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There is a need to have better information sharing among NGOs in a crisis. One option for doing this is to create situational awareness applications that can allow a technologically poor NGO to better manage their resources in a crisis, while at the same time, allowing basic data about their operations to be shared to the larger community. This is a similar dynamic to social bookmarking, where a user gets personal benefit to storing their bookmarks in something like del.icio.us, while the larger user based gets better aggregation of content. The first step in this is to create prototype applications that could show some options for how such a larger body of NGOs operating in a crisis could effectively share information.
Create prototype applications which show how an individual NGO could get improved management of their resources while at the same time, providing better situational awareness to the rest of the NGOs operating in the same sector. Prototype applications should focus on a specific sector, such as mobile medical facilities, for instance, and could either be focused on an individual NGO’s management of their work in a Crisis, or the overall aggregation of data from NGOs in a particular sector. CrisisCommons will use the prototypes in order to plan operational versions of this approach in the future.
Example of similar project in CrisisCommons (Kabap) that aggregated Medical Facilities data in Haiti Solutions and Relevant Links An example of a similar project that might be worth looking at is the Kabap Medical Situational Awareness (MedNet) project. The Kabap MedNet app was designed to aggregate operational status information for all the hospitals operating in Haiti. The difference with this model and what is asked for above is that Kabap was built around a call center collecting data, aggregating it, and then putting it out on a Geotagged map.
The hope would be that the aggregation information would be useful for developers to look at, and then to come up with options for how an NGO might be able to use a sector specific app to better manage their work, such as a mobile medical facility keeping track of which personnel were in a disaster area per time period, details many patients they treated, what supplies they used, etc. The output to the larger environment would provide high level details like the location of the facility, the number of doctors and nurses on staff, the available beds (or backlog information), the services offered and how many patients were treated in the last 24 hour period.
Scenarios
HQ: Where to send people
Where are resources
Where are needs
Trending
Project manager creating strategy
Wants a timeline/calendar/Gantt - his killer app
Predict capability
Scheduling in time and space, share through higher level
On the ground
Location
Resource availability, usage, usage rate, demand, people
Need to manage flow of resources in and *out*
Two pieces:
Capacity Management/Planning - this is the carrot
Information Sharing - this is the aggregate result
What do NGOs use now?
Some have systems in place (e.g., International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders), others don't
We need to interface with other systems such as the ones used by larger organizations, I'm OK, etc.
Multiple levels - Global for fundraising
Crisis - cross-organization coordination On the ground - project manager work
Data sharing and privacy
Some NGOs are chary of sharing information with non-affiliated organizations Need to keep the interface simple (e.g., just allow sharing with other NGOs that are funded by USAID)
ProjectRSS - an existing open standard for sharing project data. *Needs work* See @worldlyjohn. Welcome all ideas. I'm here. =)
OpenAction - working on this problem by giving NGOs tools to help themselves first and the community as byproduct. See Grassroots Business Fund where the map data is open data and lives beyond the map. *Contact @worldlyjohn or johnb AT openaction.org* I'm here.
Peter Haas at AIDG would be great to engage. Doing communication facilitation in Haiti phaas@aidg.org
Gerhard Tauscher Shelter Cluster Coordinator Port au Prince 50939006892 www.shelterhaiti.org shelterhaiti2010coord4@gmail.com
Small organizations commonly use google groups/listservs/email/etc to communicate and plan - not efficient
Outside communications rely on blog/twitter/narrative measures
Reluctance to share information - need to offer large carrot of project management to organizations in order to get them on board