Disaster Relief 20 Report

8/4/2019 Disaster Relief 20 Report

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Disasterreliefthe future of information sharing in humanitarian emergencies2.0e


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UN O fce or the Coordination oHumanitarian A airsUN OCHA is the arm o the United Nations Secretariatthat is responsible or bringing together humanitar-ian actors to ensure coherent response to emergen-cies. OCHA also ensures there is a ramework withinwhich each actor can contribute to the overall response

e ort. OCHAs mission is to mobilize and coordinatee ective and principled humanitarian action in partner-ship with national and international actors in order toalleviate human su ering in disasters and emergencies;advocate or the rights o people in need; promotepreparedness and prevention; and acilitate sustain-able solutions.

http://ochaonline.un.org

The United Nations Foundation & Voda oneFoundation Technology Partnership

Created in October 2005, the United Nations Founda-tion & Voda one Foundation Technology Partnershipleverages mobile technology programs to support andstrengthen UN global health and disaster relie work.Our core areas o ocus are to: (1) strengthen communi-cations in humanitarian emergencies though capacitybuilding and support or disaster response missionsthat connect aid workers and the a ected community;(2) support the development o mobile health (mHealth)programs that tackle critical public health challengesand improve public health systems, decision makingand, ultimately, patient outcomes; and (3) promote

research and innovation using technology as a tool orinternational development.

www.unfoundation.org/vodafone

Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

The mission o the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative(HHI) is to relieve human su ering in war and disasterby advancing the science and practice o humanitar-ian response worldwide. HHI is a leader in providing ap-plied research, education and training on disaster man-

agement, humanitarian assistance, and humanitarianaction. As an inter-disciplinary organization it has a his-tory o producing high impact research that translateddirectly into evidence-based policy and programming.

http://hhi.harvard.edu/

Contact

United Nations Foundation1800 Massachusetts Ave., NW Suite 400Washington, D.C. 20036 USA

The Voda one FoundationOne Kingdom Street Paddington,London, W26BY UK Registered Charity No: 1089625

Suggested citation

Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Disaster Relie 2.0:The Future o In ormation Sharing in HumanitarianEmergencies. Washington, D.C. and Berkshire, UK: UNFoundation & Voda one Foundation Technology Part-nership, 2011.

The views expressed in the report are those o theauthors and do not necessarily re ect those o theUnited Nations Foundation, The Voda one Foundationor the Technology Partnership.

report partners

Cover Photo Credit: Government o Colombia, OCHA /Richard Johnson, UN photo, Ushahidi/Jonathan Shuler


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Andrew Alspach, OCHADavid AylwardDavid Bitner, SahanaHeather Blanchard, Crisis CommonsOscar Caleman, World Food Program (WFP)Kate Chapman, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap TeamKurt Jean Charles, noula.htNicolas Chavent, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap TeamChoi Soon-hong, ASG and UN CITOCraig Clarke, U.S. Marine CorpsPaul Currion, humanitarian.infoNoel Dickover, Crisis CommonsRamiro Galvez, UN Disaster and Assessment &Coordination (UNDAC)Stuart Gill, World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Riskand Reduction (GFDRR)

Alfred Gilman, WFPChris Fabian, UNICEFShelly Gornall, UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)Wendy Harman, American Red CrossSanjana Hattotuwa, ICT4Peace FoundationDennis King, U.S. Department of State HumanitarianInformation Unit

We would like to acknowledge the team that worked on creating and producing this report. At the Harvard Humani-tarian Initiative, this includes authors John Crowley and Jennifer Chan; researchers Vincenzo Bollettino, Mark Foran,Gregg Greenough, and Gisli Olafsson; assistants Margeaux Fischer, Tara Suri, and Alexa Walls; and transcriberCiara Jevon. At OCHA, this includes Oliver Lacey-Hall, Andrew Alspach, Mark Dalton, Brendan McDonald, NigelSnoad, and Andrej Verity. At the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, this includes

Adele Waugaman, Trinh Dang, and Sarah Hiller. Finally, we wish to thank copy editor Kate Sparks at Active Voice,LLC, designer Ambica Prakash at Eighty2degrees LLC and Hal Kowenski and Andre Temoney at Linemark Printing.

Of course, misunderstandings and errors remain the fault of the authors, who are indebted to those who will raiseconcerns and help us correct the record.

This report would not have been as compelling without the rich photos, graphs and tables contributed by thoseacknowledged throughout this report. Lastly, the research team would like to thank their spouses and partners fortheir patience during an intense writing process: Becky, Vaughan, and Wade.

Acknowledgements

The report partners, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the United Nations Foundation, the UN Office for theCoordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and The Vodafone Foundation are thankful to the numerous individualswho have shared their ideas and experiences to inform this report. In particular, our thanks go out to the 41 expertswho were interviewed by the research team:

Robert Kirkpatrick, UN Global PulseMartin Kristensson, WFPCharlotte Lattimer, Save the ChildrenBrendan McDonald, OCHAPatrick Meier, Ushahidi and Crisis MappersRob Munro, Stanford University and Mission 4636Gisli Olafsson, NetHopeJacobo Quintanilla, InternewsDaniel B. Prieto, IBMMark Prutsalis, SahanaEric Rasmussen, InSTEDDNigel Snoad, OCHA

Andrew Turner, Crisis CommonsSuha Ulgen, UN CITOKatrin Verclas, MobileActive

Andrej Verity, OCHAJeffrey Villaveces, OCHAJaroslav Varuch, UshahidiBartel Van de Walle, Tilburg UniversityNigel Woof, MapActionJen Ziemke, Crisis Mappers


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tABleof contents


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Individuals everywhere are interconnected by technology as never be ore. In 2011 more than 5 billion mobile phonesubscriptions are in use worldwide, creating connectivity in many parts o the globe where previously we talked onlyo a digital divide.

Mobile uptake, including access to the mobile Internet, is creating new market orces and reshaping businessesaround the world, including the business o humanitarian aid.

The global response to the January 2010 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti showed how connected individuals arebecoming increasingly central to humanitarian emergency response and recovery. Haitians trapped under rubbleused text messaging to send pleas or help. Concerned citizens worldwide engaged in a variety o ways, rom sendingin donations via SMS, to using shared networks to translate and map requests or assistance.

Powered by cloud-, crowd-, and SMS-based technologies, individuals can now engage in disaster response at anunprecedented level. Traditional relie organizations, volunteers, and a ected communities alike can, when workingtogether, provide, aggregate and analyze in ormation that speeds, targets and improves humanitarian relie . Thistrend toward communications driven by and centered on people is challenging and changing the nature o humani-tarian aid in emergencies.

Since 2005, the United Nations Foundation and Voda one Foundation Technology Partnership has leveragedthe power o mobile technologies to support and strengthen UN humanitarian work in the felds o global healthand disaster response. We commissioned this reportthe sixth in the United Nations Foundation and Voda oneFoundation Technology Partnerships Access to Communications publication seriesto examine the challengesand opportunities an increasingly networked world presents or delivering disaster relie in the immediate a termatho large-scale humanitarian emergencies.

Our hope is that this report will spur dialogue and action to harness the potential o evolving communicationstechnologies to trans orm how the world responds to disasters. This work is part o an ongoing conversation and wewelcome your comments at: www.unfoundation.org/disaster-report .

Ted Turner, Chairman

United Nations Foundation

foreword By ted turner

Credit: FAO/Truls Brekke, UN Photo, Internews/Eckert


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executiVe summAry

Each major humanitarian disaster rips open a gapbetween the past and present, between what oncewas and what is now.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck less thana mile o the coast o Haitis capital city o Port-au-Prince in January 2010 is one o the largest sudden

onset emergencies the Western hemisphere has everseen, and it struck its poorest country. Damage romthe quake collapsed poorly constructed housing andiconic government buildings alike, requently crushingthose within. It also created a chasm between whatthe international humanitarian community knew aboutHaiti prior to the quake and the reality that aced themin the quakes a termath.

The race to fll this in ormation gapto assess thedamage and plan a responseis a dynamic amiliarto seasoned responders to major sudden onset emer-

gencies. A ter a large-scale disaster, there is always amassive e ort to collect and analyze large volumes o data and distill rom the chaos the critical in ormationneeded to target humanitarian aid most e fciently. Butthe response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was di erent.

For the frst time, members o the community a ectedby the disaster issued pleas or help using social mediaand widely available mobile technologies. Aroundthe world, thousands o ordinary citizens mobilized toaggregate, translate, and plot these pleas on mapsand to organize technical e orts to support thedisaster response. In one case, hundreds o geospatialin ormation systems experts used resh satellite imag-ery to rebuild missing maps o Haiti and plot a pictureo the changed reality on the ground. This workdonethrough OpenStreetMapbecame an essential ele-ment o the response, providing much o the street-levelmapping data that was used or logistics and campmanagement.

Credit: Government o Colombia, OCHA/David Del Conte, Internews/Jacobo Quintanilla

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The international humanitarian system was not tooledto handle these two new in ormation re hosesone

rom the disaster-a ected community and one roma mobilized swarm o global volunteers. This reportseeks to understand and make recommendations orhow to adapt to this new reality where collective actioncan lead to collective intelligence.

