humanitarian.info

In a couple of previous posts, I outlined why I think open data poses serious difficulties for the humanitarian sector. A lot of those difficulties stem from endemic weaknesses in the humanitarian sector, because at root I believe that failure has been built into the humanitarian system, and I really need to get around to explaining what I mean by that. That can wait for next time, because right here I want to lay out what I think needs to happen if humanitarian organisations are ever going to survive the changes that the information age has brought, as it relates to using data effectively.

Two things to bear in mind. First, that this is taking the perspective of organisations as they are now; but I also think that organisations will evolve into new forms in the course of this century, a greater variety of forms than the traditional “corporate” model allows (and yes, most NGOs are set up on a corporate model). Second, that all of these steps are not merely realistic, they’re actually relatively easy, and especially relatively easy compared to the path that most organisations are currently taking. The reason that they’re not being widely pursued is that they emerge from a view of the humanitarian system as just that – a system, with multiple interacting layers – rather than as a hierarchy reaching from global headquarters down into “the field”.

Training

1. Create freely available training modules and support material via e.g. Moodle, so our staff can start doing it for themselves. Then open up that training material so that anybody can benefit from it – local government, local NGOs, affected communities, national universities, anybody.
2. Create an accreditation system for info management trainers, initially based on prior experience. Don’t accredit people in “information management”, they can do a university course if they want a diploma; but accredit trainers so that you can reach into the professional training community.
3. Run facilitated online and onsite courses, provided by accredited trainers and leading to accreditation for participants. Okay, I lied – it’s okay to accredit people in information management. The reason that I hesitate about this is because accreditation only really works if there’s an infrastructure around it that recognises and value accreditation.
4. Integrate accredited info management course into existing accredited programmes (e.g. RedR, Clusters, etc). This step deals with that infrastructure issue, but only to a certain extent. There’s a lack of recognition of “management” a professional skill in the sector, which is always going to work against us.

Data sharing

1. Establish data standards, mainly to stop the UN agencies from dicking around with their data and refusing to agree on e.g. basic demographic categories. Data standards are not complicated but they are difficult, especially when people don’t get the basic point. It’s a minimum set, not an exhaustive set; it’s for practical implementation, not policy roll-out.
2. Adopt common data sets and agreements on e.g. which population figures we’re going to use. OCHA has done the groundwork on Common Operational Datasets (pdf), but I don’t know what the latest state of play is. What I do know is that by this point there should be an online interactive map with those datasets easily searchable behind it AND THERE ISN’T. ; the next step is working out how to leverage those datasets more effectively in the field to create better decision-making tools. (Thanks to Ben in the comments for correcting my ignorance, and my apologies for shouting at OCHA when I really should have checked my own bookmarks folder – and well done to all involved.)
   
3. Begin capacity building from the field-level up in managing data and using information more effectively. I can’t stress this enough – all capacity building should start as far out on the “edge” of the organisation and work inwards, not the other way around.
4. Lobby from the HQ-level down on integrating actual information into decision-making. This is where HQs have the requirement – not for info management skills, but for decision-making skills based on good info. Don’t bother sending managers on info management courses, they’re never going to be crunching spreadsheets; they need to be able to read spreadsheets and connect that with their actual work.

Advocacy

• Operational level – lobby to solve location-specific data issues using time-limited task forces, as a way to raise awareness that IM is essential for decision-making.
• Country office level – lobby to create better environments for information management within organisations and meetings, focused on staff not technology.
• Head office level – lobby to integrate data into decision-making, and for HQs to make reasonable and informed calls about what information they’re requesting from the field.
• Global level – promote of data standards, CODs and capacity building strategies, and stop having high-level meetings that pretend to be designing tools for the field.

Most people think setting principles out and getting agreements down is important. I don’t. I would drop having principles in favour of signing up agencies to a ‘pathway’ of simple practical steps which incorporate the principles at an implicit level. Introducing principles makes it possible for everybody to nod their heads at the next meeting and then do absolutely nothing to follow up. And finally, that Shorty Long track at the top has literally no relevance to the blog post, except to the extent that I believe that I AM DE JUDGE.

