OCHA +5 Symposium fallout shelter
Unlike me, Sanjana did attend the +5 Symposium, but he wasn’t too impressed. He’s posted some thoughts on why exactly that was, including a post entitled “Where was the innovation?” where his perspective can be summed up best by a single line:
There was not a single point that came up during the discussions that I had not covered in this blog, sometimes over a year ago.
If we put it in those terms, I’d guess that not a single point came up at the Symposium that hasn’t been discussed in the field within the last 2-3 years. There’s always going to be a lag between innovation as it happens in the field and mainstreaming that innovation into the agencies – for example, GIS is still not part of the basic kit a decade after it was first introduced to the sector – but the way our organisations are set up actually prevents that from happening.
Sanjana has an interesting perspective on the event, which I would characterise as being an informed external, and – while in general terms I can’t disagree with his overall frustration – I find myself simultaneously agreeing and disagreeing with him on several points.
For example,
it was fascinating to see so many nit-picking over turgid and banal text instead of forging ahead with a compelling vision of the future with technologies and practices that could help address an overwhelmingly myopic, self-referential and ossified humanitarian ethos.
Unfortunately that whole nitpicking thing is the way the United Nations works. Not just the UN, though; any negotiation process relies on nit-picking of minutaie in order to ensure agreement, and any civil service relies on banal text in order to make sure that there is as little ambiguity as possible in those agreements. (I’m not sure what the “myopic, self-referential and ossified humanitarian ethos refers to – Sanjana, can you shed some light on that for me?)
However I have the feeling that what he’s really talking about is the focus on processes over products, which I completely agree is one of the most difficult things about working in this system and was one of the reasons why I didn’t attend. We need to make sure our processes are a solid foundation for our work – but the moment that those processes become ends in themselves, rather than means to a particular end, is the moment when they stop being valuable.
Fundamentally of course, it is only the UN and within it, perhaps only OCHA that can lead international agreement and awareness on best practices in humanitarian aid. This makes it vital for OCHA itself to understand its own serious limitations. Sadly, inextricably entwined in in the essential conservatism and inter-agency bickering of the UN, OCHA is severely hampered in its potential to recognise, leave aside nurture, innovation.
It won’t surprise many people to learn that I disagree that it is only the UN that can – or even should – lead international agreement on best practices in humanitarian aid. The UN and its agencies are only one part of the humanitarian community, with the Red Cross movement and the NGO community each having different mandates and requirements.
We need to ask if the UN really is best-placed to lead in this particular area, on two counts. Discussions within the UN inevitably come with a huge amount of political wrangling between agencies, which slow the process down and marginalise the other two major groups in the humanitarian community, as Sanjana recognised above. In addition the UN has no formal authority over those two other groups, and so it has to rely on goodwill to secure their co-operation – and there often isn’t much goodwill to draw on.
So what might take the place of the current UN-led processes? It’s difficult to see, but personally I advocate a decentralised, practitioner-based majority-consensus approach, rather than a centralised, policy-based directive approach such as the one we have now. There’s no reason why such an approach can’t deliver what we need, but it needs people to change the way they think about their work, and it seems unlikely that this will happen anytime soon.
One telling example was when Anuradha Vittachi wowed the plenary with her demonstration of Second Life, which of course for those of us who partook in Strong Angel III last year and moreover who have used it and written about it for a number of years, was nothing new… Sadly yet tellingly, few in the room had thought on similar lines.
To be fair, why should they? I think that Sanjana misses one key point that I often forget myself; most practitioners in this sector spend most of their day fighting fires, either metaphorically within their own organisation or literally in disaster responses. Most of them don’t have the time to follow what’s happening in Second Life and we shouldn’t be condemning them for that.
More frankly, Second Life simply isn’t that relevant. I agree that there are definitely opportunities to use online simulations for training purposes, but even those opportunities cannot and should not replace real-life training. There are ways in which humanitarian organisations can use Second Life and similar services, but given the resource constraints within the sector – the perpetually low training budgets, for example – it’s hard to justify spending a huge amount of time on them.
For the moment, they’ll remain interesting distractions, not core tools, until they reach a level of maturity that enables them to be incorporated more easily into the workflow. I’m not against introducing technological innovation into the humanitarian community, but we have to be aware that there are costs attached to doing so. In each and every case, we have to ask is that price worth paying for the return that we’ll get and, in the long run, how will it help beneficiaries?
Another was the story recounted to me of how some involved in the UN involved in the organisation of the Symposium recoiled in horror at the use of Google Groups to disseminate information and share documents amongst presenters attending the Symposium and how it was suggested (nay, ordered) that an archaic proprietary system that, get this, required all those who wished to be part of the group to register with the UN, was used instead.