This work will require partnership and dialogue. Hu-manitarian organizations have amassed deep wisdomand experience rom decades o work in the eld. Yetnew voices are opening the possibility o closer inter-actions with communities a ected by disasters. Andnew partners are o ering aster, more e ective meanso analyzing an ever-increasing volume and velocity o data. The challenge ahead is how to create an e ectiveinter ace between these resources, and create an eco-system where each actor understands its role.

It will not be easy. Volunteer and technical communities(V&TCs) like OpenStreetMap, Sahana, and CrisisMappersapproach problems in ways that challenge the statusquo . As organizations, some V&TCs are struggling toattain nancial sustainability, especially when asked torespond to successions o major disasters.

This report recommends a ive-part ramework oraddressing these challenges:

1. A neutral orum to sur ace areas o agreementand confict between the international humanitariansystem and the V&TCs.

2. An innovation space where new tools and practicescan be explored as experiments, allowing or the ail-ures that are a necessary component o learning newways o working.

3. A deployable eld team with a mandate to deploythe best available tools and practices rom theV&TCs to the eld.

4. A research and training consortium to evaluatethe work in the eld and to train humanitarians and

V&TCs alike in the best practices or in ormationmanagement in a humanitarian context.

5. A clear operational inter ace that outlines ways o collaborating be ore and during emergencies, withagreed procedures or communication, shared stan-dards or data exchange and an understanding o roles, priorities and capabilities.

This report is a snapshot o an ongoing discussionadialogue that the partners to this report wish to extendand continue.

Credit: UN Foundation Photo/D. Evans


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introduction

A ter each major disaster o the modern era, humani-tarian organizations have rea rmed a critical lesson:good communication is essential to e ective coordi-nation. As a result, many institutions made signi cantinvestments in in ormation and communication tech-nologies (ICTs). Field workers now rely on tools likeportable satellite antennae that enable them to have

Internet communications rom many places on the globe.Being disconnected is still a real problem, but ewerhumanitarians work without requent interactions withtheir managers at headquarters in New York, Geneva,or other major cities. Rather, the problem is now shi ting

rom basic connectivity to in ormation management.

Although the networks that connect humanitarians

have expanded quickly in recent years, the volume o data fowing through these pathways, and the numbero in ormation sources, have increased at an even asterrate. Responders are increasingly struggling to handlea growing amount o data, arriving more quickly thanever be ore. This is a problem rom the non-emergencyworld that is ampli ed at times o crisis. Due to poorlyadapted tools, training and strategies, responders areincreasingly ill-prepared to produce use ul knowledge

rom the fow o in ormation and data.

For all the new capability in ICTs, the in ormationrevolution has not led to a undamental rethinkingo the methods o coordination and working duringhumanitarian operations. Thirty years ago, humanitarianoperations were managed with push-to-talk radios,paper orms on clipboards, and push pins on papermaps. Since that time, the eld has undergone a revolu-tion. Today, many responders read email on their smartphones while at meetings and while sending SMS/textmessages to colleagues. A ew per orm geospatialanalysis o incoming data on laptops that not long agowould have quali ed or supercomputer status. Digital

02

w thout nformat on shar ng there can be no coord nat on. if not talk ng to each other and shar ng nformat on then e go backyears. Ramiro Galvez, UNDAC

Credit: WHO/Syed Haider, MapAction, Ushahidi/Jonathan Shuler


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maps get updated requently, building thematic layersor particular purposes.

And yet, digital maps are printed and posted on walls,where they are annotated by hand. Documents havemigrated rom paper to digital les, and are still theprimary method by which key metrics and supporting

data gets collected, analyzed, distributed, and brie edto decision makers. Paper itsel is not the problem: itis a durable, cheap, lightweight, and high-resolutionmethod that requires no power to use and allows orannotations by multiple individuals. The problem is themethod o creating the content that goes onto paper.

Todays predominant method o work relies on a humanreading each document and distilling the importantbits or others in their organization or network. It is avenerable method, but slow and not easily scalable tohandling massive increases in data fows without also

increasing the number o humans reading documents.During the response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, thevolume and velocity o data began to overwhelm thisapproach, helped by a new dynamic: the ubiquity o cell phones enabled new processes or crowdsourcingand microtasking.

In the developing world, cell phone use has becomealmost ubiquitous. Even some o the worlds mostimpoverished communities now have access to voiceand data services. A ter the January 2010 quake, theHaiti community used cellular technology to tell the in-ternational community what they needed. Haitians senthundreds o thousands o text messages in throughsocial media sites. At the same time, the scale andscope o the tragedy created an unprecedentedvolume o in ormation fowing between humanitarianpersonnel. Humanitarian eld sta had neither thetools nor capacity to listen to the new fow o requestsarriving directly rom Haitian citizens.

This gap did not go unnoticed. Working in communi-

ties, thousands o volunteers rom around the worldaggregated, analyzed, and mapped the fow o mes-

sages coming rom Haiti. Using Internet collaborationtools and modern practices, they wrote so tware, pro-cessed satellite imagery, built maps, and translatedreports between the three languages o the operation:Creole, French, and English. They provided their datato each other through interlinked services, so thatoutputs rom one e ort became inputs to another.

On the timeline o the Internets evolution, the 2010Haiti earthquake response will be remembered asthe moment when the level of access to mobile andonline communication enabled a kind of collective

intelligence to emerge when thousands o citizensaround the world collaborated in volunteer and technicalcommunities (V&TCs) to help make sense o a large-scale calamity and give voice to an a ected population.

That said, the humanitarian system had no ormal pro-tocols or communicating with these volunteer andtechnical communities (V&TCs). Despite the good willo eld sta , their institutions policies and procedureswere never designed to incorporate data rom outsidetheir networks. Some view this as a lost opportunity;others worry about what this change might mean orhumanitarians who need to protect data about vulner-able populations.

Regardless o ones viewpoint on the contributions o V&TCs, the response to the 2010 Haiti quake made itclear that the rate o investment in humanitarian in or-mation management over a complex global network is

ailing to keep pace with new technological realities.The humanitarian system could use this revolution inconnectivity and the evolution o systems or widely

the absorp ve capac y o responders s pre y low. ibecause hey do no have an a fn y o echnology. i s be

hey are really, really busy 98% o he me, and hey are sle he o her 2%. Robert Kirkpatrick, UN Global Pulse


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We need to undamentally rethink how the humani-tarian system manages in ormation in light o the in-creasingly complex system o networks and datafows.

The Power of NeTworksThese insights are not novel. In the late 1990s, the in-ventor o the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee,saw that the migration o more and more devices andpeople connected into a shared network would requireknowledge to be structured and fow in new ways. Hecalled it the Semantic Web.

Technologies are widely available that, in the words o Berners-Lee, will enable better data integration byallowing everyone who puts individual items o data onthe Web to link them with other pieces o data usingstandard ormats. 2 Yet the humanitarian community isnot collecting or analyzing data in this way yet; in act,they are mired in methods that rely on documents methods more suited to the Middle Ages than theInternet age.

Many V&TCs, on the other hand, were born withinthe ideals o the Semantic Web. These groups create

sharing data during the response to a disaster to makeaster, better decisions in emergencies.

This report sounds an alarm bell. I decision makerswish to have access to (near) real-time assessments o complex emergencies, they will need to gure out howto process in ormation fows rom many more thou-sands o individuals than current system can handle.

2010 HAiti QuAke studies And After-Action reViews

th r h n n r r n r h - h r n h n r n hn

n n h 2010 H r hq r n .th n :

m , in r n s , n c n :l n r H . (c n n h d ra c n , in rn , n J hn s. nJ l. kn h F n n, J n r 2011).

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H n n : g n r h n cr in r nm n n . (ict r p F n n, a r 2010).h ://j. / ya7

p n n h in r n a : s n H rR . (ict r p F n n, 10 J n r 2011).h ://j. /h9p0 r

H e r hq R : on -y r pr r R r .(a r n R cr , J n r 2011).

h ://r r . r / 32m7y

in n n e n h u h h H pr j(uHp in n n e n t , J n r 2011).h ://j. / vng0J

cr r n cr in r n n d r- aH . (u.s. in p , s r 2010).h ://j. /9imby

t , h w q h n r n , h n n r

h n ( h h r h n n , r h

h n r . t n hr r, n h r r r r n z h n hr h n

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n r n h r n r r n h w r h h s n w . pr r

n r n h n hr h h n h h w r w w th r h w , n n h

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i h n 10 r n a h n n nh h n r n r n r n n n r

r , h r n r , h n r hn r h n q n r n

n h n h n . Alfred Gilman, WFP
http://www.knightfoundation.org/research_publications/detail.dot?id=377092http://ict4peace.org/publications/haiti-and-beyond-getting-it-right-in-crisis-information-management-4http://ict4peace.org/updates/peacebuilding-in-the-information-age-sifting-hype-from-reality.http://rdcrss.org/g32M7Yhttps://sites.google.com/site/haitiushahidieval/news/executivesummaryofpreliminaryfindingshttp://www.usip.org/publications/crowdsourcing-crisis-information-in-disaster-affected-haitihttp://www.usip.org/publications/crowdsourcing-crisis-information-in-disaster-affected-haitihttps://sites.google.com/site/haitiushahidieval/news/executivesummaryofpreliminaryfindingshttp://rdcrss.org/g32M7Yhttp://ict4peace.org/updates/peacebuilding-in-the-information-age-sifting-hype-from-reality.http://ict4peace.org/publications/haiti-and-beyond-getting-it-right-in-crisis-information-management-4http://www.knightfoundation.org/research_publications/detail.dot?id=377092


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open inter aces between their applications where data,organized by open standards, can be reely exchangedor mashed up. This enables users in di erent domainsto collaborate; or example, a community that aggre-gates SMS messages can link with another that trans-lates them and a third that uses GPS coordinatesassociated with the SMS messages to plot the messageson a map.

