NetHope World Economic Forum - Data Driven Development
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Presentation by Dr. William A. Brindley, NetHope CEO, to the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Data Driven Development (Big Data and Socio-Economic Impact); November 2012 in Dubai, UAE
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NetHope World Economic Forum - Data Driven Development
- 2. NetHope’s Misson As a catalyst for collaboration, NetHope helps NGOs more effectively address the world’s most pressing challenges through smarter use of technology
- 4. Data Drives the NGO World ‘Small’ Data Sets • Ease of Collection? • Quality? • Shared?
- 5. New Data Sources in the Information Age Crowdsourcing Open Data Big Data Communication Governmental data By-products of with communities made accessible transactional records
- 6. Crowdsourcing Opportunities Challenges • More effective aid • Bi-directional communication • Community involvement • Skewed representation • Real-time assessments of • Languages & literacy needs • Analysis of data Ways forward Leverage and build Digital Volunteer Communities Advances in NLP/translation technologies Provision of mobile phones to disadvantaged communities
- 7. Open Data Opportunities Challenges • Availability of baseline data • Openness of UN, NGO data • Driver of innovative solutions • Lack of data standards • Transparency • Lack of APIs • Mashing up of disparate data • Lack of data analysts Ways forward Data Sharing within the UN, NGO and donor communities Drive for open data standards, common APIs and capacity building within development organizations Support for innovation from academic and private sectors
- 8. Big Data Opportunities Challenges • Real-time location data • Privacy & Security Issues • Demographic analysis • Gaining access to big data • Trends and early warning • Information overload • Lack of capacity to analyze Ways forward Drive towards privacy / security guidelines (for development) Pre-emergency partnerships with big data providers Collaboration with academic community and businesses on BI
- 9. Open Humanitarian Initiative Technology Community Capacity Interoperability Alliance Training Data Sharing APIs Initiative Digital Volunteers Visualizations Funding Research & Innovation Partners Development Community, Academia, Private Sector, Governments, Donors
- 10. Call to Action Sharing data for use in development Creating data standards and data access APIs Providing expertise to help build capacity and innovative solutions Supporting collaborative efforts that focus on improving use of data Help organizations like NetHope make development and disaster response more community driven
- 11. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- NetHope, which started in 2001 brings together 37 of the leading NGOs from around the world. It was founded on the principles of collaboration and it’s mission is to be a catalyst for that collaboration and to enable the NGOs to more effectively address the world’s most pressing challenges through smarter use of technology.This is why, earlier this year we started an effort to help drive increased use of data within the development and humanitarian community.
- In the NGO sector, data is what drives our decision making. Data comes from the various sectors that our organizations operate in such as education, mobile money, emergency response, etc. Our internal operations, such as human resources, finance, etc. also generate vast amounts of data. Looking at the modern views of data, this data can be classified to be at the small data end of the spectrum. There are certainly many challenges we face with this small data, such as the lack of good data (it is often hard to collect) and the fact that we have lot of siloed data that is not being shared. Sadly it is when you start sharing this small data between all of the different organizations that you start to get the collective large data sets that allow you to start to gain useful insight that allows you to have new innovative approaches to dealing with the complex situations at hand.But in today’s information age, there are more sources of data we must consider.
- At this dawn of the information age, there are three distinct new sources of data that we must figure out how to leverage in our development and disaster relief efforts. Furthermore we must find innovative ways to combine those new data sources with the traditional “small data” sources discussed earlier.These new sources are: Crowdsourcing - the ability to communicate directly with the communities we are working in.Open Data – large data sets provided free of charge by governments and agenciesBig Data – massive data sets that get created as a by-product of transactions in systems such as mobile networksBut leveraging these new sources and combining them with the existing small sources is not trivial and in order to better define how they are affected, lets go through each of these, discuss the opportunities, challenges and ways ahead.
- Crowdsourcing provides us with an unique opportunity for the first time to communicate directly with the communities we are trying to assist. This enables us to more effectively assess the needs and therefore provide more effective and appropriate aid to these communities. Since the “cost” of communicating with the communities is so low, then we can afford to get real-time information about things that previously took days or weeks to assess.But crowdsourcing does not come without its new set of challenges that we must be willing to address. First of all it is crucial that crowdsourcing is not a uni-directional channel. If people are endlessly asked to provide information but are not receiving feedback in return, then they stop providing that information. Text messages and social networks provide an opportunity for development and humanitarian organizations to create bi-directional channels of communication, an instant feedback loop that allows for much more effective monitoring and evaluation of the efforts. This however requires organizations to build the capacity to handle this kind of bi-directional communication. One of our members, American Red Cross, is leading in this space, having established a Digital Disaster Operation Center, staffed with volunteers, both in-person and digital volunteers that leverage social media and other channels to create this bi-directional feedback loop with affected communities.Anther challenge that may be experienced during crowdsourcing efforts is that you will received data from those communities that have access to mobile phones. The demographics of the individuals that have access may be skewed compared to the demographics of the overall community. You will also see that languages and literacy level of the community can affect the data. Finally there are possibilities of communities leveraging crowdsourcing to try to influence how aid is provided. Studies looking at the use of social media during disasters however point towards crowdsourcing being more self-correcting than traditional methods of assessments. In particular the crowd is quicker to verify reports that are suspicious.We need to help drive the creation of digital volunteer communities, especially in disaster prone developing countries. We have had great success in leveraging these communities for large scale international disasters, but we need to build those communities up locally, where the geographical, cultural and language expertise is. We must also invest in advances in natural language processing and translation technologies to enable better handling of localized messages. Finally we must look at ways to provide free mobile phones to disadvantaged communities that they can leverage to communicate with organizations. The savings in effectiveness of programs due to better targeted aid, quickly outweighs the costs of the phones.
