Related posts:

1. Cyclone Nargis, you know?
2. Rambling Man
3. What do aid workers and spies have in common?

Quite a lot. ReliefWeb is the single most information portal for the humanitarian community, so it’s worth paying attention to how that community uses online services, what sorts of information it values, and so on. It’s also interesting because ReliefWeb went through a huge overhaul a couple of years ago, described in Sebastian Naidoo’s valuable article from the Information Management Journal, “Redesigning the ReliefWeb” – a redesign which I think was more interesting for the process (described by Sebastian) than the final result – but unfortunately there isn’t really any available baseline comparison to judge whether that investment has been worthwhile.

I’d love to promise you that this is going to be really exciting, but it isn’t. All I can give you is an impressionistic take on the stats…

A large proportion of users are coming back at least once a week, if not more often. This is an impressive result which demonstrates how critical ReliefWeb is for the sector. It’s also a tremendous opportunity for ReliefWeb to create a real community around the site, which is something that hasn’t really been explored properly yet. This question is particularly important because the achievement needs to be qualified – the main reason why people visit ReliefWeb is “Job Searching”. This isn’t a surprise to anybody who knows ReliefWeb – the Vacancies section has always been the most popular section of the site – but it remains problematic. How can ReliefWeb use the popularity of the vacancies to direct users towards more interesting and/or useful parts of the site.

It’s very obvious how narrative-driven ReliefWeb users are: the five most valuable types of information are all textual (Situation Reports, Country Background Information, Analysis and Evaluation, News and Assessments). Most of these resources, in my opinion, offer a very low return on investment for the reader – they’re lots of work to plough through, with very little substantive content for most of them. So what about non-narrative information? Maps are sixth in line, most valuable to 9.2% of respondents, and Financial Reports and Appeals are most valuable to a miserable 2.9% of respondents. That’s not a bad % for maps, but are people getting maps from other sources – UNOSAT, MapAction, HICs? It would be useful to know exactly what maps they’re downloading – this would be a very useful stat for ReliefWeb to release.

There are some interesting open questions tucked away at the end of the survey (what technical features would you like, what is the main weakness of the site) but they haven’t been crunched into anything useful. The pop-up box just gives me a long, long, long list of responses, many of which are gibberish. I used to speak gibber, but my language skills are rusty – it may take me some time to get anything useful out of them. A quick glance at the responses demonstrates a sad truth of surveys – never, ever ask an open question, because you’ll only get a useful answer about 30% of the time.

ReliefWeb’s position as the single most important online resource for the humanitarian community isn’t going to be challenged any time soon – but it will be challenged. While it is an effective portal site – breakdowns by country / disaster / theme – I’m not convinced that ReliefWeb is really using its position to shape the way the sector uses online tools, to represent the sector to the outside world, to provide critical operational information in a wide range of formats.

The only way that will change (particularly since ReliefWeb suffers from being trapped inside OCHA) is if enough people lobby OCHA to enable ReliefWeb to be more responsive both to the needs of users – but also to the changing technology available to us. In many ways ReliefWeb reflects the problems facing the UN as a whole, in danger of being overtaken by faster and more flexible organisations. This user survey is a good starting point for ReliefWeb – and it’s especially impressive that they’ve made the entire results of the survey available if you want to see for yourself.

Related posts:

1. ReliefWeb Webinar
2. PreventionWeb launches
3. InSTEDD publishes!

To some extent this pitiful state of affairs is the result of four linked factors. First, we’re public organisations, and although we’re perennially strapped for cash our decision-making is (ironically) not lead by concerns of efficiency. Second, it’s only recently that some of the larger NGOs have put in place good IT governance and management – based on a strategic vision of how technology supports their work – so that most NGOs still make decisions about technology without adequate decision-making processes. Third, we are (in general) not particularly well-informed about technology, and slow to adopt new technology which might lead to serious improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. Fourth, and as a result of the above three factors, we have not historically formed a coherent market that would lead private companies to develop software that targets our needs.

What this means in practice is that we get really excited any time that anybody proposes a new software that appears to meet our needs. The key word is “appears” – it seems to me that much of our excitement is based on the look of the software (ooh, maps!) rather than a sober assessment of the capacities and costs of the software. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of genuine attempts to develop software founder, particularly when the specific needs of the end user aren’t taken into account until very late in the development game. So what’s the solution? There seem to be two possible paths to take:

1. The “Follow the Leader” model, where a single key actor or consortium leads the development process of a single well-targeted application for end users.
2. The “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” model, where a range of organisations develop a range of alternatives, and others choose which one suits them.

Now personally, I think option 2 is better, on the basis that diversity is better than a single solution, no matter how perfect that solution is (I’m definitely willing to be challenged on that one, though). The problem is that option 2 hasn’t worked very well – there just isn’t a big enough market (apparently), it’s difficult to mobilise support to those projects and the cost of failure is ridiculous (in some cases, literally life or death). In addition, our sector doesn’t pay close enough attention to technology developments that we actually track software that might be useful for them – so even if something is developed, getting it in front of people is hugely difficult.

