UN’s Alspach speaks on crisis information management

by Ruth Canagarajah, College of IST student

Marking the second of four talks about informatics and technological applications in crisis environments, Andrew Alspach presented at the IST building on October 10. Alspach, who has previously worked with the Peace Corps and UNHCR, is the Information Management officer for the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination in Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). He works in Geneva, where he looks at policy developments and staffs information management officers in OCHA’s world-wide offices, which has a heavy presence in Africa and Asia.

In a dynamic presentation integrating student questions and media, Alspach informed the audience about how information management is the life-blood of humanitarian emergency which courses through the veins of effective response and informed decision making. After creating the distinction between the inherently social and contextual qualities of local knowledge versus the repository qualities of information management, Alspach stated that it was Haiti that pushed the UN to seriously pursue technological applications and solutions in information management and decision making. In the early stages of Haiti’s earthquake, more than 250 organizations (non-governmental organizations, UN agencies and national governmental agencies) responded to the crisis within the first three days, during which OCHA set up databases to keep track of them. Flooded with additional information from receiving 10 emails per minute, OCHA’s goals were to manage the information, know who was there and more importantly know what areas they were working in and where. To promote their objectives, they attempted to launch the “virtuous cycle” of convincing others to share information, adding value to the information, allowing partners to see the benefits, disseminating the information quickly and then beginning the cycle again.

The UN has technologically expanded through approaches like using Google Docs to share information with other agencies. Additionally, PDFs and Excel files have been re-purposed to RSS feeds, Facebook input and other avenues to enhance the interactivity of the information. There still exist basic-level information management approaches, such as using contact cards for humanitarian agencies during crisis response. Alspach mentioned, however, that the UN is reframing the contact card idea by using an approach akin to an interesting combination of Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. In this approach, humanitarian agencies can “check in” and “check out” of emergencies while sharing information about who is doing what and where, along with identifying what types of updates one wanted to receive. Alspach notes, “I know this is not cutting edge but this is bleeding edge stuff for the UN to utilize new technology”.

As the UN’s emergency response system expands through technology, there are still many shortcomings that Alspach mentioned should be looked at closely. For one, local knowledge that is gained through on-the-ground needs assessment is often cumbersome and slow. In Haiti, Alspach said that even in OCHA’s “Apocalypse Now” assessment wherein the team flew to Haiti in a helicopter, quickly surveyed the assessments, and flew back, they still fell behind the pre-set deadline, which invalidated the data they had collected. As a solution, Alspach referred to Twitter and Facebook as future tools that can be integrated into the decision-making process. Another issue is the different priorities of OCHA’s emergency response team versus its headquarters.  On day two of Haiti, headquarters asked for an analytical needs assessment from the response team, information which was nearly impossible to produce. What the response team was focused on during the initial stages was operational information. Whereas maps were needed by the team to navigate towards affected communities, headquarters sought maps of the affected population, the response and the gaps in between. However, the analytical information cannot be produced without operational information being addressed, which sometimes is not adequately formed until a month into the emergency. Alspach proposed that emerging technology should attempt to fill these gaps per sector by improving actionable information. The last issue, which was brought up in the kick-off speaker last week (Gisli Olaffson), is the problems surrounding information-sharing among inter- and intra-cluster sectors, in which separate clusters focus on different response areas. Alspach noted that a significant mentality shift is needed in preventing information hoarding and the inability to embrace failures, which prevents organizations from learning from mistakes.

Building capacity, improving existing systems, and creating innovative technology to address the gaps in information management and disaster response will rely on “new blood”, Alspach concluded, as he encouraged the SRA397A class and the audience to become involved through opportunities presented by ReliefWeb and CrisisCommons, among other organizations.