The one thing we know for sure about the information revolution is that it disrupts existing business models, and that we have just started to feel that disruption in the humanitarian sector. While it’s difficult to predict exactly how this disruption will play out, it’s increasingly clear that a primary source of that disruption will be increased participation of disaster-affected communities in preparedness, response and recovery; and that this participation will be facilitated by technology.

I used to think there was a clear distinction between information management and public information. At the time I may have been right, but the rapid development of communications technology, and the networks created and empowered by that technology, have made me realise that I was probably completely wrong. This cuts in two ways – both in our relations with affected communities, but also with our donor communities (say hello to Kony2012, by the way).

It’s in this context that the importance of last week’s CDAC Media and Technology Fair needs to be understood. First, the good news: there’s already a lot of solid practical experience to build on. I hate the Ignite talk format – it’s the complete opposite of my learning style – but FreedomFone, Souktel, ActionAid and others gave presentations which weren’t just PR fluff. There are a lot of ways of cutting this particular cake, and all of them involve a much greater emphasis on communications in partnership than most NGOs are currently achieving.

Mid-way through the second day, however, I realised what was bothering me. The discussions were productive, and the points being raised were solid; but the issues being discussed were basically the same as ones being discussed five years ago. Sure, there are a lot of fundamental issues that haven’t yet been resolved, but one reason I don’t go to many conferences is that I end up feeling like I’m a on a hamster wheel. I’ve spoken before about Year Zero tendencies in the humanitarian sector, but this is something we need to get past if we’re going to make progress.

Networks like CDAC offer one way out of the Year Zero trap, providing institutional continuity that goes beyond individuals and organisations. I was pleased to find out that CDAC will be taking this show on the road; the fair was the first in a planned series in different regions around the world, and it seemed obvious to me that the discussions in those regional workshops will have more grit in the gears than the London one. I’m hoping that CDAC will also work out better methods to capture the experiences of participants so that we don’t just keep

The big issue, the one which I hinted at right at the start of this post, is the question of what our new business model should be. Increasingly, I see the humanitarian community as a delivery mechanism not for relief materials, but for humanitarian principles. If we think those principles are worth preserving; if we want those principles to remain at the heart of humanitarian response; if we want those principles to empower disaster-affected communities, we need to start using communication much more effectively to start that discussion now.

Related posts:

1. Humanitarianism: its part in my downfall
2. Not “Disaster 2.0″, Just “Disaster”
3. Correcting crowdsourcing in a crisis

The table shows the range of existing laws, principles, standards and guidance in the humanitarian sector; it’s not exhaustive, but it is exhausting. It’s worth noting that SPHERE, HAP and People In Aid are merging (in some nebulous way) to create a combined standard – the first fruits of that process can be seen at www.jointstandards.org.

The first thing that occurred to me after I’d finished adapting the table was: holy shit, that’s a lot of policy wonkiness for your average NGO to get through. An amazing amount of high-quality work has been done in developing basic standards to ensure that collectively we get things done right, but the sheer scale of this should give you a clue as to why we find it difficult to implement all of them.

Take your average small NGO doing community-based work when a disaster hits. How easy do you think it’s going to be for them to meet all the requirements laid out in the documents listed in that table? It’s unfair to expect them to manage that, but it’s also unfair to expect them to stand to one side when the circus of bigger agencies rolls into town.

In some ways it’s also unfair to expect individual staff within those bigger agencies to be aware of, subscribe to and successfully implement all of those standards. The reason that it’s unfair is because UN, NGO and Red Cross staff tend to fill multiple roles at any given time; as a result, they don’t just have to apply one professional standard, but a multitude.

I’ve always been pro-certification, since it’s an inevitable part of professionalising the sector that we should welcome. The problem for me is how to develop and implement individual and organisational certification that enables us to do better work, rather than erecting new obstacles both for existing and new organisations. The next couple of years will see whether we get it right.

UPDATE: Just noticed this discussion on reasons not to professionalise on Aidsource.

