humanitarian.info

Amazing how working eats into your blogging time. Off the top of my head:

1. Articulate user requirements to focus on the necessary.
2. Consider individual and organisational incentives for (not) sharing.
3. Map information flows within and between individuals/organisations.
4. Where possible, bind to existing processes as a starting point.
5. Keep tools simple, usability the focus and end users the goal.

I would say that following these would give anybody a good chance of success. Any others?

Wading through all this Web 2.0 stuff, it’s easy to forget that this is what information management is fundamentally about. I produced this adapted flowchart soon after I started working in humanitarian info management (10 years ago, and that ain’t funny), and it’s still being used today.

Oh, you’ll see versions with more stages in the cycle and more words than strictly necessary, but this is what it boils down to. If you’re designing an information system, there is no better guide to make sure you get it right. I would say that – I’m biased – but here we go: back to the old school.

I’ll begin by saying that I like ICG, that I think their analysis is more often right than wrong, and that even when it’s wrong it’s useful. However this podcast makes it clear that they – like everybody else – are stuck in a certain way of thinking. On violence in Southern Sudan:

While it’s important to understand that these conflicts between tribes in Southern Sudan are not new – they’ve been going on for generations – the fact that 2500 people have been killed in South Sudan in 2009 alone and 350,000 displaced means the nature of that violence has changed and to a certain degree become politicised. This is of particular concern given what is at stake in the coming year. If the government can’t get a handle on the violence, extend state authority, prove itself a credible provider of security, the forthcoming elections could be disrupted and this could also become an obstacle on the road to the all-important self-determination referendum in 2011.

First, while I totally accept that ICG has a more thorough analysis of the violence than I do, it’s difficult to see how, if these conflicts have been going on for generations, that their continuation demonstrates that the nature of the violence has changed. These conflicts were always political, unless you think that inter-tribal relations have no political content – in which case you probably haven’t read enough history books – and an increase in death and displacement might not demonstrate politicisation per se but simply improvements in tactics, new supply of weapons or just a new assymetry in the conflict (for example, if one tribe loses cattle to a drought). My worry is that if – as I suspect – ritualised violence (particularly in the form of cattle raids) is an integral part of Sudanese tribal politics and culture (and possibly entertainment as well) then any solutions that you might derive from this reading of that violence are likely to have failure built in.

Second, notice what ICG thinks the effects of the violence might be – to undermine state authority and threaten the 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum. What these two things have in common is that they are state projects. While local communities might take a passing interest in those projects, they’re not things that are core to their existence. This is partly because ICG is interested in political development rather than humanitarian assistance, but it’s also because we – as people coming from established functioning states – tend to see politics in terms of the state, or – taking this violence as an example – in terms of how it relates to the state. This is the second part of building in failure – a state-centric diagnosis of Sudan’s problems and the consequent prescription of “Please sir, can I have some more state?” are unlikely to resonate with people for whom the state is not a player.

Skipping lightly on, we find the UK Defence Academy has published From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence. In some ways this paper is little more than a breeze through some of the key buzzwords of the last 10 years – Black Swans? Check. Bottom Billion? Check. Behavioural economics? Check.¹ Although it’s nice to see the military taking these concepts on board, they don’t really cohere, but there is a point relevant to the violence in Southern Sudan about halfway through:

In Afghanistan we believe the coalition has struggled to frame the choices we are asking a war-torn nation to consider. The simplest example would be the offer of democracy. Whilst well understood in liberal western countries it requires far greater explanation and framing in low income, conflict ridden countries when the decision to vote or who to vote for is largely irrelevant when compared with choices presented by the Taliban, or just by social circumstance, of life and death. We would contend that, to date in Afghanistan, we have paid little attention to how choices might be appropriately framed to change individual and collective behaviour. Many of the choices that are currently presented are too stark: poppy bad/wheat good; Taliban evil/ISAF good and so on. The reality is that we have consistently failed to understand that what seems to us as irrational behaviour is entirely rational to the individual facing tough choices.

