humanitarian.info

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story – I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?

I promised Lorant Czaran¹ that I would post something about ReliefWeb’s job vacancies mash-up – and then realised that it would fit perfectly with this discussion about innovation. I’ve written about ReliefWeb before, but it’s not exactly noted for cutting edge web 2.0 efforts. However, no matter what its faults, it’s the single most important website for the humanitarian community, which is why it’s good to see them trying some new approaches.

I’m not claiming that searching for jobs on ReliefWeb is an especially humanitarian activity, but it is an activity that a lot of humanitarians do. One of the things that I completely failed to understand about their redesign a a couple of years ago is why they relegated the Vacancies section to the bottom of the “Professional Resources” part of the site, rather than foregrounding it. The reason for foregrounding? Simply that vacancies are one of the main reasons that people go to the site in the first place.

Vacancies shouldn’t be the focus of the entire site, but they should be a focus of the user experience. Lorant and his team took a strong step forward here, introducing a new way of interacting with the site – a Google Maps mash-up which can also be downloaded as a Google Earth KML file. This is a great idea, and well executed, given ReliefWeb’s disturbingly 90s website design – but why does this fit with the innovation theme? AFter all, Google Map mash-ups aren’t exactly new, even in the humanitarian sector.

What’s innovative about it is that it shows the way forward not just for job searches but for the entire ReliefWeb site. There’s no reason why the enitire site couldn’t be organised in this way, with navigation based entirely on geography – after all, that’s the way the humanitarian community itself works. I’d love to see this approach extended to become the front page of the website, offering a way into the main Countries and Emergencies section. There’s very few parts of the site that don’t offer themselves up to a geospatial interface.

So what about those few parts that don’t – Policy and Issues, for example? Well you couldn’t do a Google Maps mash-up for those things – but why couldn’t you do a policy map instead, showing the different links between sectors and institutions? Or a tag cloud approach, showing which issues are the ones that are generating the most publications and discussion? Either of these would offer a better user experience that would make ReliefWeb not just important but innovative as well….

1. Ex-ReliefWeb, now UN-Spider, which is the most awesomest UN acronym ever, by the way [↩]

What’s interesting about the ReliefWeb Client Outreach statistics?

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.