humanitarian.info

Previously. Now: there’s a new mailing list [http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ps: register at talk-ps@openstreetmap.org] for people who want to get involved in mapping in Gaza and the West Bank. They’re still looking for people with direct knowledge of Gaza to join in the editing process. A particular note for me:

In the process, agencies like UNOSAT and EC JRC have started selective release of their data sets .. a great start to open geodata exchange. The OpenStreetMap Wiki has an extensive (perhaps the greatest) collection of Palestinian geodata on the internet, all collected rapidly through crowdsourcing. [My emphasis.]

See? Crowdsourcing can work.¹ More can be found on Mikel’s blog at http://brainoff.com/weblog/index.php?s=gaza+openstreetmap.

1. Sometimes. [↩]

Following my thoughts about being mapless in Gaza, I wanted to follow up on the work of UNITAR-UNOSAT, who have made the leap from the more basic satellite images that they used to provide, and are now regularly providing damage assessments. Their analysis of postwar damage in Georgia was very interesting¹ and now they’re producing similar damage assessments over Gaza, with a commitment to update as often as they get new images.

I mentioned the .kmz file that Stefan at Ogle Earth has been putting together, which includes the UNOSAT layer. Stefan also lamented the fact that – while they provide frequent updates and quality outputs – UNOSAT products are only provided in PDF format.

And yet, the result, always, is a PDF map, which is great for printing out but not any good for any other kind of use. In some cases, the PDFs are locked against everything but printing, which means taking screenshots in order to rasterize them for placement in Google Earth… Given the global scope of these maps, their timeliness and usefulness, wouldn’t it be great if these were automatically published as KML to the Global Awareness default layer in Google Earth? People wouldn’t even need to go look for maps when they zoom in on a region hit by an emergency.

Well, I’ll agree with Stefan up to a point. PDF files are useful for nothing except printing – but most of UNOSAT’s potential users only want to print them , and playing around with the data is the last thing on their minds. However the good news is that it looks like they’re already starting – the damage assesssment data is also available as a geodatabase file and as a .kmz file. Einar has been circulating these versions to people working on the response, but has reservations on two grounds.

1. The first is regarding the added value of releasing the data more widely – what is it, exactly? My response is that to fulfill their mission as effectively as possible, UNOSAT should be producing multiple formats and distributing across various distribution channels – and a side effect of this will be an increase the possibility of useful and interesting applications emerging. We can’t predict what they might be – and they might not even appear – but the whole neogeography field is based around innovation – it just needs the data to enable it.
2. The second concern is more difficult to address – the question of whether the data will be misinterpreted or misused. This data will never be 100% accurate, which can lead to criticism of the agency publishing it if people don’t understand that. There’s also a slim chance that the data might be abused – for example, to misrepresent the situation on the ground – although the chances of this seem very small. My response to these problems is that people are free to criticise on the basis of the PDF file already, and releasing the data is unlikely to increase the type or frequency of criticism. We faced this all the time in the Humanitarian Information Centres – people would come in waving a printout and saying “Your maps are wrong!”, to which charge we would patiently explain that all maps are wrong, and would they like to help us improve?

To some extent Open Street Map have already started to deal with these issues using their existing community mechanisms, but UNOSAT is different – it’s a formal organisation in a large bureaucracy without the mandate or means to deal with public enquiries like this. Perhaps the best approach would be a tag-team of UNOSAT and OSM – sharing data as widely as possible, with UNOSAT the corporate source and OSM the buffer to address these issues as they arise?

1. Although under-utilized on the ground – that’s the next obstacle we have to overcome, guys! [↩]

I promised in the last post that I would present some suggestions that have come out of reader comments as to how the humanitarian community might generate more successful innovation. Bear in mind that I’m not promising that any of these suggestions are guaranteed to work – they’re not – or that, if they do work, they’lll be spectacularly successful.