Ignore the Afghanocentric example – it’s tough to find anything published by the UK military these days that doesn’t think Afghanistan is the be-all and end-all – and look at the forest rather than the trees. These guys have realised that the choices we present to people might not always be the choices that they’re actually facing. In the Sudanese example, tribal violence bad / state violence good (in the Weberian sense) is unlikely to play well in Jonglei, which should make us ask not if we’re offering the right solution but if we’ve even identified the right problem.

1. A note to the authors: best not to refer to Kipling’s “savage wars of peace” in this context, since Kipling was talking (essentially) about colonial wars of oppression, which is why Alistair Horne used it for the title for his excellent book about the brutal Algerian war for independence, and it’s probably a good idea to keep Afghanistan well away from that kind of language. Somebody might get hurt. [↩]

One of the strangest things about southern Sudan is how weak the local NGO community is. It’s five years after the end of the war, with five years of focused attention from the international community, and five years with an increasing presence of international organisations looking for partners. Yet everybody agrees – particularly the local NGOs themselves – that capacity is as low as ever, and there is still no coherent approach to building that capacity in the near term. There’s an outdated website dedicated to the issue, and an interesting (although slightly opaque) report from May 2009 that comprehensively maps the landscape of organisations, but nothing appears to have been done with any of that information.

This is a similar situation to that in other countries but in a more intense form. It’s taken me a while to come up with any halfway coherent idea as to what’s going on here, but my conclusion is that international NGOs are killing civil society. Here’s a few reasons why this happens and how:

1. International NGOs present the only visible models for nationals who want to form an organisation, while the conspicuous wealth of international NGOs creates a strong incentive to emulate them. What is invisible to local people is the range of collective activities -formal and informal – that are present in the home countries of those international NGOs, and the truth that the way in which international NGOs operate in the field would not be seen positively in those home countries.
2. The presence of international NGOs forces national governments to adopt legislative frameworks that are far more about controlling NGOs than regulating them – usually with the complicity or active participation of those NGOs (or their enablers in the United Nations). The result is a legislative framework in which international NGOs and the government collaborate in encouraging a public conception of civil society made in their own image.
3. International NGOs present themselves as non-profit service providers rather than as the organised expression of a collective will. WorldVision didn’t just spring out of the ground fully formed; it’s a million church groups putting their faith (and money) into the organisation to enact their (admittedly vague) goals, which WorldVision is then supposed to implement. National NGOs usually can’t rely on this base for legitimacy – and so miss the whole “civil society” bit.
4. By participating in funding systems and regulatory regimes which emphasises legally-recognised NGOs as the sole vehicle for funding activities in relief and rehabilitation scenarios, we incentivize the registration of local NGOs – frequently as income generation schemes for sole traders – rather than the creation of a range of different organisations that may be more effective in meeting the needs of local people than a formal NGO.
5. International NGOs frequently either deny or co-opt faith groups, the most viable non-NGO civil society groups. Sensivity about faith by secular NGOs – particularly in areas where it is a contentious issue, if not a source of conflict – can undermine what is sometimes the only expression of community action. (On the other hand, NGOs with a religious background can also create problems for civil society by attempting to co-opt local faith groups into their own religious community.)

In summary: the presence of international NGOs undermines the development of civil society as we unwittingly remake it in our own image, enabled both by national governments and international donors. We need to break this cycle by recognising the diversity of collective action, revising our engagement strategies to reflect that, and reversing legal and economic frameworks that perpetuate the cycle of NGO creation that leads to bloated and ineffective local NGO communities.

Some people are attached to “Build Back Better”, and it bothers me. If we want to “build back” a country that was such a nightmare that most of the citizens basically wanted to get the hell out, build back better is the way to go; if we want to participate in a project that has clear ideological intent to sustain the status quo with marginal improvements in people’s lives, then build back better is the slogan to front it. I don’t want that; I want something new, something better than Build Back Better.