Related posts:

1. Seriously, nobody gives a sh*t about information security
2. A Black Box of Suffering
3. How international NGOs killed civil society in developing countries

The picture’s from the recent DFID strategy paper with the snappy title “Promoting innovation and evidence-based approaches to resilience and responding to humanitarian crises“.¹ It’s worth reading for many reasons – DFID are generally ahead of the curve in the donor community, so this is likely to be shaping policy for years to come. Plus points: they flag up the known unknowns, actually bother to set out their theory of change (four of them, in fact), and recognise that partnership² is essential for achieving any of those changes.

Despite those plus points, I’m going to focus on a big problem with the paper – this is a blog, after all, you don’t get points for being positive. That problem is on the right-hand side of the picture at the top, the column titled Reaction to disturbance (again, snappy snappy title!), where four options are given:

• Bounce back better
• Bounce back
• Recover but worse than before
• Collapse

These look good at first glance, but there’s something missing, and that something is: Transformation. UPDATE: As Ben points out in comments below, “transform” is given as one of the potential reactions to a shock, but I would make a distinction between transformation as a process and transformation as an outcome. It strikes me that the latter is more interesting and important than the former.³

Short version: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”⁴ Yet transformation is rarely proposed, even in the case of rebuilding Haiti, which was in an abject state even before the earthquake.  There are good reasons for this: we don’t want to treat people affected by disasters and conflicts as guinea pigs for our social experiments, right?

But we already treat them in exactly that way. As the DFID paper points out, one of the known unknowns is that “We don’t really know which interventions are most effective in reducing risk, saving lives and rebuilding livelihoods after crises.” (p5) The prospect of transforming communities – and more feasibly, transforming how we work – needs to be on the table at this point more than ever, even if the chances of success seem slim.

We can increase those chances. The concept of the Overton window should be familiar to anybody interested in generating change, but for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it’s a way of visualising progress towards specific political changes. The window itself is the range of politically possible options from the total of all conceivable options, and the mission of changemakers is to shift the window so that what was previously considered unthinkable becomes possible. Josh Trevino laid out a rough scale to show how this progress might look:

• Unthinkable
• Radical
• Acceptable
• Sensible
• Popular
• Policy

The same pattern can be seen in the humanitarian sector. In the classic reading of the Overton window:

Many believe that politicians move the window, but that’s actually rare. In our understanding, politicians typically don’t determine what is politically acceptable; more often they react to it and validate it. Generally speaking, policy change follows political change, which itself follows social change. … When social and political forces bring about change, the window of political possibility shifts up or down the spectrum and can also expand to include more policy options or shrink to include fewer. The window presents a menu of policy choices to politicians: From their point of view, relatively safe choices are inside the window and politically riskier choices (or bolder ones, if you prefer) are outside.

We have an advantage: the humanitarian sector is build on crisis moments, and in those crisis moments, opportunities present themselves to move the window. The stop-start shift towards professionalising the sector illustrates this well: every time we drop the ball on a colossal scale, we take a step closer to certification. Since most of us don’t understand this dynamic very well, we tend to miss the opportunity to move the window, arriving months (sometimes years) after it has passed.

The one thing we can bet on is that there’ll be another crisis, and another opportunity. The key to success is to have all your dominoes already lined up – the policy, the infrastructure, the tools – so that when the window opens, you can present the previously unacceptable as a solution to a problem, rather than as a challenge to the status quo. It takes a lot of patience – and potentially some deep pockets – but this model, combining incremental development with revolutionary implementation, seems to stand the best chance of success.

1. I don’t know about you, but the title makes me think that somebody had been up late playing aid worker buzzword bingo.
2. i.e. collaboration – BINGO!
3. Ben suggests that ‘bouncing back better’ could be equivalent to transformation, but I’m not convinced. As an example, bouncing back after a famine might involve introducing new agricultural practices; but leaving individual plots and forming a farming collective that asserts its land rights would be transformative.
4. No, I can’t believe I’m quoting Rahm Emanuel either.