This part, I have no disagrement with. There are tendencies within most organisations, public and private, to choose proprietary, closed platforms rather than go for the open option. In some of the work I’ve done with IFRC recently, one of the big debates is whether to allow non-IFRC staff onto their intranet/extranet, since a lot of their partners need to be involved in ongoing discussion. This is an area where we do need to be careful, but only on grounds of confidentiality and security, particularly for beneficiaries.
When you’re organising a Symposium which is specifically trying to get non-UN actors to attend, the idea of keeping planning internal to the UN just makes no sense at all. We have to get away from this mentality that fences off knowledge within organisations, because it’s just counter-productive. This leads neatly to Sanjana’s final point:
These be dinosaurs in an age of ad-hoc, needs driven information exchange who are the most serious challenge to progress.
On this final point, I agree and disagree with Sanjana. I’m afraid that we don’t live in “an age of ad-hoc, needs driven information exchange” – or at least, only a tiny minority of us do. However he’s right that these are dinosaurs (big lumbering things they are too), but they still rule the earth and so we need to take account of them.
If they are dinosaurs, then, why do they still rule the earth? It’s because the environment that we work in – an environment largely defined by governments and other inter-governmental organisations – remains conducive to them. In this sense, they’re not the most serious challenge to progress, and in fact they are probably critical to progress given the nature of that environment.
However, we all need to play to our strengths. The UN has strengths in terms of policy development and operating at the intergovernmental level; as Sanjana points out, however, it is essentially conservative, and so it is clearly not the best place for technology to be incubated.
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It would take far too long to make detailed comments on the above posts, but I also agree and disagree with both bloggers on many issues.
Having been involved with all of the Symposia, my main reflection on this last meeting is that over the last five years the humanitarian sector has developed a large body of undifferentiated knowledge and expertise in the area of humanitarian information management. There is really some excellent professional work going on out there.
However, there are still some serious impediments to progress includng the bureaucratic sludge that we all have to wade through in the UN system, as well as the fact that Paul rightly pointed out “most practitioners in this sector spend most of their day fighting fires, either metaphorically within their own organisation or literally in disaster responses”
My main personal observation is that I think humanitarian IM suffers from an inward looking perspective, and does not benefit or learn enough from the progress made in the “easier” worlds of private industry or the academic sector.
This progress I refer to sometimes is as simple as the evolution of terminology and language that helps us express and differentiate our knowledge.
Terms like ’social design’ ‘visualisation’ or ‘interaction design’ were not used, even when people were talking about these concepts, and I feel that that is a symptom that the humanitarian IM community is not yet plugged into the growing networks of people who have developed significant transferable expertise in these areas.
For example, we still talk about rapid assessment without plugging into the professional expertise of either pollsters or epidemiologists, and I think that opening up our perspectives to this outside expertise will be the key to progress.
Two last points about innovation. As Sanjana, and I were both in the same working group I think we can both take partial responsibility for the lack of innovative ideas that flowed. That being said, I feel that the prevailing mood was characterised by a mature reluctance to talk about over-hyped concepts like Second Life, as we have all been to enough conferences that just perpetuate the hype, rather than discussing real innovation for real people.
Personally, I am just trying to be part of the solution.
Craig
Craig Duncan
2 Nov 07 at 19:02
Dear Paul,
Thanks for an entire post based on my own! Three points demand a response.
“I think that Sanjana misses one key point that I often forget myself; most practitioners in this sector spend most of their day fighting fires, either metaphorically within their own organisation or literally in disaster responses. Most of them don’t have the time to follow what’s happening in Second Life and we shouldn’t be condemning them for that.”
While it may be true of others, my life, my work and that of InfoShare in Sri Lanka has NEVER happened at a time of peace when there weren’t fires, and bloody ones at that, burning. My entire life has been spent in violent conflict and most of my work and writing that articulates avenues for peace and facilitates alternative perspectives to the status quo has ironically, and particularly in the past 2 years, decreased my own security and that of my family. I am acutely aware of the pressures of the field – but this to me is no excuse to hold hostage one’s imagination to what’s only possible here and now. Systems I have contributed to the design of in the field of peacebuilding, human rights, citizen journalism and peace negotiations in particular have pushed the envelop of design and ICT in fields that have often had little or no significant real world case studies (as opposed to academic tomes) on how technology can be used, WITHIN cycles of violence, to support effective conflict resolution mechanisms. My point is that it is because I do and have followed innovation on the Internet and web that I have been able to spark similar innovations in the field using technologies often developed for other purposes. An example is our use of Groove Virtual Office, way back in 2004, for a mediation process called One Text that brought many stakeholders in the conflict together to thrash out core issues related to the conflict in a virtual environment (http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/one-text-negotiations-and-collaboration-platform-in-sri-lanka/).