Architecture for Humanity volubly disagreed with me on Twitter, which is ironic, because they’re exactly the sort of organisation that I’d like to see get more play in the great game of aid – see their plan for reconstruction if you don’t believe me. I don’t have a coherent over-arching plan to fix Haiti, because coherent over-arching plans to fix Haiti will fail – that’s kind of the point when it comes to dealing with complex systems like countries, right? So perhaps I should clarify what I meant when I said Just Say No by providing a few examples:

• Reinvent Building. Shelter is critical to most service delivery in an emergency, but particularly after earthquakes when people have lost their housing. Now’s the time to introduce sustainable housing using techniques such as rammed earth construction, supported by a radical land rights regime based on the work of Hernando de Soto.
• Reinvent Sanitation. The industrialised model of sanitation simply doesn’t scale in rapidly-growing cities in developing countries, sometimes creating more problems than they solve. There are alternatives to the flush-and-forget toilet, so why not roll out composting toilets that enable more effective management of human waste as well as supporting urban agriculture?
• Reinvent Agriculture. It might seem strange to talk about farming in the middle of the city, but if it can work in Detroit, then why not Port-au-Prince? Permaculture projects hit several sweet spots all at once – not just food security but waste management, livelihoods and so on – and an alternative to the more destructive patterns that Haiti suffered before.
• Reinvent Power. Solar solar solar isn’t the answer to every question, particularly at large scale, but it hits a lot of household usage in poor countries (including the ubiquitous mobile phone). There are smart ideas like the FLAP bag floating around, but basic solar – solar cookers, for example – have been around for a while. Anything to shift away from wood.
• Reinvent Communications. Forget restoring any landlines that might have existed before the earthquake, because I bet that everybody was using mobile phones anyway. Roll out free wireless broadband across the city – maybe find a use for those OLPCs that are hanging around in warehouses (eventually), but more importantly create new business opportunities.
• Reinvent Transport. Segways! Not really. Roads are for the rich; why not think about the needs of the poor and simply make sure there are pavements? A simple but profound idea if you want to go for a walk without falling into a hole filled with dirty water and metal poles. In an ideal world, there’d be some integrated transport plan that looked at how to convert tap-taps to LPG, but even I’m not that silly.
• Reinvent Finance. Facilitate the free flow of remittances, even if they’re not the biggest link in the chain of solidarity… but it would be interesting to see what happened if, instead of channelling funding through big multilaterals and the Haitian “government”, cash grants were used to kickstart the economy through community finance mechanisms and plain old cash distributions.
• Reinvent Governance. We all love democracy, the worst form of government. Unfortunately we tend to forget that democracy comes in different flavours; it’s frustrating when the cloning attempts repeatedly fail and everybody acts surprised. So let’s be more inventive – community-level direct democracy, emergent rather than directed policy, referenda rather than elections, issue-based not party-based, and so on.

Am I naive to think that these things are possible? Well, no, because I don’t really believe these things are possible. To be clear – none of these things are part of the immediate humanitarian response, but we should be thinking about knitting together Haiti’s social fabric before it suffers permanent trauma through a range of small-scale exploratory projects, rather than calling for a Marshall Plan for Haiti.

Unfortunately that’s the way that the international community responds – too much planning and not enough searching. The tool kit available to the aid bureaucracy is almost comically limited; there are numerous small projects going on around the world that can make a difference in people’s lives, but the challenge is placing them in a long-term view of reinvention. We’re not very good at thinking in realistic timeframes for country-level development, forgetting exactly how long it took rich countries to get rich and how recently that wealth arrived.

There are two main obstacles: first, existing institutional structures will work very hard indeed to replicate themselves, and they have the leverage; second, scaling up is incredibly difficult to achieve past anything more than the level of an extended community. The institutional structures are the same ones that brought you – Afghanistan! Iraq! most of Africa! – i.e. structures that have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re most likely not fit for purpose.

