humanitarian.info

If I don’t think that a bottom-up approach is going to work in the humanitarian community, I must think that a top-down approach is the best bet, right? Wrong. And here’s why:

Worst of all, though, the [additional and novel layers] mainly exist because the Government wanted to have the job done by the Big Consultancies – Accenture, EDS, and friends – that it was used to dealing with. Assuming that they wouldn’t be interested in small contracts, the Government invented a completely new organisational level in order to sweeten the deal. They further insisted on the contracts being covered by intense secrecy, which cut off any possibility of talking to the users. And the Big Consultants proceeded to move the actual development to the US and India to save money, thus avoiding any institutional knowledge that might somehow have seeped in.

Top-down approaches to data management don’t work in the public sector, full stop. This is because organisational politics usually over-determines a process that fails to include the users¹, and that’ll always defeat your technology no matter how shweet you think it is. So what do I think works? The Yorkshire Ranter actually provides that as well:

Part of the original plan involved using a common data exchange standard for the whole NHS; if this exists, there’s no need for much of the rest, especially not the regions and possibly not the Spine. We could define some goals and a set of data formats, then break out the cash to the individual hospitals, trusts etc to use themselves. … I think a cross-government requirement for common data standards, as much open source as possible, and perhaps even building everything with a sensible API for further development would do nothing but good.

That’s the starting point. Establish a minimum data standard using an agile process, use existing practice based on the experience of participating users, make the process as open (and open-ended) as possible, get the sign-off from the participants at the highest possible level, and then let go. Then it’s out there and organisations can use it – or not, but if they don’t, they no longer have the excuse that such standards don’t exist and can be held accountable against that. It also allows entry into the market for organisations and individuals that are new to the sector or weren’t involved in the original process – and then they might become part of the next iteration of development.

The key thing to remember is that the development needs to take place in the heart of the user community, and anything else is unlikely to yield useful results. The humanitarian community needs exactly this, and I’ve been saying exactly the same this for ten years, and as far as I can tell we’re still nowhere near even getting such a process off the ground in most of clusters / sectors. If anybody knows anything different, please feel free to let me know and make my week brighter. And if anybody thinks this process wouldn’t work, I’d be interested to hear why – especially in light of the persistent failure of IT projects in the public sector.

1. Note: the actual users, not the people who manage the actual users. [↩]

(Jestina in Geneva, 2008)

In Norton, just outside of Harare, in the early hours of yesterday morning, 15 armed men identifying themselves as police surrounded and broke into the house of Jestina Mukoko, the National Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP).

They abducted Jestina in her nighty, without her glasses, which she needs, and without some prescription medication. Her teenage son reported the abduction to human rights organisations in Harare a few hours later. As at 0830 this morning, when I texted with ZPP staff, Jestina’s location remains unknown. Lawyers from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights are now going from police station to police station to try and find her, or a paper trail leading to her.

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It bears repeating, especially when the guy doing the repeating isn’t exactly “one of us”:

The federal government has made aggressive use of so-called data-mining tools since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as counterterrorism officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to analyze records on travel habits, calling patterns, e-mail use, financial transactions and other data to pinpoint possible terrorist activity… But there is little evidence to confirm that the techniques work to actually find terrorists, despite the growing use in the last seven years, committee members said…

“More data does not mean better data,” said William J. Perry, the former defense secretary who was co-chairman of the panel

That’s right, folks – despite the work of the Supercrunchers, more data does not mean better data. What’s important is what comes before the data and after the data – planning exactly what you’re going to collect and how, and analysing and applying what you’ve collected. If you haven’t got those right – for instance, if you’re handing out a “rapid” assessment that’s 40-odd pages long – then any data collection is likely to yield less-than-useful results.

