humanitarian.info

… for one very good reason, and that’s because I’m not at the Global Sympsium +5 in Geneva. However it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, since it’s a pretty big deal. I’m also not liveblogging the NetHope Bi-Annual Summit in Panama, and that’s because I’m not there either. I’m sure that there are good explanations for my otherwise inexplicable absences, but that’s not important right now.

The Symposium +5 is being held five years after the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange (hence the +5 title - do keep up). That first symposium was a very mixed bag - it was the first time that the various actors in the sector had come together, so it was a very big deal. Because it was the first time, however, it was a little unfocused - nobody was really sure where the sector was going, although we weren’t short of ideas.

The Final Statement [pdf] that came out of that meeting wasn’t a bad one, but I had a lot of concerns about whether any progress would be made on the key points. This was partly because the wording was quite vague, as always with consensus documents, but mainly because there was (and remains) a lack of leadership in the perenially fragmented humanitarian sector. So where are we, five years later?

In the period since the first symposium, the entire technology scene has changed significantly; the increasing involvement of private sector actors, the continued problems of GIS and the rise of accessible mapping, the increase in (in)security as an information issue, the use of ICT to respond to disasters in new ways, more dedicated humanitarian applications like Sahana, increased investment in emergency telecommunications - the list could go on for a while.

Five years later, I would generally say that my concerns were entirely justified, and we really haven’t made much concrete progress on the key areas we discussed at that first meeting. The changes I’ve listed above have all been external - we haven’t seen anything really revolutionary happening in the sector itself (yet) - and none of them were related to the work of the first symposium.

Out of the best practices listed in that original document, I think we’ve only managed one - to maximise resources by expanding partnerships, but even this has frequently been because the partners have approached us, rather than vice versa (there are some exceptions, particularly in areas such as remote sensing). The other best practices, and the recommendations that came out of them? Preparedness, quality control, user requirements, appropriate technology - as far as I can see, we’ve pretty much just continued doing the same as we were before.

There has been progress , but it’s been slow, painful and not handled well. We can definitely point to some achievements, but nowhere near enough to be able to say that we’ve achieved the (fairly basic) goals we set ourselves with the first set of recommendations. I’m not happy about that at all, and I don’t feel like I’ve been able to contribute to that progress as much as I’d have liked (which is one of the reasons why this year has been one of reflection about what I can do to improve that in future).

So what can we expect from the Global Symposium +5? I don’t know that there’ll be much in-depth reflection on our progress (or lack of it), but there should be. We need to congratulate ourselves on the areas where we have made progress, particularly in order to work out why we’ve made progress in those areas and how we can capitalise on it. Equally, we need to be critical of our shortcomings, because that’s really the only way that we’ll be able to move forward.

So why am I not at the Global Symposium? I think it’s simply this: I don’t have much faith in the humanitarian community as it currently operates to live up to the expectations that we set for it. I see a lot of interesting things happening, but mostly outside the “official” channels. However a number of those projects (such as BrightEarth) are represented at the Symposium, and the organisers should be congratulated on reaching out widely. The participants list for the event has a lot of names on it that have been involved in the most important work in this sector, and who I trust absolutely to continue that work.

Yet I don’t really believe that change in this sector will come at the headquarters level or from meetings like this - although it’s important to get the support of senior decision-makers, discussions at this level more often hinder development than promote it. These events have value as networking opportunities, but there is always the question of whether that justifies their cost - the first Symposium was valuable just for getting people in the same room, but we should be past the stage where this is the biggest output we can manage. I am not saying that nothing useful will come out of the Symposium, and I’m hoping that the Working Groups in particular will have some interesting things to say.

However the value of events like this depends on you accepting the assumption that the best way forward in this area is the inter-governmental approach that dominates the UN and other similar bodies, where the aim is to build consensus, issue vision statements and all shake hands over dinner. Yet information management in the humanitarian sector is the meeting point of two strands - organisational development and information technology - both of which go against that model. We are (ironically) failing to take advantage of the technology that would enable us to take a distributed approach to the sector and, as a result, we’re still playing catch-up.