That said, V&TCs also need to adapt to a realitywhere they are providing valuable services to aninternational system of crisis response and affectedpopulations, and therefore must be reliable, con-sistent, and sustainable. Many o these technologycollectives are young: some were orged in the heat o the Haiti response; others were ounded a ter the 2004Indian Ocean tsunami. Nearly all o these groupscreated ad hoc processes or sharing in ormation inresponse to speci c emergencies and are only begin-ning to think about how to replicate those processes

or use in other emergencies, make them consistent,and bring them to scale. This community must identi yhow to apply the lessons they learned in Haiti to

uture disasters, and how to become reliable, consis-tent partners around the niche that they per orm best.The volunteer and technical community can help theinternational humanitarian system adapt to a new reality

while also directly supporting and empowering localcommunities. The question is, how? And how quickly?

Organizations within the humanitarian system needto examine the same questions and consider whatimpact an ever-increasingly networked society willhave on them. For example, they are just beginning tounderstand what it means to have two-way conversa-tions with a ected populations.

The path orward will be challengingboth or the or-mal and structured international humanitarian system(which is led by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee),and or the loosely-structured volunteer and technicalcommunities, which thrive on innovation and sponta-neity. As this report will explore, each community acesits own internal organizational challenges guring out

how to manage data fows and each brings its ownvalues to meeting those challenges.

Most importantly, however, there has not been a mech-anism or coordinating the collaboration between thesetwo groups and no ormal channel or these groups toengage in dialogue about the underlying problems o in ormation management. * The humanitarian systemhas ew protocols, procedures, or policies governingthe use o in ormation generated by citizens throughsocial media, and the V&TCs are still learning how bestto support to the work o in ormation managers in thehumanitarian system.

benefc ar es no have a vo ce, and a ec ed popula ons vo ce. theyre no jus rec p en s, [] hey have he a l

ack. tha [ o- ay commun ca on] crea es a d eren around accoun a l y and respons veness. i also crea esse o e h cal respons l es, espec ally around expec

he her hey can e me . [] [Human ar an] organ zaal ays pr ded hemselves h e ng respons ve o enefneeds, and e ng accoun a le o hem. bu here s a no dse o ools o make ha happen and s ak ng some

ons y surpr se. Katrin Verclas, MobileActive

we have hese o orlds, u e are say ng he same e ec vely: we an o help people ho have een a eccr s s. tha s our pr me o jec ve. we are com ng a very d eren d rec ons. wha e sa n Ha as a

eg nn ngs o ry ng o den y an n er ace e eenmun es. Andrew Alspach, OCHA


the real y s ha n a d sas er cycle, everyone has a p ece on orma on, everyone has a p ece o ha p c ure. the more ha

people are a le o share n orma on da a across ecosys ems,and he more n orma on ha people have o u l ze, hen ellreally see d sas er response really e a le o e more e ec ve.

Kate Chapman, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

* This report was written prior to the creation o the Libya Crisis Map,an in ormal collaboration o the Standby Task Force and UN OCHA .


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AbouT This rePorTThe purpose o this report is to review what happenedin Haitiwhat worked, what didnt, and what we canextract rom that to in orm better collaboration betweenthe humanitarian system and volunteer and technicalcommunities.

It explores how the international humanitarian systemand volunteer and technical communities approachedin ormation management during the response (Chap-ter 3) and how these approaches di ered and cameinto tension (Chapter 4). Based on this, the reporto ers guidelines or what an inter ace between the twocommunities might look like (Chapter 5), and, to stimu-late urther dialogue, presents one prototype model orthis missing inter ace (Chapter 6).

The amous mathematician and statistician, George E.P. Box once said: All models are wrong; some, however,are use ul. Reducing the complexity o the in ormationmanagement dynamics during the response to theHaitian earthquake to a simpli ed model meant omit-

ting key details and simpli ying the nuanced contribu-tions o many stakeholders. With limited time availableto per orm interviews and analysis, the authors expectcriticism. But this report is not intended to be prescrip-tive. Instead, the ramework outlined in Chapters 4 and5 envisions an ongoing dialogue and makes that a priority.

The report is a springboard or conversation and a rame-work or action. By exploring the underlying dynamicsand tensions between the ormal and in ormal systemso in ormation management during the Haiti operation,the report identi es key challenges and recommendsan organizational design or addressing some o those.

App acTraditionally, evaluations ocus on lessons learned butrarely translate these into actions; instead, they leavethe lessons identi ed with no result ing plan to turn thoseinsights into revised tools, practices, and policies. Thisreport ocuses on identi ying solvable problems andrecommending a ramework or addressing thema

practical plan or dialogue around the interdependent

operations o several entities involved in in ormationmanagement. That said, what ollows is not a set o de nitive recommendations. Instead, it is an approachconsistent with methods amiliar to the humanitariancommunity as well as with the ethos o rough consen-sus and running code that is at the core o the V&TCs.

M t dThe research team applied a mixed methods approachto untangling the complex dynamics between theinternational humanitarian community and the V&TCs

during the Haiti operation. Based on requests romOCHA, the team interviewed key stakeholders in eachcommunity using a standard set o research questions.The research team and in ormal advisory group selectedinterviewees according to three initial groups:

Decision Makers: Individuals whose infuenceand experience in emergency operations requiredirect interaction with in ormation and communica-tions technology.

Key Voices: Individuals whose work is an impor-tant component o any ramework and whose experi-ence would aid in the mapping o opportunities androadblocks to making desired changes.

Augmenting Voices: Individuals whose voicesaddress community level engagement and willin orm uture dissemination o the ramework to non-governmental stakeholders in due time.

what ollo s s an analys s based on kno n nputs. it snot an academ c study o ormal h story; t s a pract cal

rame ork or address ng the problems seen n the feld. it s the beg nn ng of a conversat on.



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Additionally, the research team asked intervieweesabout other key individuals to interview. The team re-viewed the interviews regularly to identi y untapped issuesand groups. In total, 41 individuals were interviewed.

One-on-one and group interviews were per ormed tocreate opportunities to capture each persons expe-riences in the eld and their belie s about their work.Fi teen semi-structured questions guided each inter-view toward:

personal experiences during the a termath o theHaiti earthquake or experiences during other recenthumanitarian crises,

interactions with technology at operational, orga-nizational, and cultural levels,

perspectives on new and existing in ormation fows,

validation, and e ects on eld operations, and

attitudes about the synthesis o new V&TCs into thechanging humanitarian landscapethrough the lenso humanitarian principles, ethics, and policy.

Interviewers met with members in person, via Skype, orby phone or approximately 11.5 hours. The researchteam recorded transcripts and interview notes, whichthey collated, reviewed and coded. The team met

requently to analyze interview content.

The team that conducted research or this report wascomposed o members o the humanitarian assistance,research, and volunteer and technical communities.Their backgrounds include expertise in eld operations,medical operations, humanitarian technologies, andtranslational research and evaluation. Each brings ex-perience with UN agencies and NGOs; some activelywork with V&TCs, some with military disaster responseunits. Some members have many years o experiencewhile others are more recent members to these com-munities. Through their work with the broader community,the team developed a composite history o in ormationmanagement in Haitithe subject o the next chapter.



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03 InformatIon LandscapeHumanitarian feld sta arriving in Haiti to begin therelie e ort thought that, a ter decades o UN involve-ment in Haiti, they would fnd volumes o data aboutexisting operations and be able to use this to identi yprimary tasks or the disaster response e ort. Theyexpected to be able to access in ormation such as the

locations o health acilities, demographics by regionaldepartment, road and routing in ormation, and the loca-tions and types o development programs and projectsunderway. The responders also assumed they couldconsult with peers who could explain underlyingassumptions they used when they collected the in or-mation and the trends that had emerged over time.Instead, in most cases the responders ound both thesedata and their curators tragically absent, or simplyimpossible to reach (notably, a ew who remained putin incredible e ort). In the ace o one o the largesthumanitarian catastrophes on record, relie workersstruggled to access even the most basic data sets; theywould have to start virtually rom scratch.

Thus began an information race to close the gapbetween Haitis past and present. In harsh condi-tions, and near the noise o taxiing aircra t, arrivingsta began to rebuild the shared operational datasetsthat they needed to plan and implement a response.

