Why a common standard

The problem in one paragraph

Every Center for Independent Living files a Program Performance Report. Every Statewide Independent Living Council runs a needs assessment and reviews consumer satisfaction. Every State Plan defines "unserved" and "underserved". Yet a Center's "consumer served" is not necessarily the next Center's; one state's needs survey cannot be laid beside another's; most State Plans define served areas by whether a Center exists rather than by how many people it reaches; and a Center's report, its state's report and its audit describe the same money without any requirement that they agree. The result is a great deal of collection and very little that can be compared.

What ILDATA.org proposes

Common definitions for the handful of terms every report uses: consumer served, information and referral contact, goal set, goal achieved, institutional transition, reporting period, and reach. Where a federal instruction exists, the definition quotes it; where it is silent, the proposal says what it adds.
A shared question bank with stable identifiers and fixed answer values, drawn from the two instruments here and open to additions. Any survey that uses a question from the bank, with its id and values unchanged, produces data that pools with every other survey that used it.
An open response format: one row per response, one column per question id, documented null handling, versioned, exportable as CSV and JSON, with contact details always in a separate file.
Reach with a denominator. Consumers served divided by the civilian noninstitutionalized population with a disability in the same geography, from the American Community Survey, reported by county, with the institutional exclusion stated every time. See Census data for your SPIL.
Data quality as a published measure. The arithmetic checks that any report should pass (subtotals equal totals, achieved never exceeds set, receiving never exceeds requesting) run on every Center every year and the results are public. See data quality.

What this is not

It is not a replacement for the federal Program Performance Report. It is a way to read it consistently and to fill the gaps around it.
It is not a mandate. Nothing here binds anyone. A SILC adopts a definition by writing it into its State Plan; a Center adopts a question by asking it.
It is not finished. Version 1 is what two instruments and nine years of public data needed. The gaps are listed on each page and the collaborate page says how to change it.

There is precedent

Several State Plans already compute a penetration rate from Center service data against Census disability counts by county, and use it to rank the areas most in need. Some state contract forms already separate Part B and Part C activity on every table, something the federal report cannot do. The pieces exist in individual states. The standard is mostly a matter of writing down the version that already works and giving it names that do not change.