humanitarian.info

First Monday publishes an article entitled Open Source Disaster Recovery: Case Studies of Networked Collaboration, a review of some of the initiatives that I referenced in my paper An Ill Wind? The Role of Accessible ICT following Hurricane Katrina. That paper has already discussed how these “non-traditional” voluntary efforts might fit into the broader picture of disaster response, but the First Monday article is the first time I’ve seen any discussion of how effective they might have been.

I spend enough time berating the UN and NGO community for focusing on outputs and failing to measure impact, so I’ll apply the same questions to the two projects covered by the article – Katrina PeopleFinder and the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog. The basic challenge for both projects was how to aggregate fragmented data streams; the key question for both was how to mobilise the enormous goodwill generated by the two disasters into useful resources.

With PeopleFinder, they certainly managed a huge amount of data processing and their site was clearly widely used (judging solely by the number of hits). Ethan Zuckerman characterised it fundamentally as a data entry problem in his blog entry on the history of the project, and that’s the sort of problem that’s amenable to the large scale voluntary effort that the PeopleFinder team put together.
However it’s hard to evaluate how many of those hits resulted in family reunification, and consequently it’s hard to judge whether all that effort was worth it. This is not exclusive to PeopleFinder – none of the sites running these services have been able to work out how useful they were – and to some extent it’s not relevant. The service needed to be provided, and they provided it – but it’s hard to make the case for replicating the service in other disasters if you can’t demonstrate utility.

The article cites an instance of a request for assistance by the Tamilnadu Tsunami Relief Initiative, and then goes on to excerpt a number of the responses. The article emphasises the diversity of the respondents – ministers from Scotland, graduates from Texas, psychologists from Denmark – and notes that the inititiative possibly suffered from differing expectations, conflicting agendas and high transaction costs. The article concludes that

Quantitative research investigating to what extent these volunteers actually used the blog to match their skills and resources with needs, and how good those matches were in practice, would help clarify the blog�s effectiveness in identifying and allocating resources for disaster relief.

It’s a fascinating and useful article – but it’s just a starting point for these discussions, and David Geilufe has an excellent response on his blog. There’s still no real discussion of the impact of these initiatives, the actual relief they provided or facilitated to beneficiaries. Anybody following up on this line of research should not just focus on the emerging model of collaboration for disaster relief – which is clearly interesting in itself – but what it could actually deliver.

However one of the problems with this model is that everybody involved in them has day jobs, and once the immediate disaster is over, they go back to those day jobs. And blogging.