“I have talked to teams of students designing new de-mining tools without ever having visited a mine field, students designing tools to make charcoal without understanding how poor people improve their incomes by selling the charcoal briquettes they make, and teams of students so convinced that they will create the next revolutionary product and make a fortune doing it that they forget to talk to the customers they are designing for. If these patterns of design arrogance and lack of respect and curiosity about customers and markets become institutionalized in the hundreds of new courses now springing to teach design for the poor, their impacts will be just as trivial as design for the rich.”

- Paul Polak, The Life and Death of Big Institutions

Some people thought that my previous post on needs assessments implied that I’m really unconvinced by open data. Surprisingly that’s not the case – I know, even I was surprised that my curmudgeonly instincts failed to kick in – I’m pro-open data, although I’m typically European in being sceptical about the scale of the potential benefits. The reason that I’m pro-open data is that it’s increasingly clear that governance systems in general are unable to cope with the complexity of post-industrial organisation. We need new forms of governance, we can’t rely on our governments to generate those forms themselves, and the decisions of an informed public are the only possible source of legitimacy.

Having said that, open data in government 2.0 [Wow, has that term dated quickly.] does not necessarily mean the same as open data in the humanitarian sector; importing of principles and approaches wholesale from one sector to the other is almost never effective. In more practical terms, if governments are already signing up to release their data in general, that already covers data that might be deemed humanitarian specifically. There is almost no data which can be labelled solely ‘humanitarian’ [most of it relates to population movements] and there’s an increasing amount of ‘development’ data online. Since we’re already seeing a big push in the open data movement globally, I’m content to let that play out rather than try to shoehorn it into the humanitarian sector.

While we are seeing is movement in open data on the development side, that seems to have translated into more transparency regarding development finance, rather than a push to turn everybody into Hans Rosling. Rosling’s work is fantastic, and has done a lot to raise the visibility of development issues, it’s not intended to provide serious tools for decision-making at the national or regional level; the data simply isn’t detailed enough. That’s changing, and will continue to change, as the Age of Big Data bears down on us; but Big Data doesn’t resolve policy issues, and technocrats are often misguided in their expectations.

So what do I think open data can achieve? Simply put: more effective assistance to disaster-affected communities. What sort of data do we need to achieve that? Equally simply: operationally relevant data. I don’t care about data being shared as much as I care about data being collected; you can’t open up data that you don’t have, so our first priority should be getting decent data in the first place. The problem at the supply end is the lack of systematic data collection, which needs to be addressed with better survey work; and data should be collected solely in order to facilitate better decision-making – there’s no other reason to collect it. If that data isn’t being used for decision-making, then sharing it is irrelevant, which means that advocacy for and training in using data for decision-making is a higher priority than making data open right now.

The next consideration is that there’s always a cost to sharing data: although that cost has become substantially lower (great job, internet!), it still exists. Do the benefits of sharing data outweigh the cost? Please don’t argue that the costs are neglible, because they’re not – it’s a massive investment in an organisational change process just to get on the first rung of data sharing, there are lots of technical costs, and the potential for disaster is high (as the UK National Health System can tell you). I think the benefits outweigh the costs, but we need to build a stronger case than currently exists, which means we need to do a better job of drawing the dots between data and impact.

And this is where it gets tricky. Government 2.0 is all about transparency and accountability, and Development 2.0 is an extension of that, with an additional component of aid effectiveness. I would argue that this effectiveness component is much, much more important in Disaster 2.0 (ha!), but there’s also a tension around the role of government that a lot of people are in danger of missing. Hopefully everybody can agree that the big push for better data needs to be at country level – but humanitarian organisations frequently have a more adversarial relationship to government than UN agencies. We can’t expect MSF to participate in open data sharing with the Government of Sudan.

This isn’t just a question of context, this is a question of ensuring that humanitarian principles are preserved in any data sharing agreement: for example, if neutrality is in tension with transparency, which principle wins out? That’s a question that the current discussion around open data has simply not addressed, but it may turn out to be the most important question of all.

I realise that lolcatz are yesterday's news.

The second round of Humanitarian Innovation Fund grants have now been decided, and should be posted on the HIF large grants website before too long. Once again, the Grants Panel discussions about innovation were as interesting as the projects themselves – possibly more so this time, because I had a feeling that the level of innovation in the proposals submitted for this round was even weaker than the last round.