And scaling up? That’s where the real work is – trying to rebuild from the inside these systems that have grown up over the years, using the same tools that built those systems in the first place. I’ve been trying to work this out for most of my working life, and I still don’t have many good solutions. So if anybody has any other ideas for reinventing Haiti, plug them into the comments below – and don’t come screaming with approaches that are so radical that nobody outside the US will ever use them, please….

In the meantime, there are lives to save, and I have to write an evaluation report on NGO co-ordination in Southern Sudan.

First, the bad news: the extended blog post in which I explain what I meant by Just Say No to Build Back Better has been eaten by black hats (probably Chinese, since everybody else wants to blame them for everything else). I’m going to get back to it, but it’s going to take a bit of time to reconstruct, and I’m in southern Sudan, so good luck with that.

Second, the good news: IRIN just podcasted interviews with Sanjana and myself on the Haiti response. You can hear me talking about Just Say No – think of it as a trailer for the blog post. Bottom line is this: the system we have in place for disaster response and reconstruction is broken, and we need something completely new.

Haiti is on my (thankfully) short list of “Countries for which I genuinely can’t see a solution”. It’s a possibility that we don’t like to think about – that perhaps there are certain situations which countries (loosely defined) cannot get out of. There’s no logical reason why this couldn’t happen – read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” and Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “The Ingenuity Gap” back-to-back to get a loose idea of what I’m talking about – but our natural instincts are to deny the possibility.

The argument is simple, and it goes like this. Societies are complex systems that rely on a wide range of mutually-reinforcing factors in order to maintain themselves. We don’t actually understand all the factors that are in play, let alone how they interact with each other, but some of the more visible relationships make it possible to make reasonable estimates of the health of the system.  To anybody who’s investigated Haiti’s situation, it’s clear that it was a complex system that was failing, if it hadn’t failed already.

I refuse to use the term failed state, a political construction used to justify a particular ideological position; Tyler Cowen is closer to the mark when he talks about coming to terms “with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.” It’s a little mysterious why he thinks that it’s President Obama that needs to comes to terms with it, rather than, say, the people who live in Haiti, particularly because it’s the latter who get to say if their country doesn’t exist any more.

Which brings me to the question: if I’m such a Gloomy Gus about Haiti’s prospects, do I have any positive thoughts about the situation? It’s going to take a long time to clear the rubble – both physical and emotional – but the opportunity before us collectively is huge. Let’s stop talking about reconstruction, when we’d be reconstructing a system that was a failure even before the quake; let’s stop talking about long-term development when long-term development had clearly failed to deliver significant poverty reduction.

Instead, let’s talk about reinventing Haiti. What sort of Haiti would its citizens like to see rise from the ashes of the old Haiti? The answer, unfortunately, will not be to the taste of those in power both inside Haiti and out. We don’t have the tools to respond to the wishes of people affected by the earthquake simply because it’s not within the parameters by which the system was designed. Alternative models of governance, of urban planning, of service delivery – they literally can’t be considered.

What might reinvention involve? I’ve got ideas (what else did you think?) but the whole point is that it’s not up to me. Our job is to look at the role that our decisions have played in building a structure that knew Haiti was an accident waiting to happen but prevented anybody from taking action to prevent it; even now we’re reaping the results of that in the logistics bottlenecks facing the relief effort, in a city built against resilience. Forget about reinventing the wheel; the real danger is reinventing Haiti as it was.

The earthquake that struck Haiti is a terrible disaster that requires the international community to provide both immediate aid to save lives and longer-term support to rebuild infrastructure and livelihoods. Even as I write those words, I’m reading between the lines, and my sympathy for the Haitians affected by the quake is tempered outweighed by my anger at an international system that allows Haiti to languish at the bottom end of the Human Development league, but mobilises millions of dollars as soon as infrastructure collapses.