Related posts:

1. Interesting but Wrong vs Right but Obvious
2. Response to Chris Blow 3: Please Prove Me Wrong
3. Innovation, ReliefWeb and Vacancies

Responding to my earlier blog post on the future of aid , Carsten asked a fair question:

There’s a methodological challenge by trends being projected by historic data into the far future. nobody can predict the future but we can determine likelihood of developments based on what we already know. We can’t really do it based on what we don’t know. This is what the series of articles also does. Curious what you’d do differently.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but Carsten is right: while we can’t predict the future, we can make assumptions based on what we know from the past and what we see in the present. The challenge is that everybody suffers from incomplete knowledge, which means that you may well be making completely wrong assumptions without even realising it. The more perspectives that you can incorporate into your planning, the more likely it is that your plan will be robust.

The weakness was with the Alertnet poll was that they asked a bunch of aid professionals what the future of aid will look like, and got responses that completely failed to deviate from the usual preoccupations of aid agencies. Most people from outside the sector wouldn’t be able to give you very useful answers either, because they lack the necessary knowledge of the sector, so I’m not claiming that’s the solution either.

If we want to build a more robust vision of what the future of aid looks like, we need two things. First, we need to engage more explicitly with the wider range of actors that occupy the international stage (private companies, militaries, and so on) and with a wider range of actors at national levels – most organisations’ model of community engagement is still stuck in the 1990s. Second, we need more people within the aid industry with obscurely wide interests and sufficiently weak organisational ties that they can offer different perspectives.

With that in mind, here’s three possible futures that don’t appear in the Alertnet poll:

1. Peak Oil has gone from fringe obsession to mainstream consensus in the space of a couple of years (which is good, because it was getting really crowded on the fringe and we needed the space). Peak Oil means two things: short term price volatility, which the Alertnet poll does take account of, but more importantly large changes in the energy market in the medium term. It’s the latter that presents real problems for us: the price of fossil fuels is directly linked to the industrial processes on which our entire civilization is built. The cost of shipping becomes increasingly unpredictable, travel costs for expatriates go up dramatically, grid energy contracts to serve the core, etc. Maybe a previously-undiscovered technology will mitigate these effects, but I really wouldn’t base your strategic plan on it.

2. The Demographic Shift was almost something that we cared about (say, 15 years ago) but it’s often lost in more unfocused discussions about population growth. The Alertnet poll cites Population Growth as critical, but given that we know that population levels are likely to stabilise that’s relatively easy to plan for. We might plan for “more young people in poor countries”, but that’s not the real impactof the shift from our current pattern to what Bruce Sterling called “old people in big cities who are afraid of the sky”. Unpacking that shift has a whole host of possible impacts – lower income levels in rich nations = less taxpayers and charity givers, desperate employment markets = quicker and easier migration flows, and then degraded infrastructure, social division, political instability – you know, the usual stuff.

3. The collapse of a major currency used to be a doomsayers fantasy, but these days pretty much everybody is looking at the Euro funny. The idea of currency collapse seems like something that had been consigned to the history books, but that’s just historical amnesia on our part – it happens all the time, including in Europe in the early 1990s. Should the Euro or (less likely) the dollar collapse, every single NGO that relies on European or US funding has an unprecedently big problem that will basically bring the entire sector to its knees. The only silver lining on this scenario is that we’ll all have far bigger problems to worry about if that happens, like how to pay for matches.

These are in principle Black Swan events, which by definition are so unpredictable that you can’t plan for them, you can only increase your resilience. However I will predict that at least one of these things are going to happen in my lifetime, although I don’t think the impacts will necessarily be as extreme as those I’ve outlined above. I’ve selected extreme but not impossible scenarios to make the point that these do not represent threats to our performance; they represent threats to the stage on which we are performing.