That leaves us with option 1. Clearly this has potential, particularly when there are budget constraints (and when aren’t there?) – by allowing organisations with more funding to take a lead (preferably together), development costs are borne by those who can afford it the most, and by working together we can leverage economies of scale. The problem is that this doesn’t work very well either: the needs of the larger organisations are not often identical the needs of smaller organisations (they’re at different stages of development), there’s no guarantees that a) the developers will release it to other end users (or at least not without trying for costs recovery) or that b) the end users will accept it without at least some customisation – for which there’s no cash available.

Having said that, option 1 has been the favoured one so far, and will probably continue to be so. Part of the inclination of Sahana – and more so with the humanitarian-ICT community – was to encourage people to explore option 2. So far, progress on that front has been slow indeed, but perhaps that’s because we’re only really starting to develop a mature market for software.

(Note: Slightly related is a fantastic blog post at Humanized last year, Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software, where Jono DiCarlo lays out the ways in which he thinks we can get to better (read: more useable) Open Source solutions. A number of the things he discusses are germane to this discussion in terms of managing the development process itself – but none of them address the problem that I outline above.)

Related posts:

1. Technology on Disaster’s Frontlines
2. Nonprofit, Technology, etc, etc – but this is good
3. Why End Users in the Humanitarian Community Just Suck

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…

Related posts:

1. Information just wants to be free!
2. Humanlink now!
3. OpenStreetMap and the next disaster, Part 1

When you visit the DRRlibrary, what you see looks almost identical to del.icio.us, the mother of all social bookmarking sites, with a few extra functions. Searching through the tags is quite simple – as well as being able to sort by date, title or URL of each link, there’s also a tag cloud on the main page and a browser (which works fine but is a little confusing). It’s great to see this approach being used, and I assume that Ian O’Donnell at ProVention had something to do with it – I’ve had too many discussions with him about just this approach for it to be a coincidence!

Any downsides? Well, tagging can get very unwieldy very quickly, and tags like “seismic-resistant construction” are a little too specific to make for simple searches. (I blow hot and cold on this – when I look at my own del.icio.us links, I have problems understanding my own tags, which is a bad sign.) However this isn’t a show-stopper, and it’s the sort of thing that will sort itself out as the project grows. From a technical point of view, the only potential spanner in the works is that the DRRlibrary is based on Scuttle (open source, hooray!). Scuttle is only at release 0.72, and the lead developer has announced that although the project isn’t dead, it is dead slow.

The big questions aren’t about the site itself, but about how it relates to other sites. How, for example, can we ensure that the DRRlibrary is interoperable with PreventionWeb, particularly if the latter starts to offer more social networking features? At the moment there’s no tagging on PreventionWeb, but it’s the sort of thing that could appear; and even if it doesn’t, there’s a danger of duplicating resources and creating confusion amongst users.

It’s early days, though, and there’s plenty of time to address these issues. DRRlibrary is a welcome addition to the range of resources out there – not just for DRR, but for anybody who’s interested in how the web can be used more creatively to share knowledge in this sector.

Related posts:

1. Social media in disaster response: Dennis McDonald’s take
2. Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds
3. Disaster Resource Network – Survey on Emergency ICT

Related posts:

1. Liveblogging the NetHope 2007 Summit
2. Sahana – Sourceforge Project of the Month
3. Sahana in the Philippines

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet café at the north Kenyan camp.

The rest of the article then pretty much re-treads my blog (ahem) in an overview of some of the big issues in the sector. Unsurprisingly it focuses on the easy stuff – hardware, particularly telecoms – and misses the more interesting issues. In a single paragraph the article does identify some ways in which improved telecommunications have improved relief operations:

Now, when an emergency occurs, the first people on the ground are often computer geeks, setting up telephone networks so other aid agencies can do their stuff. Donors keep track of supplies on spreadsheets and send each other SMS messages: this road has been attacked by bandits, that village cut off by floods. Transport agencies announce helicopter flights by e-mail. Aid providers can find out where exactly on an incoming ship their medical supplies are, saving hours hanging round the docks. Aid donors find it easier to locate the victims of disaster; and victims queue as eagerly for mobile-phone access as they do for food.

As a result, the organisation of aid is changing.

Well, quite – except that the changes started ten years ago, there’s a whole new set of changes on the way, and we still haven’t solved the problems created by the last set. So what does the article say about all this?

There’s a lot of blanket assertions in the article, such as “Better communications also favour information-sharing and co-ordination between agencies… Things like e-mail service and satellite links help to herd the cats.” That doesn’t tally with the experience of the Humanitarian Information Centres, for whom capturing and sharing data from the agencies is like pulling teeth, and it doesn’t tally with the findings of the ECB assessment, which painted a picture of NGO staff flooded with email, still attending too many “co-ordination” meetings, and limited improvements in information-sharing of any substance.

And as Hugo Slim of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue points out, technology increases the flow of information not just to workers in the field, but to offices in New York or London; this may tempt bosses to micro-manage from afar – which can be disastrous.