At the same time, they had to track and coordinate anun olding operation that involved hundreds o regis-

Wh iv i p - u-p i , hu i i g .The oundation on whinternational organizations usually build their operatiplansthe baseline datasets that described a nations sy

tems or public health, fnance, and other critical servicewere hard to fnd. Many were on hard drives, buried under

rubble. Backups were unavailable. And tragically, the curao these data, including sta rom the UN peacekeepinsion in Haiti, MINUSTAH, were too o ten missing or dead

Credit: FAO/Truls Brekke, UN Foundation Photo/D. Evans, UN Foundation Photo/D. Evans


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tered NGOs, several militaries, and a Haitian govern-ment that had lost key decision makers. And they hadto do so without much input rom either the host nation,which usually points to available data or in ormationsystems, or local UN agencies, whose operations hadbeen crippled by the collapse o buildings and the sig-ni cant loss o personnel. As one in ormation managerput it,

The managers in home o ces, who did not understandwhy immediate and detailed answers to questionsabout baseline and operational metrics were unavail-able, put even greater pressure on the humanitarian

eld workers. In twice-daily telecon erences, senior UN

and NGO sta requested granular bits o data aroundfight prioritization, ood delivery, and health acilities.The overburdened sta simply did not have the an-swers to many o the questions and were overwhelmedby repeated requests to obtain situational awareness.

DriNkiNg froM A fire hose Against this backdrop o missing data and a shatteredlandscape, arriving humanitarian eld sta interviewedconsistently reported that as they rushed to reassem-ble data sets and coordinate the relie e ort, they eltas though they were trying to drink rom a re hose o in ormation. Yet these same respondents describednot being able to collate, analyze and trans orm this

into the knowledge they needed to make decisions andto brie their bosses.

When they started, relie groups lacked veri ed in or-mation such as basic street-level maps or dispatchingsearch and rescue teams, up-to-date hospital through-put rates or planning the shipment o medical sup-plies, road closures and routing or moving aid, and thecurrent point o contact or any given NGO working inHaiti. Like many emergencies the treacherous race to

ll this data gap while simultaneously running a mas-sive relie e ort de ned the early phase o the Haiti

response operation.

ex t n D mand t human ta an sy t m Amidst the time pressures o their jobs, which or mostmeant 20-plus-hour days, relie workers were expectedto process a rapid fow o data and extract the elementsnecessary to make sense o the rapidly developingcrisis. This included the typical emergency tasks o :reading numerous emails and coordinating documentswithin their own organizations; having requent con-versations with headquarters and related Skype andchat conversations; keeping pace with the fow o rapidassessment data, personal queries rom outside visi-tors and partners, situation reports, brie ng documentsand maps rom multiple organizations; and attendingregular interagency coordination meetings. All this wasongoing without any signi cant engagement with non-traditional actors, or new sources o in ormation andanalytic support.

h xp a o as ha oul o or ha or al. bu ,aus o h [] la k o a ss o hos a l s, r

a uall a l o o h sa as r a h l oo h r . i as o o h os r l rus ra g h gs iv

hrough. Nigel Snoad, UNDAC

th hall g h g g as ha h r as al o o h ork a h all o a su [Ha ] as flla ors. th r as a la k o as l a a. th m s r o ollaps a h los a lo o s a a all [

a a] s s s. no l s o s hools surv v . w r r

rap s ass ss s h al os o h g o go o . Charlotte Lattimer, Save the Children

dur g h frs 1224 hours, h r s a og o or a o . th s -ua o s ha g g rap l a h u rs ar ha g g rap l . you gh as ll a h cnn or h ha g g s ua o , ausa pro u ha as qu kl ou o a a ov r ak

v s. Dennis King, U.S. Department of State Humanitarian

Information Unit


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Yet even in spite o these challenges, according tointerviews with experienced eld sta , in ormation man-agement in Haiti did per orm well, both in terms o thequality and the productivity o their work. Various expe-rienced emergency responders noted that in ormationmanagement tools and processes had improved overthe past ew years, leading to both increased capabilityand increased expectations.

The challenge was that the sheer volume o in orma-tion input and number o sources had increased evenmore quickly than expectations had grown, leading to astruggle or situational awareness within the humanitar-ian community and in the general public.

Although the in ormation management challengesin the early phase o the Haiti relie e ort had uniqueaspects, such challenges in sudden-onset disastersare not new. As Paul Currion noted in February 2001:

Over the past decade, the challenge has only increased.In ormation is fowing at a rate that is increasing expo-nentially. But investments in methods and personnel tohandle these increased fows are lagging behind. Thein ormation gap is now more pronounced than ever, not

because o a lack o human e ort, but because com-munications are growing more complex at a fasterrate than current tools and practices can handle .

And according to interviewees across the spectrum,the situation is only going to get worse.

new da a from he Volu eer & te h i al commu i ies

Against this backdrop, volunteer and technology com-

munities rushed to ll the perceived sense making andin ormation gap, leveraging social networking andmobile phone-based tools to aggregate, analyze andplot data about urgent humanitarian needs. Yet with-out a ormal inter ace or in ormation exchange with thehumanitarian system, or appropriate data standards,this new data-added to the raging river o in orma-tion that aid workers aced as they struggled to buildthe relie e ort rom the ground up. As the volunteerand technical communities continue to engage withhumanitarian crises they will increasingly add to thein ormation overload problem. Unless they can becomea part o the solution.

over-filliNg The gAPHow did the humanitarian system that came into Haiti

acing a yawning in ormation gap end up overloadedwith too much data? Our research points to our majorcauses that will likely continue in uture emergencies:

[] y he me ha e ere o eeks n, here as 1 ema l erm nu e com ng n o our eams ema l ox, 24/7. we needed o clas-s y hose ema ls, urn hem n o n orma on, and hen grou hemaccord ngly so hey could e addressed y he d eren [ eams] ha had ex er se n shel er or heal h and so on.

Andrew Alspach, OCHA

ra d advances n n orma on and commun ca ons echnologyhave led o a rol era on n he quan y o n orma on ava la le o human ar an orkers a all levels u no necessar ly any cor-res ond ng m rovemen s n he r a l es o use ully handle ha

n orma on.3

i go o he s age here, a he end o he frs en days, i had o

[] g ve a alk o everyone n he general mee ng, here i sa d,look, [] s r gh ha he sen or managemen n he room sdemand ng more roduc and n orma on. tha s he r role, ha s he r r gh , and hey should. [] bu every ody should real ze, ha

eve[] done very ell y com ar son o here [ n orma onmanagemen ] as n he [2005] pak s an ear hquake, or dur ng he [2004] sunam , o h n erms o he y es o roduc s ha

ere ou u ed, and he y es o coord na on e managed. i jusan ed every ody o real ze ha , even hough he ex ec a onsere h gher han ever. Nigel Snoad, UNDAC

Credit: Mark Turner


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1. Capability ofExisting Systems

2. V&TC DataFlow Rate

3. Disaster AffectedCommunity DataFlow Rate

4. ExpectedAnalysis Rate

PressuIncre

Analysi

Gap: Actual vExpected

Analysis Rate

Actual Analysis Rate

Increased Expectationsof Decision Makers

Perceived Needs of Affected Population

Cluster DataFlow Rate

Crisis Data AnalyzedCrisis Data

1. The cluster system was neither structured norgiven the resources and tools to deal with thecomplex information dynamics it faced in Haiti. The method by which eld sta manage in orma-tion has not kept pace with the increased velocityand volume o in ormation fows. Most data handledby eld workers require their dedicated attentionascarce resourceat every step: data entry, aggre-gation, analysis, presentation and brie ng. Humansand busy eld workers at thathad to take eacho these in ormation management steps, so it iseasy to see how the cluster system in Haiti becameoverwhelmed as the volume, tempo, and heterogeneityo the in ormation fowing in increased.

2. A growing number of volunteer and technicalcommunities (V&TCs) mobilized valuable tools

for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data.They attempted to share that data with responders,and advocated the use o methods that automateor outsource parts o the in ormation managementworkfows. However, with the notable exception o geospatial data, there existed only ad hoc meansto make these new in ormation fows use ul to theharried eld sta rom NGOs and UN agencies. Asa result, both the in ormation that V&TCs submittedand the aster methods or in ormation managementthat V&TCs used and shared only exacerbated the

eld sta s sense o in ormation overload.

3. The affected population became mobile-enabled. At the time o the earthquake, the state o cellularconnectivity in Haiti was such that tens o thousandso citizens could, and did, directly communicatetheir needs to a domestic and international audience,and those citizens expected that a ew thousandinternational responders would be able to monitortheir hundreds o thousands o requests or aid andat least deal with aggregate trends, i not individualrequests. Some o these increased expectationswere created by the V&TCs, who were responding tomessages sent over SMS and tracking messages inthe hundreds o social media eeds.