The question is not whether we can do anything about these trends, because we can’t; the question is can we do anything to mitigate their impact not just on the lives of affected communities, but on our own operations? I’m not in the business of making predictions, I’m in the business of building resilience. From that perspective, the problem is that the aid sector is (in general) only increasing its capacity to deal with specific issues within the existing framework, not noticing that the framework itself isn’t likely to survive for much longer.

But I could be wrong.

Related posts:

1. IBM hearts “complex math”
2. Why the technocrat loves the technology
3. The Future of Aid?

Two weeks ago, I was staying at a working dairy farm 60 kilometers north of Bogotá, Colombia… I was fiddling around with my iPad… when one of the kids that worked in the stables came up to me and started staring at it.  He couldn’t have been more than 6 years old, and I’d bet dollars to donuts that he had never used a computer or even a cellular telephone before… Curious, I handed him the device and a very small miracle happened.  He started using it.  I mean, really using it. Almost instantly, he was sliding around, opening and closing applications, playing a pinball game I had downloaded… Think about this. Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate 6-year-old can use without instruction. If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.

Quite apart from the colossally  patronising attitude towards the illiterate poor – btw Colombia has nearly 100% mobile penetration, cellphone registration at around 96% of population levels and MOST 6-YEAR-OLDS ARE ILLITERATE – this anecdote shows literally nothing. When you pick up, turn over or touch the screen of an iPad, shit just starts happening – if that’s your definition of “use” then you’re setting the bar pretty low.

That anecdote breached my spleen courtesy of Ken Banks, who asks a more interesting question: What if Apple worked in ICT4D? He comes up with five points where the Apple approach would be different and/or problematic, and they’re all good points. There’s one important point which he doesn’t include, which is that great design is the product of obsession, not consultation. Witness the level of detail required to bring you an Apple product, excavated from an upcoming book by Adam Lashinsky called Inside Apple.

To fully grasp how seriously Apple executives sweat the small stuff, consider this: For months, a packaging designer was holed up in this room performing the most mundane of tasks – opening boxes… One after another, the designer created and tested an endless series of arrows, colors, and tapes for a tiny tab designed to show the consumer where to pull back the invisible, full-bleed sticker adhered to the top of the clear iPod box. Getting it just right was this particular designer’s obsession.

That packaging is a peripheral detail that most people will never notice consciously, but that’s what it takes to make a talking unicorn made of rainbows.  The obvious question is, did that attention to detail make a significant difference to that illiterate 6-year-old (even if he only exists in Noer’s imagination), or was it just an opportunity to play some pinball? The most important question is this, though: does making it easier to play pinball imply anything beyond making it easier to play pinball?

I happily acknowledge that the iPad interface is a pretty keen example of good usability which has opened up computing to a new audience entirely, but it seems to me that’s as far as you can go. I thought that failing to distinguish sufficiently advanced technology for magic was something that we would have gotten over by now, but it seems to be a mistake that a lot of people are still making. On the other hand, what do I know? I don’t use Apple products; but one thing I do know is that the perfect is the enemy of the good enough.

Speaking of letting your freak flag fly, here’s Tranquility Bass.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Why we need intelligent design
2. Post-disaster communications in Pakistan
3. Mobility in Lebanon, post-conflict

The first thing to note is that it has the interesting title “Where is the Money?”, explicitly tying the future of aid to the financing of aid. We can all agree that funding – both the amount and the sources – are vital to humanitarian aid, but it worries me that discussions about the future of aid might be reduced to a discussion about finance rather than principles.

The second thing to note is that the poll shows that the aid community is as unimaginative as the rest of the population. There’s no shame in that, but it does show that we need a bit more grit in the vaseline. If we’re responding to disasters, we need to actually predict disasters, not just predict business-as-usual with a few extra people living in cities. A word from Noah Raford:

In the end, futures work is rarely about accurate prediction. It is almost always about staging a useful intervention which encourages discussion of the most challenging aspects of the present… The best futures projects take on difficult subjects of today, cast them forward, then reflect them back upon the present in order to make them discussable, now.

