humanitarian.info

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.

Having recently spent a pleasant few weeks with the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, I am disappointed to report that William Lind’s thoughts about PowerPoint are equally applicable outside the US military:

The U.S. military has carried the formal meeting’s uselessness to a new height with its unique cultural totem, the PowerPoint brief. Almost all business in the American armed forces is now done through such briefings… The briefing format was devised to use form to conceal a lack of substance. PowerPoint, by reducing everything to bullets, goes one better. It makes coherent thought impossible. Bulletizing effectively makes every point equal in importance, which prevents any train of logic from developing. Thoughts are presented like so many horse apples, spread randomly on the road.

Observations elsewhere are confirmed by my experience: my co-workers in the ARRC commented that if it wasn’t on PowerPoint, it didn’t exist, and every day was a race to get as much as possible into the daily slideshow. Now that we know where the contagion originated, the remedy is clear – NATO should be quarantined immediately, and all officer ranks isolated while we crank out huge quantities of PowerPoint vaccine. The nature of this vaccine is clear for Lind: talking.

General Greg Newbold, USMC… asked for conversations with people who actually knew the material, regardless of their rank. Five or ten minutes of knowledgeable, informal conversation accomplished far more than hours of formal briefing.”

Proving once again that new technology isn’t necessarily an improvement on old technology – as per my post on paper. Pick the right technology for the task in hand, and always be questioning our use of technology to make sure that we’re not being taken for a ride. This is repellent to a large proportion of the social media set, who sometimes seem to believe that mere talking fails to deliver much substance – far better to attach a photo, mark up your location via GPS or retweet yo’self.

From the WFP Logistics Blog:

One thing that strikes me about David’s account is his mention of Filomena Nelson and how it was best to just get “out of her way”. Good logistics officers are adept at entering into a chaotic situation, appreciating what has been achieved by local teams and then figuring out how to best complement the system they have in place. By doing so you are often guaranteed a better result than if you were to just rush right and start trying to build your own system.

True dat.

A warm welcome to the blogosphere to Robert Kirkpatrick, scion of Groove and Microsoft Humanitarian Systems. With the formalities out of the way, I can tear apart his first post to get at the raw meat inside.

Robert is bang on the money when he says that “In every disaster zone and every rural development environment… paper is still king” and equally on the money in suggesting that this is because paper has a range of natural advantages over digital formats. Despite this he also predicts that “One day, hopefully soon, we won’t need paper in the field”, which seems a strange thing to wish for – the disappearance of a technology which is better than anything else we’ve yet developed.

The usual motor for such wishes is commercial: we’re sold new technologies which aren’t really better than the old ones mainly because somebody wants to make a buck out of it. This approach has a surprisingly successful track record for the obvious reason that people just aren’t that good at rational thinking. We’re more resistant to the sales pitch when the object is right in front of us and appears to work pretty well. Exhibit A: the bicycle. Few people even try to persuade us that they have something better than the bicycle to sell us, because it quickly becomes obvious that they don’t.

Unfortunately in the world of ICT, this natural check often doesn’t apply – it’s not immediately obvious that the novel solution isn’t any better because often the product in question isn’t as tangible as, say, a bicycle. This becomes a real problem when commercial companies approach non-profit organisations, offering them what looks like a free gift. Important to remember: whenever a commercial company offers you its product for free, it’s still a sales pitch.

Having said that, Robert’s offer is more interesting than my skepticism might allow. If “paper is the weakest link in your information supply chain”, then strengthening that paper will strengthen that chain – right? Well, sort of. In my opinion, in the humanitarian sector the weakest link in an information supply chain is more often to be found at the far end – the decision-making end. That’s tangential, because I do agree that there paper is a weak link, if not the weakest, taking us back to Robert’s point:

Data entry is not only a juncture where errors tend to be introduced; it’s also the point that tends to contribute most heavily to latency in the flow of humanitarian information. When critical information needed to match needs to resources reaches decision-makers too late, coordination breaks down, further delays are introduced, resources are misallocated, and too little arrives too late to help a population in need.