4. Expectations of what should be known inresponse operations have dramatically increased. Everyone rom senior managers at the UN todonors and bene iciaries expected the ormal hu-manitarian system to have ar better communicationsabout what it has discovered and what correctiveactions it is taking. They demanded a composite

picture across all specialties and organizationsinvolved in the response, but that was unrealisticgiven the humanitarian systems paucity o technicalresources and sta , and nor with its document-centricmethods o in ormation collection and data exchange.

These causes are interlinked. Under existing UNdesigns, most data is designed to fow through thehumanitarian cluster systema group o UN agenciesand NGOs tasked with adjacent and sometimes over-lapping areas o expertise. The cluster processes data,analyzes it, and periodically brie s it to decision makersat meetings and through situational reports.

new data i fows

During the Haiti response, two new data infows were

added to the system: one rom the V&TCs and onerom the a ected community o Haitians. These new

data had to pass through the same humanitarian sta already overburdened by work to back ll missing datasets. And because these new data eeds were openand widely reported in the press, many decision mak-ers in the humanitarian system thought that more datawas available than what they were receiving. This putadditional pressure on responders to increase theirprocessing rate, despite not having adequate resources.The ollowing system diagram captures this dynamic.

This chapter explores each o these our basic causes.The chapter starts with the base system into whichV&TCs and the a ected population tried to pour newin ormation: the in ormation management componento the IASC-led humanitarian cluster system.

FLOWS OF DATA TO CRISIS RESPONDERS


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best e ort, drawing on years o experience, to developa structure to negotiate the responsibilities or vari-ous sectors. This organizational design assigns a leadagency inside each cluster to be responsible or coor-dinating the provision o aid in a unctional area (e.g.,water, shelter, etc.). Each cluster coordinates with theUN O ce or the Coordination o Humanitarian A airs(OCHA). OCHA, in turn, is the UN agency accountable

or the overall coordination under the UN EmergencyRelie Coordinator.

While the cluster system solved many o problems o earlier systems, it still is evolving. One outstandingissue is the architecture or in ormation management.In theory, this in ormation management system isdesigned to provide decision support services to lead-ers working on two levels: those who are working inthe area o unctional specialization represented byan individual cluster (shelter, health, camp manage-ment, etc.), and those who are working to coordinatethe overall system across various clusters. Each o thevarious clusters is responsible or building in ormationmanagement systems that tie its various data fowsinto the clusters decision making. Likewise, OCHA istasked with building tools that coordinate in ormationfows or decision making across the various clusters.

01. CAPAbiliTies of exisTiNg iNforMATioNMANAgeMeNT sysTeMs

In the initial phase o a response operation, humanitariangroups partner with a host nation government to de-termine what happened and what needs to be done torestore civil society and address urgent humanitarianneeds. In this role, they operate at the edge o knowl-edgean activity which entails great risk. Decisionsmade early in the response will lead to allocations o billions o dollars or uture programs. Even small errorscan lead to unin ormed decisions that could result ingreat harm to vulnerable populations; the unintendedconsequences could blight a societys uture or yearsor decades to come. Thus there is a tension betweenthe time needed to ully understand a complex sce-nario, and the urgent need or immediate humanitarianresponse. And in large-scale humanitarian emergen-

cies like the Haiti response, the evolving nature o thesituation requires continuous updating and analysis.Respondents consistently reported that, no matterhow fast information managers operated, they werebehind where they were expected to be . The ques-tion is, why?

Based on interviews, there appear to be three typeso issues that changed the speed o in ormationmanagement:

1. Structural issues: Aspects o the in ormation

management design used by the IASC-led clustersystem that restricted in ormation fows within andbetween clusters.

2. Lack of Resources: Overreliance on under und-ed and understa ed in ormation management units.

3. Delays: Delays in in ormation fows due to transla-tion, collation, and analysis.

st uctu a i u :C u t s t m D n Cha nIn the humanitarian system, di erent actors approachproblems with varied practices and belie s about neu-trality and solidarity, as well as di erent views on therole o international aid. The international communityhas developed cluster architecture to align the e ortso organizations with these actors divergent methodsand values and minimize the risk o confict within thehumanitarian system and with the host-nation govern-ment. The clusters are the international communitys

Source: OCHA

INFORmATION mANAgEmENT IN HumANITARIAN EmERgENCIES


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iAsC ope at na gu dance nre p n b t e f sect C u te leadand oChA n inf mat n Mana ementThe cluster lead agency is responsible or ensuringin ormation management or an e ective and coordi-nated intra-cluster response. While the design was wellintentioned, in practice, this research and previousreviews have shown that the clusters o ten do nothave the resources to per orm work beyond theirown analysis and to devote time and assets to coor-dinating with OCHA. The clusters tend to managein ormation in a way that is best or their own immedi-ate needs but not necessarily or the overall system.In many cases, the clusters choice o closed propri-etary systems locks data in tools and data ormats thatcannot be easily shared (though many commercialso tware providers are now building open inter-

aces to their systems, this work is not universal).

This dynamicwhere clusters work in their own sel -interest with ew resources (and low incentives) toinvest in overall coordinationappears to have ledto one o the core in ormation management chal-lenges in Haiti: information fragmentation , thedivision o data resources and analysis into silos thatare di fcult to aggregate, use, or otherwise reinte-grate into composite pictures. Based on interviewswith in ormation managers at the cluster level, atOCHA, and the CITOs o fce, ragmentation occurredthrough this design on two levels: those o the backend systems and those o the tools used in the feld.

Fragmentation in Back-end Systems As designed, each cluster applied its own back-endsystemsusually proprietary and contracted to ven-

dors by individual agencies or organizationsto thecrisis. As is widely known inside the UN, this approachhas created data silos. These systems had rarely beendesigned to acilitate data exchange directly with thein ormation systems rom other clusters using open(i.e., non-proprietary) data ormats. Many systemslacked toolssuch as data dictionariesthat enabledsta using one system to determine programmati-cally how their own data might be related to data inanother system. 4 While having agreed inter-agencydata standards like the Common Operational Dataset(COD) or data like baseline population, road data

and moreis a step towards solving this problem, feldsta amiliar with the GIS, systems where this data o tenends up being used, indicate that the CODs schemalack specifcity about how to characterize individualobjects that are important to the response. 5

Interviews with multiple UN managers and feld sta in-dicate that the politics o opening their internal data toother UN agencies is itsel an issue, let alone opening thedata to the hundreds o organizations that partneredwith the IASC-led cluster system in Haiti. Barriers suchas cyber security, humanitarian protection 6, and dis-trust loom as large as the technical interoperability o proprietary systems. 7

Fragmentation in Field SystemsIn the feld, most in ormation sharing occurs in ace-to- ace meetings at the cluster and sub-cluster levels.For anyone who is working in another cluster (or whosework prevents them rom at tending any given meeting),the key method o exchanging metrics rom assess-

there a a reeme be wee h w i rma i i pp ed be ma a ed wi hi he cl er appr ach, which mea hae e ially each he cl er i pp ed ma a e i wi rma i i he cri i . s me cl er , week i he di a er,were l cky have a cal p i , mewhere where y r p blici rma i fcer l ki r i rma i ma a eme a dd i heir day j b. s he cl er hem elve did have hecapaci y early ma a e heir w i rma i . s wha wapr bably happe i wa eve i here were i divid al a empby ngo a d un a e cie c llec i rma i y ema ically,whe her i wa a i divid al a e me a heal h acili y r am ch m re y ema ic a dardized a e me , he capaci y

he pr ce ha a d he hare i did exi . UN staff member

Credit: OCHA/Dan DeLorenzo


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ments is bullet points, shared in web sites, slide decks,and emails. This is the primary method o briefng deci-sion makers in the feld and back at headquarters.

However, multiple interviewees described a amiliarproblem: the documents used to brie leaders werealso the method by which sta exchanged in ormation,including key metrics. To learn what was going on, onehad to read documents manually, tracking dozens perday. Worse, to get those data back into ormats thatcan be used or analysis and tracking, someone hadto manually re-key those data into another document.This was particularly a problem or maps, where themap itsel was shared as a static graphic, instead o a

ormat that could be used or GIS purposes.

While meetings o this sort do convey in ormation romone human to another, this method o in ormation shar-ing also assumes incredible memory on the part o stressed readers. Relie workers would need to recall,

or example, three previous hospital throughput ratesrom earlier brie s and urthermore be able to compare

those past metrics to emerging data. The capacity o responders to engage in this type o recall is laudable,but the cognitive load placed on overtasked manag-ers could be lessened by improved methods o in or-mation sharing. However, because clusters have notimplemented open data standards, there exists noway to pull structured data (like key indicators rom theSPHERE standards) out o unstructured documentslike slides and situational reports. There is also noway to easily map this in ormation to gain a better situ-ational awareness so that managers can communicateneeds and prioritize their decisions.