I’m thinking specifically about this sort of field-based data collection, of course, the processes that require a heavy investment and careful management (because they’re taking place at the sharp end of an emergency). The key to success is to focus on the most essential key indicators, and be very clear about exactly what you expect to learn  from them. Think of it this way – you’re not looking for an in-depth photo essay that tells the whole story, but a polaroid snapshot of the scene that you can refer to later.

A massively detailed picture isn’t going to be any use to anybody – it takes too much time to gather, it takes too many resources to analyse, it’s out-of-date too quickly and it’s rarely possible to match the data collection process to the form. So boil those forms down people, boil ‘em right down until there’s barely anything left. Then boil ‘em down again. Then give them to me so I can boil ‘em down even more…

(HT: Siva Vaidhyanathan)

• The Economist article Of internet cafés and power cuts was passably interesting on the subject of technology in developing countries, although it takes the usual optimistic approach that the Economist favours. The Economist picked up on this issue was the publication of this year’s Global Economic Prospects by the World Bank, with a focus on technology adoption and a barrel full of blindingly obvious conclusions.
• More interesting is the research that both of those draw on quite heavily, building a Historical Cross-Country Technology Adoption Database. You can download the database itself from that page, but the overview article Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts by Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn is much more manageable. I haven’t dug into the data yet, but the initial Economist article made me suspicious – the data itself may suffer from survivor bias (e.g. the many failed technologies don’t feature), doesn’t explain disrepancies such as the dominance of VCDs in developing countries as opposed to DVDs in developed countries, and the focus on mobile phone uptake doesn’t take account for the nature of that particular technology. I’m not sure I can face the data itself, as the sun is shining.
• Eagle-eyed Declan Butler (a literal description; he’s at the cutting edge of trans-species surgery) quotes short-sighted Paul Currion in Nature magazine. Declan’s article Satellite can spot razed villages in Darfur on the fantastic work of Erik Prins for Amnesty International on monitoring burnt villages using remote sensing. Amnesty used his research as part of their campaigning back in 2004-5, but Erik has just published an article, Use of low cost Landsat ETM+ to spot burnt villages in Darfur, Sudan, in the International Journal of Remote Sensing. The research is right on the mark, although it’s unlikely that the large-scale study that he calls for in the conclusion will happen any time soon; lack of funds, lack of will.
• I’m angry with Firoz, who published his dissertation without telling me. Or maybe he did tell me and I just forgot. Anyway, my revenge for his oversight and/or my memory loss is to link to it here: The Utility of GIS Analysis in Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance. Congratulations, Firoz; now get back to work.

An email from CEO Eric Rasmussen tells me that INSTEDD is finally flying in radar (and apparently I’m mixing metaphors, unsure of whether INSTEDD is a whale or a plane). In his words,

InSTEDD has been invisible, a rumor and a ghost, for the few past months, but we surfaced today in a media call with Google.org in the launch of their first-ever Initiatives.

I’ve known Eric virtually for a couple of years, although we’ve never managed to actually meet in person. He’s a very solid choice for CEO – his thinking on civil-military affairs was always more lateral than I expected for somebody in his position, and I think that it reflected his willingness to listen and learn from others. That open attitude will be the single most important tool in INSTEDD’s box, at least in its early days, and in fact that’s why they are only launching now – for the last few months, the team has been travelling around meeting with various actors and hearing out what their needs might be.

If you don’t know anything about INSTEDD, I recommend that you visit the website, as it gives you the right flavour. It’s moved away from Larry Brilliant’s 2006 talk at TED and morphed into something that’s somehow broader yet less ambitious (a good combination if you can manage it). Yet I still harbour doubts about how successful it will be, doubts which don’t have anything to do with the goodwill or competence of the staff (or the fact that they’ve got a ton of funding behind them, not least from Google.Org).

Where do my doubts come from?  I’ll freely admit that part of my concern is rooted in my essential antipathy towards advice from experts (yes, including myself – it keeps me on my toes); part of it is based on my lack of faith in the power of technology to save us from ourselves; and part of it is linked to my sense that the entire system of disaster response has been built with a fundamental flaw at its foundation, and trying to make it more effective may simply be throwing good money after bad.