That evening I had a chance to catch up with Ben Ramalingam, whose work on complexity and aid is some of the most interesting research being done in the sector at the moment. We had a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion that took in landscape engineering, urban mathematics, humanitarian futurology and the relative merits of the Sandman and Lucifer comic books (I’m down with Lucifer, Ben with Sandman – but he’s going to give Lucifer another chance).

I don’t agree with Ben on everything, but his views are always interesting, and this started me thinking. Where are the interesting thinkers in the humanitarian sector? There’s a lot of thoughtful people working on aid issues (some of whom blog), but being thoughtful isn’t always enough to qualify as an interesting thinker. The blogs I linked to are consistently insightful, but they’re tightly focused on aid, without much effort to introduce tie together new ideas in an innovative way.

While I was in London for the HIF, I also had the chance to drop in on the Truth and Beauty sessions curated by Vinay Gupta. Up front, I disagree with Vinay on a lot of issues – but he has the ability to pull together widely divergent thoughts into something coherent and his views are never less than interesting. Vinay is in a different (if tangentially related) space to the humanitarian sector, and I actually struggle to think of many individuals in the humanitarian sector who have the same capacity.

Since then I’ve chatted with a few friends and colleagues, and asked them the question: who are the interesting thinkers in the humanitarian sector? So far I haven’t been able to build a list, and that worries me. The humanitarian community is struggling at the moment with a range of issues which we’re ill-equipped to deal with, and the default solution to tough challenges is to add more layers to the bureaucracy. There’s a serious lack of vision within the sector, and nobody’s close to addressing that gap.

I posted on UN Dispatch today about the risks of failing to learn from what’s gone before. Needless to say, documentation of previous humanitarian information work is thin on the ground, but that’s exactly why we need to create mechanisms for better institutional memory. The idea that Haiti was Year Zero for humanitarian information isn’t always explicit, but the general tone of a lot of online commentary definitely labours under its influence, particularly from those who don’t necessarily understand the work.

Haiti has exposed both the benefits and risks of the web-enabled response to disaster. The positive side has been written about extensively – wider awareness, greater levels of engagement, access to potentially valuable resources (whether satellite imagery or volunteer time). I’ll go on record here as believing that these are all to the good, and possibly the starting point for greater good in the future; although if we’re going to get to that future good, everybody’s going to have to check their egos at the door.

Unfortunately the negative side is almost completely ignored. Wider awareness that isn’t informed by grounded understanding is useless, and occasionally dangerous; greater levels of engagement need to harnessed in the right direction if they’re going to have any impact; and access to resources is unevenly distributed and comes loaded with assumptions that are often hidden from the people who provide those resources. The UN Dispatch blog post series is a good start but it’s no substitute for hard discussion.

Haiti also amplified another trend – the involvement of the public in debates about humanitarian principles and practice. This is something that we should welcome, but I’m a big fan of people knowing the limitations of their own experiences. I don’t feel the need to pontificate on the finer points of hospital management, because I’m not competent to discuss them; yet for some reason people feel that they’re entitled to pass judgement on the humanitarian sector based on what they just read in Wired or Newsweek.

While the recommendations in the Disaster 2.0 itself are likely to have positive impacts, they’re generally about how the humanitarian community can better utilize technology, rather than how “volunteer and technology communities” (and my word, what a frightful phrase that is) can perform better. Likewise this report on Volunteer Technology Communities does nothing more than describe what they do, rather than the impact they can have.

If we put all of this together, we can identify the problem at the heart of this debate; and possibly why some on the “V&TC” side has become increasingly defensive. In all the discussion about how social media might affect the humanitarian community, as far as I know, nobody has yet articulated a clear theory of change. That was what I was hoping for last year, when I challenged the crowdsourcing community to clearly articulate how the inputs they deliver will lead to the outputs they claim will result.

If we’re going to work actively to ensure that our use of technology is going to help anybody in post-disaster/post-conflict responses (whether 2.0 or just plain 1.0), all of us need to be much clearer about exactly how it’s going to help. I emphasise that this is a management problem, not a technology problem; and to their credit the Disaster 2.0 report writers very clearly targeted their recommendations on addressing the management issues, at least in some small part. Let’s see where this takes us.