How Bangladesh might be the start of something
In the last few days of my mission to Bangladesh, I chaired a meeting of the Information Management Working Group in Dhaka, at which something curious and exciting happened. The Group is comprised of representatives from each of the clusters, the CDMP (a government body) and usually a couple of others (today, CARE - it’s really just a place to reach agreement on basic issues like geocodes.
But in the meeting we actually agreed that all the clusters would pursue a policy of open data - that all data collected during assessments would be shared in its raw form as soon as the collecting organisation had published its own report, through the offices of the Disaster Management Information Centre (DMIC). This will make it possible for other agencies to incorporate that data into their own analysis, enabling better cross-cluster co-ordination.
As far as I know, this is the first time that this has happened in any humanitarian response operation anywhere (I could be wrong). It could be that the cluster leads won’t be able to live up to this commitment, since there are all sorts of internal agency constraints. Nevertheless I thought it was indicative that we are moving in the right direction, and that alone made my work in Bangladesh worthwhile.
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Great to hear good news like this — congrats
Mikel Maron
31 Dec 07 at 15:16
I would caution you a bit on your optimism. In Uganda, cluster leads have done a very….let’s be charitable and say “mixed”…job of information management and dissemination. Not so much because of reluctance to share data as simply time constraints, management skills, etc. The idea of sharing all of the raw data sounds nice in principle, but will the cluster leads actually be able to deliver the goods in practice?
Also…if there’s no system for organizing/tabulating/indexing all of this data within or amongst the clusters, mightn’t this just lead to the very old problem of info overload?
Jeremy
4 Jan 08 at 9:24
My optimism is always cautious! I should point out that I don’t think the clusters are a particularly good idea in themselves - they suffer from many of the same issues as the old arrangement - but that in the context of the clusters, an agreement to share data is a good idea.
Will the cluster leads be able to deliver the goods? No. But if they have information management staff working for them with the least bit of experience, those people will be able to use that data quite effectively. So one of our recommendations is that all the clusters need to assign information management officers as well as co-ordinators.
Finally - there might be information overload, but there definitely isn’t data overload. Anything I could have laid my hands on in Bangladesh would have been useful…
Paul Currion
4 Jan 08 at 15:15