- Open data is the new buzzword in town. Governments around the world are competing in releasing their large data sets to the public. The success of open.gov in the US has lead to governments around the world adapting this same approach. With all of this data becoming available it not only provides development and humanitarian organizations with access to good baseline data, it also helps drive innovative solutions by entrepreneurs in the countries that have opened up data. They leverage bits and pieces of datasets and mash them up together to allow citizens to be more involved in the way their government. Last but not least open data provides transparency like never before. We must however expand open data beyond the government agencies. UN agencies and NGOs should also embrace open data and share all data that is not privacy related. This would lead to increased transparency and more effective accountability than we have today. But sharing for sharing sake can be counter-productive. It is important that we help create simple data standards (without spending 5 years agreeing on them) for the key datasets that are needed for development and humanitarian response. We must also go beyond the data standards and select and promote simple data APIs that can be used to access the data properly. Finally we must help build capacity both within governments and development/humanitarian organization in the area of information management. This way we can have enough people that can help gather, process, analyze and visualize the data available. We must team up with the academic and private sector to ensure we drive innovation in this space and leverage state of the art technology to provide intelligence out of all of the vast amounts of data available.
- We have seen amazing uses of big data, especially from mobile networks over the past few years. The ability to see population movements, analyze changes in mobile phone usage and determine worst affected areas after a disaster through availability and usage of communication networks can provide program managers, both in development and humanitarian response with near real-time information that was never before available. Since mobile phone companies also often have demographic information about their users, this data can even be segregated based on demographics. All of this provides us with new possibilities for detecting trends and providing early warning of changes in community behavior. In order for big data to be useful we must work with big data providers to ensure access to the data before a crisis hits. In order to enable this access, close partnerships must be developed and we recommend that organizations share successful partnership frameworks. Sharing data that potentially can have privacy and security issues can have dangerous consequences if not treated properly. It is our suggestion that leading experts in the privacy and security space, along with private sector organizations and development organizations collaboratively work towards common guidelines for privacy and security in this space. It is also important to drive effective use of all of this data. There are opportunities to leverage expertise from the academic community and from private sector business analyst community in driving the business intelligence work needed. This can then lead to information management capacity building efforts, especially in developing countries that leverage that expertise to train people in those countries in the gathering, processing, analysis and visualization of big data.
- We understood that we needed no only to find effectively ways to better share the “small data” between organizations, but also find ways to incorporate these new “big data” sources into the work of our organizations. Through an effort that we call the Open Humanitarian Initiative, we are bringing together the development and humanitarian community with academia, private sector and national governments around the common goal of improving information sharing and more effective use of information within development and humanitarian programs. The Open Humanitarian Initiative addresses three key aspects needed to achieve this effort. These are technology related, community related and capacity building related efforts. Lets look at these in more detail.As mentioned earlier, then there are a number of technology related issues we must address before we can effectively leverage crowdsourcing, open data and big data in our program work. We must work together in addressing interoperability issues such as data standards. We must also work towards common APIs for accessing the open data. But having the data by itself does not provide direct value to those who share it. It is therefore important that we work with academia and private sector organizations to drive effective data visualizations that enable better decision making by people at all levels.But having all of the technology aspects solved is not enough, if we don’t have capacity to work with that information. We must therefore have focused effort on providing training and building capacity, especially in developing countries. Too much focus has been in the past to build up this kind of capacity at the HQ level, but it is in the field that this kind of capacity is most needed.Secondly we must work on building communities of digital volunteers that can be leveraged to deal with the massive information flow that can occur when you start crowdsourcing information. We have best practices from digital volunteer efforts over the last few years that we can take and transfer over to developing countries.We must also drive innovation and research in this space, especially within the developing countries. It is no surprise that the most innovative solutions that have come out over the last few years in this space come from countries like Kenya. We must foster these kind of efforts through innovation labs and partnerships between academic and research institutions from across the world.Finally we must build a community that enables all of this to happen. This community is based on an alliance of organizations of all types that want to work towards collaborative drive towards data driven development and humanitarian response. We must also have a collaborative, ambitious long-term initiative that brings those organizations together around a common vision. Finally we must have the funding, in-kind and financial required to make significant efforts forwards.We welcome you all to work with us towards this vision.
- Finally here is how you can work towards more data driven development and humanitarian response. You can provide open data. You can help drive standards and APIs forward. You can share your expertise to solve some of those complex issues and help us drive innovation and finally you can provide support to collaborative efforts like the Open Humanitarian Initiative that enable us to take giant steps forward.If we work together, then we can ensure that not only are we making more effective decisions through improved access to data, we are also involving the communities, making them an integrated part of our work and thereby building a more informed and resilient community that is better able to deal with challenges it will face in the future.