Again… sort of. Note to self: future post on how the humanitarian sector may suffer from serious whiplash effects in its supply chain because of the uncertain nature of most of the material requirements, the rapid turnaround required in procurement and the shifting conditions on the ground. This problem means that truly “efficient” supply chain management is not really what’s needed – as Michael says more eloquently, it’s better supply chain visibility that makes for better coordination, since it means that managers can make earlier decisions. WFP, for example, doesn’t order food based on precise headcounts, and nor would more precise headcounts cause WFP to re-think its logistics.

I could be wrong.

As a result of this dynamic, the forms designed to assess population needs at the outset of a response soon become inadequate. Questions must be added. Others must be removed. The schema of the data being collected has changed, impacting form and database design.

Surely this isn’t a technology problem – that it is, it isn’t a problem with the schema, the databases or the processes used to populate those databases? This is a political problem. The basic fields required to respond to a humanitarian crisis are almost invariant no matter what the specifics of that crisis are. The main requirement is to take into account local technologies (e.g. do we need to look for boreholes or surface water supplies), terminologies (e.g. what words do people use to describe their situation) and ontologies (e.g. what are the administrative boundaries).

We can argue about my reservations, but Robert’s post is still based on one major assumption:

As long as paper is used for data collection, error and data loss will continue to reduce the effectiveness of humanitarian coordination, and unless someone invents self-validating paper, it’s hard to see ways that technology can help here anytime soon.

Unless Robert has access to research that I don’t, my personal experience gives me no reason to believe that the levels of error in paper-based data collection are sufficiently high to significantly reduce the effectiveness of humanitarian coordination.

This project sounds interesting – but is the problem it seeks to resolve one that warrants such an investment? Does Robert make the fatal mistake of assuming that certain key processes needed to make it work (for example, people actually cleaning up data in a collaborative workspace) will somehow materialise as soon as the technology is developed? I worry, I worry, I worry…

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog criticizing the work of others, and a small amount of time describing the (small) amount of work that I’ve actually done. However I’ve never actually laid out where I think we should be focusing our efforts and how we should be achieving that focus – at least not in this blog.

Earlier this year I published an article titled Only Connect: Problem Sciences, Information Systems and Humanitarian Reform in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. In the article I did lay out the framework in which I think we should be operating, and I’ll drop other bits of the article into future posts (frankly it was a bit over-stuffed). Let’s start with this:

Conceptually it is most useful to class disasters according to the level, nature and source of inputs that they mobilise, rather than the type of disaster itself. It makes sense to think of resource mobilisation moving outwards depending on the scale of the disaster – like a rock dropped in a pool, the impact of the disaster spreads further depending on its size, visualised as per Figure 1.

Each successive layer usually becomes involved only if the resources available to those occupying the next layer in are insufficient. It is clear that increasing the capacity of each layer will limit the need for additional resources, with the greatest return on investment provided by increasing capacity towards the centre. Thus the primary question in disaster management is how to ensure that individuals and (more frequently) communities mobilise sufficient resources to withstand shocks.

In an ideal world, sufficient resources the world would always be available at the lowest level, in the context of resilient communities that are able to withstand shocks with little if any external support. Realistically this is unlikely to happen for most communities around the world in the foreseeable future, and so the requirement for external inputs will continue. The secondary question is therefore how to mobilise resources successfully between one level and the next to mitigate the impact of shocks.

There, I feel better already. Unfortunately this raises the obvious question: why am I still working on the secondary question rather than the primary question? There’s an obvious answer – after 15 years of doing this work, I still haven’t figured out the most effective way of addressing the primary question. I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out.

Michael is abolutely right when he says that ICT projects can’t solve process problems on their own. It continues to puzzle me that so few people have worked this out in the humanitarian sector considering that we’ve been saying this for so long now. Anybody care to predict what will happen to UNOCHA’s OneResponse, a platform without any process behind it? Answers on a postcard, please.