Headquarters appear to be largely uninterested in micromanagement, so unless there’s some evidence to back that up, I find it difficult to take a serious concern. Headquarters offices have an extractive relationship with their staff working in the field – so although those staff have access to more information, it’s not thanks to headquarters.

In addition, the overwhelming focus on vertical information flow – e.g. between field and headquarters – is at the expense of horizontal flow – e.g. between different field offices, organisations working in the same response, or colleagues in neighbouring countries, all of whom may have valuable experience to share. The technology is actually cementing in place the hierarchical structures that need to be demolished if aid agencies are to survive in the 21st-century.

The article then moves onto the role of “Those Ingenious Victims”, acknowledging that local people and communities affected by disasters usually provide almost all their own immediate assistance and suggesting that “Their ingenuity is likely to change disaster response by rich-world donors in unexpected ways”. I tend to agree, but the article then describes the least expected way you could choose – the extensively-documented spread of mobile telephones.

There are no actual examples of how mobile telephony has affected disaster victims (as opposed to anybody else), but it then moves on to mention cash distributions – an issue which I think is critical to the sector right now, but has almost nothing to do with technology. There’s a brief paragraph mention of family location, citing the Red Cross’ fairly average familylinks site (a missed opportunity to discuss the PeopleFinder development that came out of Hurricane Katrina), and then it moves on to an interesting Zimbabewan diaspora project called mukuru, through which Zimbabweans can “order and pay for goods such as petrol online – and have them delivered to family members back home.”

This is fascinating, but it’s got nothing to do with humanitarian relief. Basically, the article struggles to find any examples of technology use by the victims of disaster changing the aid paradigm – as do most of us. I have no doubt that something will be changing, although I’m not as optimistic as Toby Porter at Save the Children (who I know is a very smart guy), who’s quoted as saying

In the humanitarian operation of the future… beneficiaries of emergency aid will use technology to tell us what they need – cash, food, or education – find out from us what to expect, and track its arrival, just as we can track an order from Amazon.com now.

This is based on the assumption that if only we had more technology, we’d be able to do these things; in fact this isn’t true (as anybody who has read the Social Life of Information can tell you) and we could do these things right now with the available technology – if we really wanted to. Questions about political will, absorptive capacity, organisational change and the cultural location of technology are completely missing. Let’s be clear, things will change – but what Toby is describing is just an improved version of business as usual, rather than a fundamental re-organisation of how the aid community works.

The Economist believes that the story of Mohammed Sokor texting UN officials is “a sign that technology need not create a digital divide” – although it doesn’t tell us if the UN officials bothered to text him back. The story notes that “the WFP did boost rations in the Dagahaley refugee camp, albeit citing other reasons” – not surprising, since a text message really isn’t a good enough reason to revise a distribution plan. I imagine that the rations were increased on the basis of WFP staff on the ground re-assessing the situation, rather than technology empowering beneficiaries. But the Economist buys into the classic technotopian vision:

The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.

No it hadn’t, and no it hadn’t. The response to famine was exactly the same as it has always been – send more food. Mohammed Sokor is in exactly the same position of supplication as he would have been ten years ago, only now his begging letter is a text message that can be quickly deleted, rather than the “crumpled note” passed on by hand. The aid world is about power relations, with beneficiaries at the bottom of the pile, and there are limits to how much technology can change that. The “familiar flow of authority” is still intact, except now it comes with a customised ringtone.

Related posts:

1. Blogging for Famine
2. More blogging for famine
3. Humanlink now!

Given that it’s the World Bank, the app is not what you might imagine. In the words of the site,

We developed the BuzzMonitor, an open source application that “listens” to what people are saying about the World Bank across blogs and other sites in order to help the organization understand and engage in social media.

So it’s full speed ahead on the Web2.0 bus at the World Bank! The jury seems to be out on whether this is a really awesome new approach or a bit of a hog on your server, but it looks interesting enough to try – a super-aggregator with some nice features, particularly eliminating dupes, attributes sources, and allows users to collaborate on tracking and tagging. Apparently they open-sourced it in response to requests from other organisations, so there must be some demand – but you’ll need your own server to set up.

There’s been discussion around the application on Britt Bravo’s blog, the Net-Savvy Executive blog and (gasp) an article at Salon. Plus Pierre seems to be taking an active role in any discussions, so I’m sure if you email him he’ll be happy to give you a guided tour!

Related posts:

1. William Easterly versus the World (Bank)
2. Third World Farmer
3. Ugandan Displaced join Somali Refugees in Google Earth

(Jonathan and Jeff Allen have also been playing around with Clark Connect, a Linux server gateway which I didn’t know much about previously, but looks interesting as a way of providing connectivity over low bandwidth.)

Related posts:

1. ECB4 Report Launch: Information and Technology Requirements
2. NetHope Disaster Relief White Paper
3. D-TRAC is 1 year old!

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.

Related posts:

1. ECB4 Report Launch: Information and Technology Requirements
2. Blogging for NGO security
3. Information just wants to be free!