Dispersed pieces, tidbits o data almost, that cant even be claed as in ormation, were some o the less use ul [in ormati

got], because that required an intense amount o resources acoordination to turn that into actionable piece in ormationIm not just talking rom the V&TCs, but also rom things gdumped into the emails i you sort o think about it, we neput it [all] together or the big clustersbig clusters whichmaking multi-million and in this case multi-billion dollar decis

Andrew Alspach, OCHA

Credit: Andrej Verity

Virtual On-Site OperatiOnSCOOrdinatiOn Center (OSSOC)S mm y Ov v w:

12 USAR Team (around 440 pax and search dogs):BE, FR (2), LU, IS, PL, UK, NL, ES (4)

2 Field Hospitals (90 pax): BE, FR 6 Advanced Medical Posts: EU, FR (3), OT, SE 38 Medical Teams (252 Pax); FR (30), PT (2), DE,

ED (2), HU, GR, UK 6 Water sanitation units: EU, BE, DE, FR, ES (2), and

water puri cation tablets: IT, DE, PT, SE 1.182 tents or app. 7.600 persons: AT (400 x 6). SE(200 x 5). IT (155 x 8), SI (25 x 10), SK (15 x10), ES

(55), PT (65 or 615 pax), BG (67 x 6), PL (200 x 6) 1 TAST/Base-camp with a capacity o 300 people:

this is a joint-module o SE, DK, NO, EE, and FI EU co- nancing or transport o assistance requested

or approved so ar reaches a total amount o EUR3.2 million.

EU CP Assessment and Coordination Team on sitesince 14.01.2010. A second team has arrived inPort-au-Prince on 23.01, to replace the existing team.

The other thing that we have is that in ormation managemenseen as a panacea to coordination problems. So i you havemeeting and its run e ectively with decision points, thats ae ective in ormation exchange or those who are present

well-written minutes and captured very short. But i a meeis run incredibly poorly, disorganized, the notes arent captue ect ively and arent disseminated e ectively, its a waste o

Brendan McDonald, OCHA

I you want to know where the biggest gap is, its the extraco structured data rom unstructured inputs. And the unstructinputs are situation reports, emails that go fying around, etc. A the structured data outputs would be points on a map with a key values that matter or decision making. And I think th

two reasons we dont do that one, we just dont think that can, two, decisions are currently made on the basis o situatireports and verbals, so theres a decision making culture that h to change. Thats a chicken and egg problem, because i you hbetter outputs, you make better decisions.

Nigel Snoad, UNDAC


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The fragmenting effect of austere conditionsWhile the tools that eld sta had to process thisin ormation had improved markedly rom previousdisasters, the capacity o personnel to harness thosetools was ar lower than one might expect. First, theconditions in the early days were in many ways no bet-ter those in Banda Aceh a ter the 2004 Indian Oceantsunami. Normally reliable equipment ailed in the heatand dust. Reliable workhorse printers actually caught

re trying to keep up with the demand or maps. Radioand phone communications were di cult due to air-cra t engine noise less than 100m rom the tents. Andsome teams that are accustomed to being within closeproximity o one another were separated by more thanone mile that had to be covered by oot.

Across the board, questions about the use o webportals received a short and simple response: webportals ailed to work when accessed rom the feld.

Field sta ound the method o exchanging les viaweb portals to be fawed. They o ten could not a ord todownload large les, particularly those which involveddatasets, imagery, and new applications. Instead, lowbandwidth and unreliable access to the public Internetle t sta relying on paper and data ormats that couldwork o fine. Portals also tended to provide le dumpsinstead o a common picture or dashboard, requiringsta to piece together a situational picture by pains-takingly reading through lists o documents and blogposts; ew had time or adequate network bandwidth or

this activity. Many had no means to exchange data withother web sites or services.

Web services, a method o exchanging eeds o databetween machineshad better success; the datatended already to be in structured ormat, was low

bandwidth, and could be handled in the background.However, it was not well used in the eld, and had bet-ter success among the V&TCs.

02. lACk of resourCes A second barrier to increasing the fows o in ormationmoving through exponentially increasing number o devices and network connections was lack o invest-ment. This occurred at both the level o inter-clusterand intra-cluster coordination. When the dominantmethod o extracting in ormation rom analytical prod-ucts required human intervention, the ailure to provideadequate resources or in ormation management allbut guaranteed that coordination across and betweenclusters would be a struggle.

Inter-cluster Coordination: In the initial days a ter theearthquake, the O ce o Coordination or Humanitar-ian A airs (OCHA) and UN Disaster Assessment Coor-dination (UNDAC) team deployed an in ormation man-agement sta to coordinate in ormation fow between

Credit: Mark Turner

the oper on cen er or he usaR e w oc e n -

eren p ce ro he oper on cen er or c er org n z - on . they were o 11.5 e p r . the usaR oper onwere n he e o rpor , w h he c er wor ng ro he

og c e (logb e). to ep r e he wo w goo ro noper on per pec ve, n h hey were 1.5 e w y.in or on w no fow ng e ween ho e wo oper on , nco n c on e ween he oper on cen er w ex re e y

e . Gisli Olafsson, Icelandic USAR team

d r ng he r 2 wee o jor er, e Hwe h connec v y, we [ ] no h ve he x ry he gr ph c we , $68/mb or . an yo op ge, w h pho o / p ge, h 300400kb. i

p. Gisli Olafsson, Icelandic USAR Team

i e o e h peop e howe p he even c p o r . ten ye r go, hey howe p w h he

n now hey how p w h he r own we - e prog he e pro e : none o ho e c n co n c

o her. David Aylward


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clusters, along with a team rom the NGO MapActionto supply mapping services. These in ormation man-agers ocused on getting the basics completed: reg-istering thousands o individuals arriving at LogBase,building 3W reports (who is doing what where), noti yingeveryone registered o every cluster meeting, makingmaps, and coordinating the in ormation ows o therelie e ort. They had no time or additional duties. Itwas all the sta could do to manage the teams inbox(receiving around 1 email per second, which is over3000 emails per day), build contacts lists, and handlethe in ormation ows generated by USAR operations.

OCHA and UNDAC were so overstretched that Map- Action sta increasingly assumed a ormalized tasko augmenting in ormation management sta . Eventogether, they could not keep up.

Intra-cluster Coordination: Each unctional areaemergency shelter, ood, WATSAN (water and sanita-tion), etc.was also supposed to have an in ormationmanagement sta assigned to process ows o datainto analyses that could support decision making. Mostclusters did have small numbers (13) o in ormationmanagers who usually wore multiple hats: public in-

ormation o fcers, data jockeys, technicians, and GISanalysts. However, anecdotal evidence points towardsa problem o double-hatting, or multi-tasking by keysta in some clusters: many personnel assigned tohandle in ormation management at the cluster or sub-cluster level were also expected to per orm their day

jobs or their organizations.

03. Delays in Processing informationSeveral issues increase the likelihood that a given in or-mation management process would take longer than

desired. These delays included translat ion, ad hoc datamanagement practices, and usion o data rom mul-tiple sources.

t : a P H dd i u

Multiple sources cited a lack o translation support asa perennial problem in international operations. Clustermeetings were held in language that shut out manyparticipants and which delayed the communication o decisions to those who needed to know.

The classic situation is always in ormation overload. Its just thatparticularly with better communications, theres more and moreemail to process. We had one to two people ull time doing theinbox o the UNDAC team, and to some extent al l we could do with

the email was to orward them to the cluster coordinator, whichjust replicated their problem. And again thats another task thatcould be done elsewhere, i the process and systems are set up.And were not talking new tools; were just talking a di erent wayo using email inboxes. Nigel Snoad, UNDAC

Go and look at any evaluation rom the last ten or f teen yeaRecommendation: make e ective in ormation available togovernment and the population in their own language. We didndo it. The maps, English. Now theyre much better, but the frmonth most o the sta didnt speak French and most o the inmation produced was English It is a consistent thing acrosemergencies: how to best disen ranchise the national authoritieis to run your meetings in a di erent language.

Brendan McDonald, OCHA

Credit: WFP/Dane Novarlic

The clusters themselves didnt have the capacity early on to man-age their own in ormation. Even i there were individual attemptsby NGOs and UN agencies to collect in ormation systematically,whether it was an individual assessment o a health acility or amuch more systematic standardized assessment the capacity

to then process that and share it didnt exist. Brendan McDonald, OCHA


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One interviewee told the ollowing story:

Clusters did not have unding to translate cluster meet-ing notes, and OCHA does not have the resources toprovide this service to each cluster. As a result, criticaldata may have been available to decision makers, butthere was neither time nor unding to allow those whospeak other languages, including the host government,to nd or read it.

Ad h c Data Mana m nt P act cGiven the tempo o sta rotations, a common com-plaint is that incoming sta elt lost in a stream o dataand experienced a steep learning curve. It was a com-mon practice or sta to use spreadsheets to try tocome to terms with datao ten reinventing the toolsthat departing sta had used, substituting their own

amiliar data structure and thereby making the datarom one sta rotation incompatible with the next. This

was a result o both lack o commonly accepted toolsand standards, and the common chaos caused by sta duty-cycles in a crisis. Although e ective or individualsta members, the time invested in this activityandthe time lost in translating one persons spreadsheetinto the nextneeds to be analyzed.