I recently exchanged emails with another colleague whose work I respect and whose views are generally solid. He’s taken it upon himself to develop a management dashboard to manage humanitarian missions. I used to think this was a great example of how ICT could support humanitarian work, but I’m much less convinced now, for reasons which tally with Michael’s post:

• All these systems suffer from their “weakest link”. If one person fails to enter data (or fails to enter accurate data), the utility of the entire system falls dramatically.
• Systems which try to do too many things suffer from lack of focus. It’s better to do one thing very well than a lot of things quite well – otherwise users will not pick up the system.
• System competition – even the smallest NGO has information systems (usually for finance if nothing else) and some of them have extensive systems. Trying to introduce a new (external) system will meet a lot of resistance.
• Adoption costs are extremely high – all staff in the organisation (including those without much computer experience) have to be trained on the system, which is difficult (but not impossible) to manage.
• Support costs are extremely high – if the system fails, there needs to be a full service level agreement with somebody to fix it – which is very difficult unless there is a commercial provider willing to do that.
• Scaling. It’s easy to introduce such a system as a pilot in a single country office of a single organisation – it’s much harder to introduce the same system across a range of country offices.
• Variability. If each country office wants a slightly different system, i.e. adapted for their needs, the costs of introducing and supporting it across the organisation go up exponentially.
• - Internal weakness. The system will only be as useful as the information systems that the organisation already has in place (e.g. reporting, standards, monitoring, etc) – and generally NGOs don’t have very effective formal systems in place.

After I sent the email, I read it back and realised how negative it was. It’s easy to point out the flaws, but the question of how we deal with those flaws is much more elusive. The points above might prove useful as red flags to warn us of possible pitfalls, but are we doooooomed to keep chasing after something which may not in fact be possible to achieve? Again, answers on a postcard…

Obviously, this blog is dormant but we don’t often have good news to share; so, here we go…

The  baseless and preposterous charges of banditry against humanitarian.info’s friend, Zimbabwe Peace Project National Director Jestina Mukoko were yesterday bounced out by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court. Zimbabwean Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, quoted in  the BBC, said:

“The state, through its agents, violated the applicant’s constitutional rights… entitling the applicant a permanent stay of criminal prosecution.”

I do not have a copy of the judgement, so it’s unclear to me whether this is a ruling on the procedural conduct of the authorities in failing to bring Jestina to court, or their complicity in her (and others’) abduction and torture. I hope  that this ruling opens the prison door for those who are still missing,  likely imprisoned in off-the-map places of detention , before the bitter fight to bring to book their abductors begins and closes it again.

Hey, I know that I’m always down on the “international community” and their “humanitarian assistance”, but believe me, it’s all based on bitter experience. One of the lesser-known reasons why the aid industry fails to deliver  is because aid workers have terrible music taste. Seriously, check this out:

Third Eye Blind is the soundtrack of the Eastern Congo.

Really? Third Eye Blind? Somebody kill me. How about this, though:

I blasted The Who through earphones into my head. Pete Townsend’s thundering guitar story, A Quick One While He’s Away (Live at Leeds), with its crashing chords and bleeding vocals powered me through the stress of working half way around the world from my girl. Like rolling down a mountainside in a barrel I could think of nothing but rock. Then came something even louder: Mppp…mppp…I tore my headphones off and looked out the window at the oddly vacant airport road. Mppp… There it was again. The Darfur rebels had finally launched their attack.

The Who – that’s better, I guess, but the list at the end of the article gives the game away though. It’s so… rockist. So… average. Then Jon went and posted this, and now I have to stand up and be counted. As a well-known music snob, I will try and redress the balance, with a selection of tracks that have kept me going through the darker days:

Basement Jaxx – “Red Alert”. Full speed ahead for 90s Brixton madness. Also the soundtrack to Iraqi refugee camps in Iran.

Outkast – “Bombs over Baghdad”. Hey, Kosovo! As well as having the most bonkers video in hip-hop, this doubled up for duty in Iraq as well.

Holly Valance – “Kiss Kiss”. The least appropriate music video to be watching in Afghanistan. The original track by Tarkan is better, but she’s considerably more attractive.

Soulwax – “2ManyDJs”. Feeling alienated in Cyprus, waiting for the Iraq war to hurry up and finish so you can die in Baghdad? This was perfect.