Having said that, INSTEDD’s philosophy is healthy.  It’s not proposing overarching systems that will solve the whole set of problems in one go, but a piece-by-piece approach that addresses key problems in the field as they arise.  So I welcome their launch, and I definitely welcome their presence on the scene – it’s definitely healthy for the sector to have more non-traditional actors bringing some new perspective.

And new tools, of course!  INSTEDD will be releasing any tech tools it develops, and it looks like on an open source basis (more specifically, the MIT license).  First out of the gate is a GeoSMS system, which is built on a bunch of existing Google tools and some GeoRSS.  And yes, we hope to discuss how Sahana might fit into these developments…

It’s fair to say that Craig Duncan was largely responsible for ReliefWeb, the site which has become the primary hub for the humanitarian community on the web. It’s not perfect, but there’s a number of good reasons for that, particularly the problem of addressing legacy systems in the age of Web2.0. He’s now moved from OCHA to UNISDR, and is the Senior Co-ordinator of PreventionWeb, a new website which hopefully will become similarly indispensible for the disaster prevention / risk reduction / preparedness community.

This demo gives you a good idea of what PreventionWeb is about, and it looks like Craig and his team at UNISDR have taken the opportunities presented in building a website from scratch. The layout is clean and the site is easy to navigate, and things like RSS feeds are clearly flagged, but the site doesn’t really take advantage of the full range of Web2.0 type interactive functions. This last point may become a problem, as UNISDR has correctly identified that they need to rely on contributions from practitioners, rather than generating all their own content; and engaging users more actively in the site is one of the best ways of doing that.Like the blurb says,

PreventionWeb is a new information service to increase knowledge on disaster risk reduction (DRR). For the first time, a website will provide a common tool for both specialists and non-specialists interested or working in the area of disaster risk reduction to connect, exchange experiences and share information.

There are two questions that will impact on the success of PreventionWeb. First, will people adopt it as a resource in the way that they have with ReliefWeb? Second, will ISDR be able to get beyond ReliefWeb’s relatively passive model and generate a sense of community around DRR? This is just the beta version, however, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the site develops.

In response to an enquiry by Kevin Toomer about how to integrate GeoRSS into security reporting as a means of producing more accessible security maps for the humanitarian community, I sent a request to a few colleagues for advice. The result was a very rich email discussion, which I am now transferring onto the blog for anybody else to contribute to or benefit from. The people contributing to the discussion have an amazing range of experience (interestingly, almost all of that experience is outside the world of “classical” GIS) and my thanks go to everybody who’s contributed. Kevin’s original question is quoted here in the post, and the discussion continues in the comments below:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to easily get news items from an RSS reader unto a map that can be easily distributed. So far I’ve got that idea that I should be linking the RSS items to the Geonames database to produce a GeoRSS stream. I’m thinking the next step would be to do a mashup of the data with Google Earth or a similar service. Users could then go to the mashup site for updates rather than waiting for someone to send out a week old powerpoint showing where last weeks incidents took place. Yesterday I came across Popfly and I think that might work for at least part of the process.

Earlier this year, the NGO Security Blog closed its doors (wrong metaphorical device, I know), but its mysterious creator JM left an interesting note that provides an insight into the rationale and methodology of the site:

Thirteen months ago the blog started out as an experiment in providing information about humanitarian safety and security incidents from public and open sources. The methodology was to consult a number of different online news sources each day, select articles of interest, and then summarize them including a link to the original source. The information would be made available in a public Internet forum that anyone with an interest in humanitarian security issues could access.

I personally consider the experiment a success. Around 100 people a day currently read the blog (sometimes a little more, other times a little less) with repeated visits from UN and government agencies, large and small NGOs, educational institutions and news organizations. There’s also been a considerable amount of positive feedback from readers on how the blog helps them stay current on what’s happening in the world and exposes them to concepts and tools outside the traditional NGO security box.