In aggregate, the in ormation management practices o the cluster system not only experienced problems within ormation management at both the intra- and inter-clusters levels but also were ill-prepared to accept in or-

mation fows rom new sources. The in ormation man-agers in Haiti had to con ront two such re hoses: one

rom an emerging V&TC and one rom the a ected pop-ulation. These are the subjects o the next two sections.

v&TCs: uNiNTeNTioNAlly overloADiNg The gAPV&TCs are not a new phenomenon in humanitarianoperations. MapAction is an NGO that has providedmapping services to OCHA since the 2003 Bam earth-quake in Iran. And the NGO Tlcoms Sans Frontires,which provides satellite-powered voice and data com-munications in emergencies, has had a ormal relation-ship with the UN emergency telecommunications clustersince 2006. In Haiti, both MapAction and TlcomsSans Frontires deployed under OCHA in support o

UNDAC. Another volunteer community, Sahana, is a501(c)3 organization that developed an open-sourcedisaster response management system to track peopleand supplies in Sri Lanka a ter the 2004 Indian Oceantsunami. During the Haiti operation, Sahana deployeda public instance o its so tware to coordinate datafows between V&TCs and many members o the inter-national humanitarian system; it also deployed aprivate instance o its so tware in support o WFP.

Yet in the Haiti response, many new V&TCs wereestablished, contributing capabilities that had not here-to ore been available to the cluster-led humanitariansystem. Some existing groups re ocused their activitiesand came to the ore ront. Many o these V&TCs hadmandates that did not explicitly include deploymentsto disasters. Some o the newer V&TCs that playeda major role in the Haiti earthquake response include:

For om r o , un g c m ply co v c h v ry-o o h pl p k Fr ch. i m g, h H gov r -m w h r . th m g r w h rl v r l o :p r gr ph, h p r gr ph. th gov r m l , h l l -g g h w pok w Fr ch. th cl r l co h co v r o Fr ch, o r l o ll. tw y mw by, w h pp r ly m jor c o b g m . i pp

p , th r o r l o , cl rly h g h v h p-p l 20 m h r m jor c o , go g o b v ry fc l o r v ho . i w r go g o h v m -

g gl l g g , wo l b mor r o bl o h v h l g g b e gl h, c mo o h r o rc r go g o b com g rom e gl h- p k g co r ? i go boo l gh . [th m g co Fr ch]. th us m l ryr pr v pok o Fr ch. th usaid r pr v room pok o Fr ch. th r l comm y o b l g l. th ym y ll p k e gl h, b h y o ll p k Fr ch th rw r g co q c . th m l ry olk r r . ic v rg p hw y h cl r. NGO feld worker

Credit: UN/Nancy Palus


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OpenStreetMap is a community o approximately150,000 mappers dedicated to building a ree andopen map o the world. Approximately 640 mappersparticipated in the e orts to build an open base mapo Haiti. MapAction credits OpenStreetMap with provid-ing an essential service and or building a street mapo Haiti rom scratch in about two weeks, a project thatshould have taken about a year.

CrisisMappers is an in ormal network o humanitar-ian practitioners, technology groups and academicsinterested in crisis mapping, which is loosely defnedas the application o geospatial and crowdsourcingtools to the analysis o humanitarian emergencies. Itwas ounded in November 2009 with approximately100 members; more than 550 participated in the Haitie orts. The CrisisMappers community, via an email

listserve, became the central mechanism or coordinat-ing imagery and mapping activities in Haiti. Its mem-bers included representatives rom UNOSAT, Google,GeoEye, Digital Globe, OpenStreetMap, and the SanDiego State University Visualization Lab, which hostedhaiticrisismap.org and its associated web services.

CrisisCamps/CrisisCommons started in 2009 as avenue through which crisis response pro essionalscould explore ways to share best practices. It trans-

ormed into a structure or mobilizing almost 2000 lay-people (mostly technologists) in 25 cities around the

world to swarm around in ormation needs generatedby the Haiti operation.

Mission 4636 is a partnership between Samasource,1000 Jobs Haiti, FATEM, Union Haiti, Stan ord, Ener-gy or Opportunity, CrowdFlower, The Crisis MappersNetwork, Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, SEIU, Thompson-Reuters Foundation, InSTEDD, The US State Depart-ment, Microso t Research, Sahana, Digicel, Voila, anda dozen more Haitian NGOs. It was a fliated with In-ternews and the Communicating with Disaster A ectedCommunities initiative.

Ushahidi is a 501(c)3 organization that develops reeand open source mapping tools or live collaborativemapping, mostly in the area o election monitoringand international development. Ushahidis Director o Crisis Mapping mobilized approximately 200 studentsat Tu ts University Fletcher School o Diplomacy tomonitor and geolocate reports rom over 300 sourcesincluding Twitter, Facebook, new sources, o fcial UN/humanitarian reports and Mission 4636.

The History of the Volunteerand Technical Communities in HaitiDespite the damage to structures, many o Haitiscell towers remained operational, and thousands o Haitians sent SMS/text messages rom makeshi tcamps, telling the world o their plight. Importantly,Haitians were able to send these messages not onlyto other amily members but also to public social me-dia channels such as Twitter and Facebook. Both o these services can interact with SMS so that users canpost messages directly to their profles rom a cellularphone. As a result, via the highly connected networkso the Haitian Diaspora, requests or extraction rom therubble reached ar beyond what might be expectedthat is, messaging among small amily and riendsnetworksand expanded into the common view o aglobal social network.

These messages were heartbreaking to read and elicitedstrong emotions worldwide. Many survivors complainedo broken bones and lack o ood and water; theyo ten le t clues about an address or location o peo-ple in need. Others messages probed or in ormationabout missing loved ones. During past crises, variousonline communities had supported the a ected bywaging online campaigns, rom wikis during HurricaneKatrina to Twitter during the Iran elections. During theHaiti quake, a new dynamic emerged: V&TCs beganto aggregate, geolocate, and prioritize incoming mes-

sages rom various social media, and providing geo-located reports o trapped individuals to urban searchand rescue (USAR) teams on the ground. Much o thiswork was possible because the V&TCs had establishedrelationships with responders ahead o the disaster.

Among these groups was Ushahidi, a Kenyan NGO thatoriginally built SMS-based tools to monitor elections inits home country.

UshahidiWithin two hours o the quake, the Ushahidi teamlaunched an instance o the so tware customized or

One message arrived rom a location listed only as UBon Privee. The hunt or where this businessit turnout to be a bookstorewas located took hours, andinvolved research that included fnding the resume o

ormer employee on the Web and calling him in NYC2AM local time to ask where the bookstore was in Porau-Prince.


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Haiti and opened an operation center in a small apart-ment near the Tu ts University Fletcher School o Diplomacy, where Ushahidis Director o Crisis Map-ping, Patrick Meier, was a Ph.D. candidate. Based onnew code written by Brian Herbert a ter the quake, themodi ed Ushahidi plat orm provided a mechanism orPatricks classmates to begin collating social mediaposts and plotting each message on a map.

The messages were initially collated by about twodozen Fletcher students rom Twitter, Facebook, andcontacts within the Haitian diaspora. The team devel-

oped a quick-and-dirty system or classi ying, prioritiz-ing, and geolocating the tweets using a mix o GoogleSpreadsheets, Microso t Excel, and Google Maps,the same time worked with the Ushahidi developmentteam to integrate this type o capability into the so t-ware. However, this system strained under the volumeo messages. There were two reasons:

1. Geolocation. Pinpointing the location o a plea orhelp took lots o time and had to be right. However,messages o ten arrived rom locations listed by nick-names or partial addresses. That said, the team wasunder pressure to ensure that each location was veri-

ed, especially i it required sending a USAR teaminto an area with questionable security or required ahelicopter to erry a patient to a hospital.

2. Resources . Volunteers came together with nobudget or even pizza and co ee. They broughttheir own (aging) laptops, which o ten did not haveaccess to GIS tools. And they had no relationshipswith vendors to get them ree licenses. For nearly

two weeks, nearly 20 people on the Ushahidi teamat Fletcher worked rom a small 1.5 bedroom apart-ment, with their eet overlapping on a co ee tablesurrounded by three so as. When the laptop o theperson in charge o geolocations ailed, she did nothave a spare computer; it took several hours to nd adonor or a new computer (which increased speed o lookups by over 100%); meanwhile the geolocationteam tried to proceed on a borrowed laptop.

The team received help rom a coalition o organizationsthat came together around the use o SMS to reachdisaster-a ected communities using the 4636 shortcode.