The problem with the Alertnet poll is that it does take on difficult subjects of today but it fails to cast them forward. What do I mean by this? The poll notes that one factor increasing humanitarian need will be high and volatile food prices, which is true; but it’s been true for the last four years. Another factor noted is increased urbanisation, which is also true: but 50% of the global population became urbanised in 2008, so that’s also been true for at least the four years¹.

The same is basically true for every single item on this laundry list of future problems. They’re all problems that we should have been planning for ten years ago, have only recently noticed that they’re a big deal, and are now assuming that those are the problems that we’ll face in the future. In military terms, this is what’s referred to as “fighting the last war”, and it’s generally agreed to be the quickest way to lose the next war.

Exhibit A: the factor deemed likely to increase humanitarian need was an increase in climate-related disasters. The reason for this selection is that climate change is now the dominant meme in environmental circles – which isn’t to say it isn’t important, but it might not be important in the way you think.² Exhibit B: The biggest challenge to the delivery of humanitarian aid was thought to be the politicisation of aid. The reason for this selection is the war on terror – but the politicisation of aid is baked into the aid industry, and calling it a “challenge” completely misses that.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. The reason why this Alertnet poll is wrong is not that the responses are “wrong” – they accurate reflect what people believe to be true – the problem is that what they believe to be true is wrong, in the sense that it doesn’t actually reflect the future of aid. Visit the site, read the results and watch the video anyway: it’s still interesting, even if it’s wrong.

And now, a vision of the future we definitely won’t get:

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. In fact urbanisation has been a critical issue for much longer, but completely overlooked due to the rural bias of traditional livelihoods interventions.
2. There are a whole host of environmental problems that are not necessarily climate-related (eutrophication, topsoil degradation, deforestation, you choose) or that are climate-related but don’t come at us from the obvious direction of “more flooding!” Boy, am I looking forward to the first famine due to ocean acidification.

Related posts:

1. Welcome to the future
2. Heuristics for this discussion
3. Ushahidi: crowdsourcing in their own words

Embedded Decision-Making in Peace Operations

The diagram illustrates a dynamic, where the lightening bolt is any given action that the mission undertakes. Each of the three MPD elements is nested, with the military is embedded in political decision-making, and the political embedded in the requirements of social and economic development. The problem is that each element operates on a different timescale, with decision-making happening at different speeds, creating feedback loops that are completely out of synch with each other.

In a peace operation, the military can’t wait for the political level to reach a final analysis before it reacts to any given situation (for example, a rebel attack); as a result the political level often reaches a premature conclusion while the political feedback loop is still completing. This goes double for the development loop, because social and economic development processes happen in terms of decades rather than days.

Within this triple feedback loop, for any given action the three cycles may come together at a single point (temporal or spatial), but the effects are felt over different timescales and in different ways, each feedback loop may be positive or negative; and of course there is no guarantee that the three loops will even come together again. If this model is anywhere close to useful, then it’s always going to be impossible to predict how the three will play off each other from any given starting point – let alone for the wider range of interlocking actions the international community usually undertakes.

As a result it seems unlikely that we’ll ever be able to reconcile the three to create a truly coherent MPD approach. MPD is complex rather than complicated, and this means that linear planning tools – which currently dominate thinking in all three of these elements – aren’t up to the task. While systems thinking is making its way into each domain and will no doubt provide new tools to deal with this problem, there’s still a long way to go before that will have any impact on the ground.

It’s worth noting as well that this applies not just to peace operations in the traditional UN blue helmet sense, but also occupations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and it should be a counsel of caution for anybody who still thinks that regime change is a linear process of Stop X, Start Y. Also possible to adapt this very basic model to change processes in e.g. Arab countries in 2011-2012, but that’s a story for another day. Also:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Related posts:

1. Is the relief-development continuum a figment of your imagination?
2. No comment on Haiti
3. Ever have one of those years? And Darfur, mapped.

