Jeremy, I have a question for you. Taking into account everything that you’ve said, what outputs of a W3 information system would you find useful? Narrative reports, maps, graphs and charts? Showing other organisation’s work, or showing your own? Is there any analysis that you think would be worthwhile?

Speaking as one of those pesky NGO types who can’t be bothered to properly fill out the 3W forms….

I think your analysis is more or less correct. In my experience with these forms, they tend to be either 1) so general as to be useless (i.e. grouping very different activities together under common headings) or 2) so overly detailed that they’re not burdensome and consequently ignored. Rarely is a useful balance found.

Likewise, as you point out, NGOs tend to fill them out based in varying internal standards. The fact is that from an NGO’s perspective, filling out 3W forms tends to get low priority (for all of the reasons previously noted) and so NGO staff aren’t going to commit a lot of time to deciphering the format and adapting their internal data to fit it – particularly if they’re not confident that it will result in a useful tool at the end of the day.

The cluster system (about which I have maaaaany reservations) could provide a way forward by creating a context in which key implementers and technical actors develop joint 3W tools for their respective sectors, and the cluster lead can more directly promote adherence to those tools. One of the additional problems with traditional 3W tools is that they tend to be put together by OCHA generalists who don’t necessarily know, sector by sector, which bits of info are relevant to coordination and which are not. By decentralizing this process out to the clusters, the cluster system has the potential to make some progress on this. However, as noted in my other post, the cluster leads might not actually live up this this in practice.

Lastly – I fully agree that proactively contacting the relevant actors is the best way to get the information you need. I (and I think, most NGO folks) tend to be much more responsive to a phone call or direct meeting than to a mass email with a generic attachment.

In response to your point:

I’m not sure how we would integrate reporting in that way, given that a) there isn’t an agreed W3 format, and b) we have no leverage to make people accept it. I think that the existing form-based approach (”Here’s a new form – fill it in for me”) just doesn’t work.

If we look at (for example) NFI distribution, what I needed was a) agencies to have decent distribution plans, and b) agencies to give me those distribution plans. I can do the rest, in terms of turning that into useful W3 analysis. What I got suggested that either agencies don’t have decent distribution plans (in the sense of being particularly coherent or detailed), or that b) they just aren’t prepared to give them to me.

The problem is that sitreps don’t contain sufficient detail to be useful – most of the information is aggregated. Now we can build a W3 at that aggregated level, but I am consistently asked for much more detail, which is impossible to deliver. The short answer to the problem is the development of an evidence-driven programming culture, of which I will write more in the near future…

Having said that, the accessibility question is also an issue – just not so much of one. Realistically, I don’t want to have access to everybody’s internal reporting – I just need that reporting to be done better.

Is this because there is really a drought, or useful stuff is pre-bottled in house and totally inaccessible for sharing purposes?

In the ideal world of my imagining, a few common standards for sitreps would allow for quick, efficient aggregation of W3 data from multiple organizations, without requiring field staff to enter any more information than they do now. I think there’s a real opportunity for an approach that kills several birds with one stone here – improving the current sitrep process and using those improvements to attack the problems you’re describing here.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this approach – in my opinion, the more the different reporting functions are integrated, the better it will be for everyone: less work for the field staff, better and more up-to-date information for the coordinating bodies.

As you point out, the key is creating an incentive for agencies to fill out the form. The only way of doing this that I can think of is to turn the information around quickly and give them back some useful products that help them in the field – anything else is not interesting to them.

Hiring additional staff would help in terms of (for example) phoning around the agencies, but the key to successful information gathering is building relationships with those agencies – and that’s not something that can be solved by adding more staff, unfortunately, only by investing more time.

Given the time-critical nature of W3, could you employ a squad of data clerks in the information team to do the crunching task manually? An Dhaka-based NGO like D:Net could probably perform this task for you.