Black Keys – “10AM Automatic”. Balls to the wall blues rock. Just right for getting over Indonesian tsunami trauma by going to bed at 10am in Bangkok.

Suba – “Sereia”. Balkans to Brazil, from a classic album. Incidentally, I realise that this list has got a serious western focus. Maybe I can do a follow up with more Tuvan throat singers or something.

Leaving you with one of the greatest anti-war songs of all time. Compassion not politics from Bill Withers. Sleep well.

Chris Blattman’s partner Jeannie is the new research director at IRC, and they’re thinking about “how to assist learning in the field — both IRC’s expat aid workers and national staff”. So here we are, ready for another go-round. What do we know about aid workers and “learning”?

1. Most aid workers learn by doing rather than by reflecting; that’s what lead them into aid work in the first place.
2. Different professions have different approaches to learning. Compare water engineers to child protection officers.
3. National staff have different approaches to learning depending on their social and economic backgrounds.
4. Different organisations have different cultures which affect how their staff will learn. Compare MSF with WHO.

One concern is when Chris says that if aid workers were learning more, “Presumably the quality of aid would benefit too”. I have yet to see any research connecting aid worker learning to improvements in the quality of aid, and I’m not even sure what that research would look like, to be honest – two extremely hard to measure metrics with a very tenuous causal link. Good luck! More worryingly, it overlooks the structural deficiencies that prevent aid workers from improving the quality of aid – but that’s a bigger argument.

Chris believes that “while most research is horrific to read… enough well-written stuff is out there to keep us all busy for a fair while.” This is not true. The quality of writing is irrelevant, it’s the style of wring that’s problematic. My apologies for being blunt, but academic research is plain boring and functionally useless for most aid workers. Your best bet is to hire a professional writer who understands the sector to rewrite academic research in styles that will be more widely appealling (and tailored to the medium of delivery, of course).

One danger of technology-focused solutions: a lot of aid workers spend a lot of time sitting at computers. Yeah, I know he says that “not everyone sits behind a computer”, but not everyone has an MP3 player either and he still think podcasts are a good idea. The last thing I want to do with my spare time is to keep sitting behind my computer. Aid workers who aren’t sitting behind computers are generally the sort of people who don’t like sitting behind computers, so they don’t want to keep sitting behind their computer either. So we have to be careful.

The two ideas that they have so far are: podcasts for Landcruiser journeys, and reading clubs for aid workers.

• Podcasts, sure, I do think they’re a good idea. I like podcasts, but I listen to podcasts that have nothing to do with my job, because podcasts are entertainment. If you’re chugging 6 hours through the forest on bad roads, do you really want to listen to a detailed discussion about a book on nutrition? I’m not sure, but worth a go.
• Reading clubs – myself, I hate book clubs, but I’m probably not the target audience. If you emphasise the social element, then people will go for it, but I’m just not sure how it’s possible to create a top-down learning structure like that. And when I say I’m not sure how it’s possible, I mean I don’t think it’s possible.

I just came back from a workshop in an unnamed Latin American country for an unnamed organisation. (Ha!) This is not the first workshop I’ve done, nor will it be the last (hopefully); my experience with technology in the aid world is not inconsiderable; my commitment to improving the capacity of aid workers (particularly national staff) is fairly obvious, blah blah blah. So I’ll go out on a limb, and say that this approach will work in this sector as the starting point for better learning:

1. Holding workshops in the field that bring people together across a) different organisations, b) different countries and/or c) different disciplines, focus on core transferable skills, emphasising practical skills that reflect policy. Old school!
2. Creating structures that enable the professional links developed in those workshops to be maintained more effectively over time. Call it social networking if you must, but stop looking at Facebook. This is where the technology comes in – new school!
3. Then (and this is the really, really difficult bit) let these groups define the direction of future learning. Regularly poll staff to see what they want to learn, how they want to learn and when they want to learn, and shape your approach accordingly.

There needs to be some imagination around these two approaches, a willingness for organisations to give up control of the learning process, and a long-term investment that will definitely see mixed results. Unfortunately these are three things that aid agencies are really, really bad at – however I am available for consultation should funding be in place cough cough cough.