In a couple of previous posts, I outlined why I think open data poses serious difficulties for the humanitarian sector. A lot of those difficulties stem from endemic weaknesses in the humanitarian sector, because at root I believe that failure has been built into the humanitarian system, and I really need to get around to explaining what I mean by that. That can wait for next time, because right here I want to lay out what I think needs to happen if humanitarian organisations are ever going to survive the changes that the information age has brought, as it relates to using data effectively.

Two things to bear in mind. First, that this is taking the perspective of organisations as they are now; but I also think that organisations will evolve into new forms in the course of this century, a greater variety of forms than the traditional “corporate” model allows (and yes, most NGOs are set up on a corporate model). Second, that all of these steps are not merely realistic, they’re actually relatively easy, and especially relatively easy compared to the path that most organisations are currently taking. The reason that they’re not being widely pursued is that they emerge from a view of the humanitarian system as just that – a system, with multiple interacting layers – rather than as a hierarchy reaching from global headquarters down into “the field”.

Training

1. Create freely available training modules and support material via e.g. Moodle, so our staff can start doing it for themselves. Then open up that training material so that anybody can benefit from it – local government, local NGOs, affected communities, national universities, anybody.
2. Create an accreditation system for info management trainers, initially based on prior experience. Don’t accredit people in “information management”, they can do a university course if they want a diploma; but accredit trainers so that you can reach into the professional training community.
3. Run facilitated online and onsite courses, provided by accredited trainers and leading to accreditation for participants. Okay, I lied – it’s okay to accredit people in information management. The reason that I hesitate about this is because accreditation only really works if there’s an infrastructure around it that recognises and value accreditation.
4. Integrate accredited info management course into existing accredited programmes (e.g. RedR, Clusters, etc). This step deals with that infrastructure issue, but only to a certain extent. There’s a lack of recognition of “management” a professional skill in the sector, which is always going to work against us.

Data sharing

1. Establish data standards, mainly to stop the UN agencies from dicking around with their data and refusing to agree on e.g. basic demographic categories. Data standards are not complicated but they are difficult, especially when people don’t get the basic point. It’s a minimum set, not an exhaustive set; it’s for practical implementation, not policy roll-out.
2. Adopt common data sets and agreements on e.g. which population figures we’re going to use. OCHA has done the groundwork on Common Operational Datasets (pdf), but I don’t know what the latest state of play is. What I do know is that by this point there should be an online interactive map with those datasets easily searchable behind it AND THERE ISN’T. ; the next step is working out how to leverage those datasets more effectively in the field to create better decision-making tools. (Thanks to Ben in the comments for correcting my ignorance, and my apologies for shouting at OCHA when I really should have checked my own bookmarks folder – and well done to all involved.)
   
3. Begin capacity building from the field-level up in managing data and using information more effectively. I can’t stress this enough – all capacity building should start as far out on the “edge” of the organisation and work inwards, not the other way around.
4. Lobby from the HQ-level down on integrating actual information into decision-making. This is where HQs have the requirement – not for info management skills, but for decision-making skills based on good info. Don’t bother sending managers on info management courses, they’re never going to be crunching spreadsheets; they need to be able to read spreadsheets and connect that with their actual work.

Advocacy

• Operational level – lobby to solve location-specific data issues using time-limited task forces, as a way to raise awareness that IM is essential for decision-making.
• Country office level – lobby to create better environments for information management within organisations and meetings, focused on staff not technology.
• Head office level – lobby to integrate data into decision-making, and for HQs to make reasonable and informed calls about what information they’re requesting from the field.
• Global level – promote of data standards, CODs and capacity building strategies, and stop having high-level meetings that pretend to be designing tools for the field.

Most people think setting principles out and getting agreements down is important. I don’t. I would drop having principles in favour of signing up agencies to a ‘pathway’ of simple practical steps which incorporate the principles at an implicit level. Introducing principles makes it possible for everybody to nod their heads at the next meeting and then do absolutely nothing to follow up. And finally, that Shorty Long track at the top has literally no relevance to the blog post, except to the extent that I believe that I AM DE JUDGE.