I hope that since the concept has been proven, similar projects will spring up elsewhere. Using Google’s Blogger or other blogging tools is extremely simple and I’d encourage humanitarian organizations to consider using this technology to internally publicize safety and security incidents and provide information (either on their intranets or with non-public Internet blogs that can only be viewed by selected people).

I believe that humanitarian organizations as a whole generally don’t do a good job of sharing security information with each other (especially at the field level) and it would be nice to one day see InterAction or a collective of large NGOs get together and host something like the NGO Security Blog for their members to contribute to and use. The technology is available, the readers are out there, and from running this blog I think the benefit is apparent.

A couple of points. First, this was definitely a worthwhile experiment – before JM started it, nobody had tried to use blogging as a security tool. This was largely due to lack of imagination, I think, as well as unfamiliarity with the technology. Blogging is now officially mainstream, and every week at AWN we get notices of new aid blogs, a number of which are official or semi-official organisation blogs.

Second, that experiment was a success within its own parameters. JM pointed out the positive feedback the blog had received, but I don’t think that will convince other security officers or organisations of its utility. Measuring success is always tricky, but much easier to do internally, when you can identify who is reading your material and where they are. If you’re writing a security blog for Afghanistan and most of your readers are in the New York office, it’s probably not working that well.

Third, JM makes the point that this would probably be done best by a group of organisations, rather than a single organisation, and I agree completely. If blogs are about sharing information, then it makes sense to maximise the network. Even if it starts out as a way for security officers to share information with each other more effectively, that should be a strong enough argument to give it a try.

Fourth, the concept needs to be extended to make it really “sticky“. The possibilities of GeoRSS open up a security blog to the interesting possibility of automated map sharing for security information, in a secure format if necessary. It’s not just a high-tech glamour – it could be the factor that makes security blogging really come to life for both the contributors and users. Simple and effective.

The NGO Security blog is now defunct (and we’ve removed it from AWN Aidblogs) but there are still related resources on the NGO Security Page. Thanks to JM and others for their hard work – let’s hope we see more in the future.

Apparently they both suffer from really rubbish web apps.

Our pals at the NGO Security Blog link to a fascinating article about how US intelligence agencies are using technology that was really cool back in 1983, but hasn’t really moved forward since then. (Frighteningly it sounds a lot like one of my all-time favourite films, War Games.) In particular, the information sharing database Intelink sounds particularly scary, and by scary I mean absolutely useless – I’m glad it’s not my tax dollars at work.

The blog suggests a number of possibilities that the new technology has created for security management in the aid industry:

Picture a wiki where anyone could post up-to-date security information organized by country and city, or an informal global network of security practitioners who could brainstorm evacuation plans through instant messaging, or just-in-time training that could be delivered over the Net to specific offices during an Avian Flu outbreak.

Absolutely. And NGO Security has an idea about why it is that NGOs (and the UN, to be fair) aren’t taking advantage of these possibilities:

I think much of the resistance to using these types of tools comes from a lack of understanding of their potential as well as a fear of relinquishing control – from both IT departments and management.

It’s a short piece, but it’s worth reading the whole article.

National Geographic carries an interesting short article entitled Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds, looking at how geoRSS can make sharing spatial data simpler, quicker and more useful.

The article deals with prediction rather than response, and the question of how geoRSS might improve disaster response is still open. The obvious one is data sharing from needs assessments or situation reports, but that goes back to the problem that most people don’t really understand the role of spatial data – let alone set up their mobile phone as an automatic GPS ping, like Tim Hibbard in this article.

What it’s about is changing peoples attitudes towards spatial data – making them realise its value – and offering them the tools to work with that data more effectively.� If we can do that, we can let the end users define what they need, and maybe develop it themselves – which some are already doing with Google Earth.� So maybe it is about their mobile phones after all….
Hat tip to Mikel Maron.