1. Overcome fear. “Many humanitarian organizations, especially larger NGOs and the UN, fail to embrace failure. Innovation requires a willingness to fail, perhaps repeatedly. For every successful innovation there are numerous failures… People who are afraid to fail don’t innovate. They follow the rules. They preserve the status quo. The bosses who brought the best out in me were the ones who let me take risks and even fail. They didn’t punish failures other than those that were due to negligence.” – Kevin Toomer
2. Create incentives. “So, how do we know what we know and judge it, use it, teach it, reward it? Paul (and the comments/replies) wrote a whole lot about that, but some of this comes down to simple professionalism/best practice (which sometimes goes AWOL on an institutional level particularly) and some of it is that we do need a cultural change. A recognition of innovation as necessary, worth sharing, celebrating. Spectacularly hard when it’s really the grinding day-to-day of just getting stuff done or just surviving that’s most aid work, let alone the brick-wall-headbutting of preparedness in and by local communities.” – Nigel Snoad
3. Look out! “Perhaps pursuing innovation within organizations from the start is the barrier. Innovation is happening outside traditional structures, where those creative types can act as individuals, collectively .. in open source projects, mailing lists, unconferences. The loose network of creative technological humanitarians is growing, and growing more exposed. We can concentrate our efforts there for now, to the point where they can’t be ignored.” – Mikel Maron. However bear in mind that “Folks that haven’t spent time in the field have a very hard time understanding the nuances so they develop solutions that will never hold up. They waste all of our time chasing ghosts and fixing things that they think need fixing. In the mean time all we can do is watch them run around in circles.” – Jon Thompson
4. Only Connect. “I agree that the answers lies in better connections between field offices and head offices, among organizations AND ALSO between different field offices. I think that head offices could play a better role in facilitating the transfer of solutions between field offices. Currently all the interaction I have with head office and field offices in different countries has been based on personal relationships with people I have met. I do think that INGOs could do a better job of connecting their staff around the globe.” -  Michael Howden
5. Technology > Network. “I’ve been involved with a number of projects that demonstrate innovation, all focused on introducing new technology to the sector, with varying degrees of success. None of these projects were technologically innovative themselves – their innovation was in using existing technology more effectively for the benefit of the sector – and all of them relied on network effects to create the value that make their innovation more or less successful. As soon as their focus on or their leverage from networks lapses, their success starts to disappear… What made it possible for each of them to create those networks in the first place was technology, creating the possibility of overcoming many of the organisational problems that plague the sector, from organisational silos to staff turnover to insecurity in the field. It is not that technology will solve these problems, but it does offer us the possibility of working together more effectively to solve them ourselves.” – Paul Currion

So there’s a starting point based on actual practitioner experience. All of these recommendations are realistic, and can already be found in various organisations, so the question then becomes – how do we implement them in our own organisations, and spread them across the sector? Approaches will vary from organisation to organisation, location to location – but in 2009 we’d better get the message out there, because otherwise the traditional humanitarian sector is going to be left behind.

Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron spoke at Where2.0 on Disaster Technology. Streaming video is a bit of a non-starter on my shonky internet connection, but both of these guys have an interesting take on the sector. They’re both technology evangelists, but minus the utopianism that makes my fists itch. A platform like Where2.0 is fantastic for getting the word out and (hopefully) engaging more people in the process of development for humanitarian action.

Here comes the requisite word of warning: for many people the politics of humanitarian assistance (both international and organisational) don’t appear on their radar. If we want useful tools to come out of this sort of forum, we have to communicate the political realities that technology will bump up against. Myanmar is a case in point; there’s a lot of activity (as per my earlier post) but the dots just aren’t joined up, and this needs to stop.

I used to think that this was just a phase that we were going through; then I thought that it was a naturally occurring state that we had to work around; then I realised that the endemic problems of co-ordination that we have were emergent properties of the system; but now I’m not sure what I think. Maybe I should leave the thinking to other people for a while.

Anyway, watch the video. You’ll enjoy it. They’re American, you know.