Related posts:

1. Disaster Response Capacity in Guatemala
2. How to build capacity in humanitarian NGOs
3. Avian Influenza Capacity Map

“I have talked to teams of students designing new de-mining tools without ever having visited a mine field, students designing tools to make charcoal without understanding how poor people improve their incomes by selling the charcoal briquettes they make, and teams of students so convinced that they will create the next revolutionary product and make a fortune doing it that they forget to talk to the customers they are designing for. If these patterns of design arrogance and lack of respect and curiosity about customers and markets become institutionalized in the hundreds of new courses now springing to teach design for the poor, their impacts will be just as trivial as design for the rich.”

- Paul Polak, The Life and Death of Big Institutions

Related posts:

1. 36 years of police archives in Guatemala opened up
2. Ever have one of those years? And Darfur, mapped.
3. New Year High Resolution….

Having said that, open data in government 2.0 [Wow, has that term dated quickly.] does not necessarily mean the same as open data in the humanitarian sector; importing of principles and approaches wholesale from one sector to the other is almost never effective. In more practical terms, if governments are already signing up to release their data in general, that already covers data that might be deemed humanitarian specifically. There is almost no data which can be labelled solely ‘humanitarian’ [most of it relates to population movements] and there’s an increasing amount of ‘development’ data online. Since we’re already seeing a big push in the open data movement globally, I’m content to let that play out rather than try to shoehorn it into the humanitarian sector.

While we are seeing is movement in open data on the development side, that seems to have translated into more transparency regarding development finance, rather than a push to turn everybody into Hans Rosling. Rosling’s work is fantastic, and has done a lot to raise the visibility of development issues, it’s not intended to provide serious tools for decision-making at the national or regional level; the data simply isn’t detailed enough. That’s changing, and will continue to change, as the Age of Big Data bears down on us; but Big Data doesn’t resolve policy issues, and technocrats are often misguided in their expectations.

So what do I think open data can achieve? Simply put: more effective assistance to disaster-affected communities. What sort of data do we need to achieve that? Equally simply: operationally relevant data. I don’t care about data being shared as much as I care about data being collected; you can’t open up data that you don’t have, so our first priority should be getting decent data in the first place. The problem at the supply end is the lack of systematic data collection, which needs to be addressed with better survey work; and data should be collected solely in order to facilitate better decision-making – there’s no other reason to collect it. If that data isn’t being used for decision-making, then sharing it is irrelevant, which means that advocacy for and training in using data for decision-making is a higher priority than making data open right now.

The next consideration is that there’s always a cost to sharing data: although that cost has become substantially lower (great job, internet!), it still exists. Do the benefits of sharing data outweigh the cost? Please don’t argue that the costs are neglible, because they’re not – it’s a massive investment in an organisational change process just to get on the first rung of data sharing, there are lots of technical costs, and the potential for disaster is high (as the UK National Health System can tell you). I think the benefits outweigh the costs, but we need to build a stronger case than currently exists, which means we need to do a better job of drawing the dots between data and impact.

And this is where it gets tricky. Government 2.0 is all about transparency and accountability, and Development 2.0 is an extension of that, with an additional component of aid effectiveness. I would argue that this effectiveness component is much, much more important in Disaster 2.0 (ha!), but there’s also a tension around the role of government that a lot of people are in danger of missing. Hopefully everybody can agree that the big push for better data needs to be at country level – but humanitarian organisations frequently have a more adversarial relationship to government than UN agencies. We can’t expect MSF to participate in open data sharing with the Government of Sudan.

This isn’t just a question of context, this is a question of ensuring that humanitarian principles are preserved in any data sharing agreement: for example, if neutrality is in tension with transparency, which principle wins out? That’s a question that the current discussion around open data has simply not addressed, but it may turn out to be the most important question of all.

Related posts:

1. The Bear versus Shark of Data Entry
2. Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds
3. Back on the data wagon