

While data portability is a hot topic of the day, there hasn't been a lot of tangible work done around the details yet. Idealware's guide could make implementation of these themes much more manageable. Readers may also be interested in this related discussion about data portability use cases over at the DataPortability.org public discussion.