“There are tendencies within most organisations, public and private, to choose proprietary, closed platforms rather than go for the open option. In some of the work I’ve done with IFRC recently, one of the big debates is whether to allow non-IFRC staff onto their intranet/extranet, since a lot of their partners need to be involved in ongoing discussion. This is an area where we do need to be careful, but only on grounds of confidentiality and security, particularly for beneficiaries.”
Agree, as you do with me. This is a rather vexing issue in that it is almost impossible to come up with a one size fits all solution. I’ve been involved in discussions on information security in fields ranging from SSTR to human rights systems to humanitarian aid collaboration systems and it’s a mine field. Encourage you to read my post here – http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/complex-political-emergencies-and-humanitarian-aid-systems-design/ – which also points to a conversation I had with Nigel Snoad from MHS on this very point.
Finally, regarding Second Life, you say:
“More frankly, Second Life simply isn’t that relevant. I agree that there are definitely opportunities to use online simulations for training purposes, but even those opportunities cannot and should not replace real-life training. There are ways in which humanitarian organisations can use Second Life and similar services, but given the resource constraints within the sector – the perpetually low training budgets, for example – it’s hard to justify spending a huge amount of time on them.”
What is relevant or not I feel cannot be determined by you or I. What I attempted to suggest was that at the UN OCHA conference, many saw Second Life for the first time, when some of us had used it over a number of years and had no illusions whatsoever as to how, when and where it could be useful or not. I wasn’t promoting Second Life as a panacea or as a replacement for real world training. However, Craig’s assertion of a “mature reluctance” I believe is being rather charitable – innovation is about imagination tethered to realities which may not be our own. To constantly run down technologies because they do not fit our own interests, frame of reference or experience is foolish as it blinkers one’s vision to a very limited and limiting range of experience to draw lessons from. Craig’s assertion is also, I humbly submit, essentially dishonest – I don’t think many in the room would have recognised Second Life had they seen it. It was in this light nothing to do with mature deliberation trumping juvenile ideas, it was simply to do with an ignorance of real technologies that are maturing apace for real people. Two posts of mine explore the potential and (severe) limitations of Second Life:
http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/avatars-and-politics-using-second-life-for-political-activism/
http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/avatars-and-politics-using-second-life-for-political-activism/
Stay well,
Sanjana
Sanjana Hattotuwa
3 Nov 07 at 8:33
Paul,
My apologies, the links on what I’ve written on Second Life are in addition to what’s there in the last post, the following:
http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/online-dispute-resolution-and-second-life/
http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2006/08/26/second-life-for-humanitarian-aid-and-peacebuilding/
Sanjana
Sanjana Hattotuwa
3 Nov 07 at 8:55
Craig: Thanks for your points about the parochial nature of information management in the humanitarian sector. Although we have come a long way, both in terms of working constructively with the private sector and leveraging expertise from other organisations, we still have a long way to go. Interesting point about the language that was used at the Symposium – I think it supports Sanjana’s point that many of the people working on this inside our organisations suffer from very limited vision, and generally aren’t tracking new developments in technology.
Paul Currion
5 Nov 07 at 14:26
Paul, Sanjana, and Craig…
The OCHA +5 Symposium doesn’t need a fallout shelter…it wasn’t meant to be the definitive event or the ultimate get together on the subject of humanitarian information management. It is another positive step, along with many others, to promote and address the issues of better information management for humanitarian action. It should not be seen as a competitive or a exclusive one-track UN effort, but something that is linked and complimentary with other initiatives….ICT4Peace, ECB, Strong Angel, ISCRAM, etc. Each effort has its strengths and weaknesses, no single initiative can solve all of the many problems/issues…only working together and respecting each effort’s unique role will the larger issue be addressed.
If you haven’t seen it already, check on the November issue of Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/issue.cfm, article by Sheri Fink entitled “The Science of Doing Good.” One has to subscribe/pay to get the digital, on-line version, but Scientific America should be at international magazine stores and in libraries (where I got it)…There is even an endnote reference to somebody named Paul Currion…
Dennis
Dennis King
10 Nov 07 at 11:23
or try
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=8B7AF3D4-E7F2-99DF-3E22EDA23F8C509D
or Scientfic American homepage http://www.sciam.com/
Dennis again
Dennis King
10 Nov 07 at 11:31