After much thought and a bowl of noodles (udon not ramen), I decided to clarify my thinking. Online platforms come in five flavours:
- Response management – for the immediate information needs of an emergency. Example: Sahana.
- Collaboration space – for both emergency and non-emergency. Example: Google Groups.
- Community of Practice – for developing and maintaining professional networks. Example: ShelterCentre.
- Knowledge base – for creating institutional and sectoral memory.Example: WaterWiki.
- Capacity development – training and other development requirements. Example: various under development.
These five functions can be combined, although not necessarily successfully, but all the web-based work I’ve seen or done fits these functional descriptions. There seem to be three main areas which cause problems in terms of implementing these platforms:
- Setting up a platform without clearly identifying which function it fills, or combining different functions without working out how they’ll relate to each other within the platform;
- Creating multiple platforms that overlap, without reference to each other and without considering interoperability issues, thus increasing user confusion, workload and migraine;
- Building platforms without consulting end users, assuming they’ll welcome yet another chance to spend hours at their computer.
It’s impossible to build the perfect platform, even within a single organisation; user expectations and capacities are simply too diverse; avoiding these three elementary mistakes is a good start, however.
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