Measuring the impact of data and information is one of the most important and interesting topics. A recent blog post by Andrej Verity on cue-based decision making has inspired a discussion on how to measure and evaluate the impact of information products. Besides our most recent publication on understanding risk accelerators [pdf preprint; published in LNCS] (presented in Bartel's Keynote at the CAiSE Conference), this post is dedicated to relevance information for decision making. Knowing what information is required, when, by whom, and in what format is key to creating and delivering tailored information products. 

In the past, it was considered as the main challenge to overcome the lack, uncertainty or vagueness of information. The core assumption was that more information and a complete overview of the situation, decision-makers are able to make better decisions. 

And there is more: locally word of mouth, communcations by municipalities or charities; online the digital humanitarians scrambling, curating and assessing information remotely. Information evolves more dynamic than ever before - and our understanding cannot keep pace with the explosion of updates, reports, maps and graphics. 

The question where to set up a hospital has very different characteristics from funding decisions. Both decisions are important, but have very different requirements in terms of information granularity, timeliness, and updates. Which donor would like see a daily update of a few hundred kilobyte operational map? Or what field office needs an infographic? Information providers should ask: which decisions do we want to support? Making the purpose of an information product explicit and transparent is crucial to better operational impact and evaluation. 

Focusing on operations, it is important to understand which information decision-makers use, and even search for. A taxonomy of decision-makers is provided in the Decision-Makers' Needs Report. We propose going even beyond this work - focusing on key decisions, embedded in a personal and organizational network.

In the field, limited bandwidth and time pressure serve as natural filters. Queries from the field are therefore indicators for information that is actually vital, but not provided - at least not in a form that is easy to find or retrieve. 

How can information products be as efficient and reliable as a phone call? 
The answer in this new paradigm: by providing tailored information products, created and designed in near-real time for a purposeful decision in a given context. For us, the greatest potential for innovation and improvements lies in understanding decisions such that we can generate less information to make better decisions.

Now more than half a year has passed, since Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda hit the Philippines. Our friend and supporter Geert Gijs has recently visited Manila, Tacloban and Palo to monitor the recovery. Indeed, the typhoon has triggered many activities - and it is good to see that part of the efforts of DSWD, OCHA and other agencies are dedicated to learning such as in the SIIEM project. DSWD has invited for an Inter-Agency Forum on Increasing Availability, Quality and Accessibility ofCommon Operational Datasets to Support Disaster Risk Reduction apd Emergency Management in the Philippines, a project that has been supported by DRL in cooperation with MapAction. 

Our leading question in this effort is: if we cannot avoid that natural hazards strike, how can we reduce the consequences? 

In the past weeks, the DRL team has been sharing the impressions from our field research with our crowd funders in a Webinar, we have discussed our findings with the colleagues at our institutes, and presented at the Humanitarian Technology and ISCRAM2014 conferences.

Most of our work is publicly available, including our initial insights from the Philippines, a reflection on our research design and on coordination. For all of us, it was great to discuss how technology can support humanitarian operations (see the keynote presentations of Patrick Meier  and Ed Happ ), to share our visions for advancing science and research, to get a signature of Gisli's new book … but we are aware that a lot remains to be done! 

Practitioners. Our work can only be relevant if we engage in a process of co-creation. This requires from all of us navigating uncharted waters to find a common ground between operational relevance and the generic concerns and questions of research. A way ahead may be the creation of shared learning environments, offering room for reflection and continuous improvements – turning the world into a living lab?!

Walking the line… together. While few researchers have been to the field, many have been collecting and analyzing data about the impact of Haiyan, the response and recovery efforts. We have been trying to understand the context, requirements, needs and to improve technology, tools and systems. Most of this work is still fragmented; also in science, data is often not open. We keep advocating data sharing protocols and better interoperability for emergency managers, and seem utterly unable to open up and share ourselves 

To make headway in both aspects, we will publish in the coming weeks a series of blog posts about the Philippines. This will still be exploratory and anecdotal, including subjective reports and reflections from our respective standpoints. We believe that to achieve academic rigor, we need to make room for information sharing and engage in a discussion. We hope you join!