The race Again t Time and the 4636 sho tcodeWorking separately rom Ushahidi Haiti, several NGOs

partnered with the U.S. State Department to launch asingle SMS number or aid requests in Haiti. SeveralNGOs partnered with the U.S. State Department andHaitian carriers to launch a single SMS number or aidrequests in Haiti. These partners, who included RobMunro o Stan ord University, FrontlineSMS, InSTEDD,Energy or Opportunity, the Thompson Reuters Foun-dation, amongst others, worked with cell phone carri-ers in Haiti to set up a resource called an SMS short-code along with the in rastructure to support the fow o SMS messages sent via a 4636 shortcode. Brian Her-bert wrote code to integrate the 4636 fows with Usha-

hidi Haiti overnight. Like 311 or 411, a shortcode is analias or a longer number that is more memorable andeasier to communicate to a large audience. The core4636 service was launched or Mission 4636 by Digi-cel and their local partners DigiPoint a ter discussionslead by Josh Nesbit o FrontlineSMS. It was launched inminutes, with the messages read into a translation andmapping microtasking plat orm quickly put together bythe V&TC community. The Thompson Reuters Foun-dation and their technical partners InSTEDD helpeddeployed to Haiti in the rst 72 hours, where they pub-licized the number within Haiti and later worked withengineers rom ActiveXperts, Energy or Opportunity,CrowdFlower, Digitel, Noula, Samasource, Stan ord, Ush-ahidi, Voila and Votident to support the crucial task o passing the messages rom the telcos to Mission 4636.

The period during which responders can rescue some-one who is trapped under the rubble is short: undermost circumstances, trapped survivors only have a ewdays be ore they will die rom dehydration, exposure,or untreated injuries. To identi y where these desperate

Credit: Ushahidi


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victims might be, the partners advertised the short codeover Haitis radio stations, which largely remained op-erational or were quickly brought back online throughthe e orts o Internews, which builds citizen journalistsworldwide.

Messages began to fow into 4636 almost immediately.To deal with the fow o in ormation, the partners had tobuild a means or translating these messages rom Cre-ole to English. Working with Haitian community groups,Rob Munro o Stan ord, mobilized more than 1,200Creole and French speaking volunteers rom the Hai-tian Diaspora in 49 countries. These volunteers trans-lated messages in near real-time via micro-tasking plat-

orms, collaborating on open chat rooms and using theirgeographic knowledge to map thousands o messages

rom satellite imagery in the crucial days be ore the Open

Street Map initiative started publishing new maps. Toensure greater quality control, Rob soon migrated themicrotasking plat orm to CrowdFlower, a or-pro t thatspecializes in ensuring quality controls over microtasks.Through Crowdfower, Rob worked with Samasource,an NGO that had just established a microtasking cen-ter outside Port-au-Prince to create digital employmentopportunities. By day six o the response, Ushahidiwas ully linked into this new fow o messages com-ing in rom 4636. Soon therea ter, the Sahana DisasterResponse Management System integrated the datacoming in through 4636 into its system.

Crowdsourcings enabling T chnologi sConnecting SMS in ormation with situational maps o needs requires enabling technologies. For instance,volunteers could not have geolocated most o the pleas

or help without maps with street names and buildingoutlines. The success o 4636 was in large part due tothe coupling o SMS with ve technologies: 1) tools orcollecting, processing, and viewing publicly availablehigh-resolution satellite and aerial imagery; 2) Geospa-tial wiki plat orm where many people can build a com-mon map o the area o interest (AOI); 3) wikis werevolunteers can collaboratively build up a narrative andlink to resources; and 4) collaborative plat orms like

Google Docs that had open inter aces to mashup datastored in the plat orm with web services; and 5) thewide use o Skype text and voice chats or use across-plat orms and low-bandwidth connections. The mostcommon use o this ourth resource was to link a web-bases spreadsheet to services that could automaticallyplot rows o data on a map.

The rst two toolsopen aerial mapping and openstreet mappingwere relatively new to the eld o humanitarian response. While their underlying tech-nologies existed at the time o prior disasters, the toolshad not been applied to humanitarian operations ona massive scale until Haiti. There ore, each requiresa short explanation be ore getting to how they wereapplied to mapping Haitis health acilities.

Collaborative documents like wikis have a relativelylong and important history in citizen contributions tohumanitarian response. The Hurricane Katrina Wikiwas a collaboratively created portal based on the Wiki-pedia plat orm (MediaWiki) that provided both situationupdates and resources and advice or those a ectedby the disaster. It grew out o the initial e orts o theTsunami Wiki, and was ollowed by locally led and de-veloped wikis or the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake andseveral other emergencies. For Haiti the ICT4Peace

oundation developed and maintained a wiki that pro-vided a collated and curated set o links and resources.

In a similar vein the NGO InSTEDD regularly provided aV&TC oriented situation report that gave a snapshoto many key activities by new players in the volunteer

Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

the q e i he mari e c rp a ryi a er ere hare he ngo , here are hey, ha are heir eed a d h d e

e i h he e p er he ? si ply l a i he ngoa a h e pie e f he p zzle. un had a ap f ngo a r

Hai i Ja ary 12, b i a q i kly da ed. we relied heavily u hahidi l a e ngo . Craig Clarke, US Marine Corps

Civilian Analyst


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and technology sector. Together these activities can beseen as an attempt by the V&TC community to makesense o their own activities, and to start to apply bothindividual and collective intelligence to the problem o in ormation overload and harmonization o e ort.

Crisis Mappers and open Aerial MappingHigh-resolution imageryde ned here as being ableto see to the level o one meterhas not traditionallybeen available at the eld level or operating agenciesimmediately a ter a disaster. Imagery can be critical tomaking operational decisions, especially in regardsto logistics. But imagery also is time consuming toprocess and analyzea task or which eld sta hasprecious little time. During the response to the 2004Indian Ocean tsunami, the UN sta in Aceh had asked

or detailed imagery o bridge outages so that theycould design supply chains around the island. Theyhad also requested nighttime in rared imagery o the is-land, hoping that heat o camp res and congregationso (warm) people would help the UN identi y where thepopulations o destroyed villages had moved. Whilethey eventually received some imagery, they neverreceived a data set that answered their operationalquestions.

Haiti was an entirely di erent case. A GeoEye/Googlepartnership released high-resolution imagery o the

disaster 26 hours a ter the quake. Digital Globe soonollowed. What was remarkable was that these provid-

ers released the imagery under an attribution onlylicense, instead o the usual restrictive licenses thatprevent derived works and redistribution via otheronline and o fine channels.

Working in coordination with Crisis Mappers, theDisaster Risk Management group in at the World Bankcommissioned the Rochester Institute o Technology(RIT) and ImageCat to collect 15 cm aerial imagery o Port-au-Prince. From 2129 January, the teams few aprop aircra t in box patterns, releasing the imagery intothe public domain. This trans ormed the work o theresponse.

The Haiti imagery would have been use ul under anycircumstance, especially or the UN and the NGOs thatpossessed the requisite geospatial in ormation systemsexperts to process the raw imagery into the ormatsthat laptop clients and web services could read and write.However, in this case, something unexpected happened.

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30/7230

A community o geospatial expertsloosely coordi-nated by the Crisis Mappers mailing listtook it uponthemselves to become the stewards and evangelists

or the imagery data.

This group had rst congregated at the InternationalCon erence o Crisis Mapping in October 2009 and in-cluded about 100 top subject matter experts rom theUN, U.S. State Department, the EU Joint Research Cen-ter, and major academic institutions. Their intent be oreHaiti was to de ne crisis mapping as a new disciplineand to explore means or identi ying how the analysisand visualization o data fowing rom humanitarianemergencies could improve response operations andrecovery.

Crisis Mappers went ar beyond what one would expect

o an online community. Growing to over 500 members,they downloaded many dozens o terabytes o post-quake imagery rom satellite providers, georecti yingthem against pre-quake data sets. Crisis Mappers setabout analyzing the imagery rom many angles: creatingshape les o the emerging IDP camps, building the-matic maps o potential hazards, even modeling poten-tial fooding hazards rom a hypothetical tropical storm.

Much o the work was centered at academic centers,with the San Diego State University/Telascience hy-percube server unctioning as the primary plat orm

or aggregating the data. Other academic centersincluding the Delta State University in Mississippiadded complex GIS analyses. This location o the worktook the load o eld sta or processing and analyzingimagerya service to eld sta and other V&TCs alike.

op nstr tMapOpenStreetMap (OSM)a geospatial wiki, akin to aWikipedia or mapsbegan to displace traditional GISwithin a week o the temblor, especially or routing dataand or maps o building ootprints in Port-au-Prince.The reason was practical: OSM was able to mobilizeover 640 volunteers around the world, who scannedand recti ed old atlases and maps and traced roads,bridges, and buildings into the OpenStreetMap geo-spatial wiki using tools that only required a simpleweb browser and time. In the process, this communityturned a blank spot on the map into one o the mostaccurately mapped countries in the worldcreat-ing a map ar better than any available to the UN. Bymid-March, OpenStreetMap had become the de actosource or Haiti map data within most UN agencies andthe EC Humanitarian Unit.

04. ChANge iN exPeCTATioNsThe goal o in ormation management is more than en-suring that in ormation fows rom an origin to its recipi-ents. When timely and accurate, in ormation enablesleaders to make well-in ormed decisions. However,leaders at UN headquarters were very clear that theydid not believe that were receiving detailed in ormationabout un olding operations that would enable themto know what was going on and to coordinate the re-sponse. While this expectation or greater visibility into

the eld is expected and right, what is unclear is i exist-ing structures or in ormation management can supplysuch ne-grained details so early in the response.

T plumb n b tt r, w y n rmat nn t f w n ?Since the Indian Ocean tsunami, the UN and NGOshave made e

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