Nobody can deny that Haiti needs assistance right now to save lives, but it also needed assistance yesterday when the infant mortality rate was the 37th lowest in the world. When it comes to natural disasters, we – our governments, our media, ourselves – are victims of the same biases that cause impulse buying at the supermarket. Thousands of people dying from buildings falling on them instantly mobilises a huge amount of resources, but thousands of children dying from easily preventable diseases is just background noise. This is the uncomfortable reality of the aid world, but it’s not one that our media or governments really wants to hear.

I’m not looking to condemn any particular individual or organisation that wants to help in whatever way they can, but if we think there’s something wrong with that picture, perhaps we shouldn’t just be handing over money to our chosen charity, but lobby for the following:

1. Develop a more consistent and more coherent aid architecture that takes a long view of human capability instead of a short term view of human suffering.
2. Encourage more creative approaches to rebuilding Port-au-Prince for an urban plan that meets the needs of the poor, not just the rich, and builds more resilient communities.
3. Put an end to the portrayal of Haitians (and others) as victims and takes notice of the fact that they are the ones who responded first to this emergency.

My thoughts go out to the people of Haiti; first suffering the earthquake, and now the international community.

Serious problems require a serious tool: written reports. For nearly all engineering and scientific communication, instead of PowerPoint, the presentation and reporting software should be a word-processing program capable of capturing, editing and publishing text, tables, data graphics, images and scientific notation. Replacing PowerPoint with Microsoft Word (or, better, a tool with non-proprietary universal formats) will make presentations and their audiences smarter.

That’s our old friend Edward Tufte again, in PowerPoint Does Rocket Science–and Better Techniques for Technical Reports. I know that I’m beating up PowerPoint this week, but I wanted that quote because mentions “non-proprietary universal formats” – and that means open source, badda-bing.

This all started because NATO use PowerPoint far too much. Ironically they then post all the PowerPoint slides on a super-duper high-security intranet, the sort of place where information goes to die, although at least they’re thorough and consistent about it. However it just doesn’t seem to meet the needs of decision-making, particularly in complex situations. David Byrne notwithstanding, most people realise that PowerPoint doesn’t help them much, and in some cases hinders them.¹

PowerPoint has its place, but it’s become like a weed that stifles the growth of other presentation tools. I was only partly joking when I talked about a PowerPoint vaccine to inoculate organisations against its further spread – perhaps organisations could declare a “No PowerPoint Day” (week? month? year?) and ask employees to come up with alternative ways of delivering their message?

1. I once had to develop a slide show 30 minutes before giving a speech because the conference organizers simply couldn’t conceive of a presentation without PowerPoint and refused to let me take the podium without a slide show. Needless to say, the slide show ended halfway through the actual talk, and thus I maintained the delicate balance between the principled and the practical. [↩]

Knock, knock, knocking PowerPoint, all week long.

Anybody who cares about “our” kind of information management should read Edward Tufte’s classic The Visual Display of Quantitive Information. Yes, I know it’s expensive – get your gran to buy it you for Christmas or something. What I didn’t know is that Tufte also wrote a short essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint – which at $7 for 32 pages frankly isn’t worth your gran’s pension money (get her to buy you Unknown Soldier instead) – which lays out exactly what is wrong with PowerPoint:

How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide? The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and  dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity… The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information.

Did everybody at the back hear that? I’ll repeat it in bold: The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information. Now as you all know, my own preference is that information architecture and the associated technology should bind to existing organisational processes – so does that mean that I disagree with Tufte?

Absolutely not, because organisational processes don’t usually match up with organisational structures, and information flow in particular looks nothing like the organigram. However this creates a serious design problem when you try to fit the two together, which is why we end up with PowerPoint slides that, by bearing a cosmetic resemblance to the organisational structure, can fool everybody into thinking they represent the way the organisation thinks.