UC Berkeley Sitrep Project

Team Members:

Megan Finn, Ph.D. candidate, School of Information

Elisa Oreglia, MIMS ’08, School of Information

Nick Rabinowitz, MIMS ’09, School of Information

John Ward, MIMS ’08, School of Information

Faculty Advisor:

Jenna Burrell, Assistant Professor, School of Information

Project summary:

The accuracy and availability of information plays a critical role in humanitarian response to emergencies. Situation reports, or "sitreps," are a type of document used by non-governmental organizations, UN agencies, and other actors involved in emergency response to share information about the situation on the ground. Though widely used, sitreps have been recognized as a problematic, often unwieldy tool with little or no standardization across agencies.

The UC Berkeley Sitrep project aims to investigate the challenges and opportunities for situation reporting in disaster response. Working with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), our project will document the current practice in the humanitarian sector, offer recommendations for a general sitrep data model that could enable more efficient sharing of information, and potentially implement a technical prototype for an improved system. Since the project's inception in October 2007, we have conducted an initial document analysis and extensive interviews with staff at OCHA and a number of NGOs. We propose a continuation of this work, including visits to OCHA field offices, which we consider crucial to the project's success.

Project mission:

The Sitrep project is an initiative within the context of the School of Information's Information Services Design Clinic to investigate the challenges and opportunities for situation reporting in disaster response.

Phase I

The first phase of the project, spanning the 2007-2008 academic year, is devoted to exploratory research to identify problems and opportunities in the current process, the format of the information being collected, and the systems used to collect and analyze that data. Our approach to this research has been a combination of qualitative research methods, including interviews and roundtable discussions with a wide range of stakeholders, and document analysis of a large sample of sitreps from NGO and UN sources. We have conducted 32 interviews and four roundtables to date, along with an initial document analysis, and we intend to complete several more interviews and a more extensive document analysis within the next month. The result of this work, to be completed in early May, will be a research report detailing our findings on the current process as it exists in a range of organizations, including an in-depth evaluation of situation reporting within OCHA, which acts as a central point of collection and aggregation for information from a wide variety of NGOs and UN agencies during emergencies, and which issues its own situation reports that aim at giving a general snapshot of the events. We will offer initial recommendations for a generalized sitrep data model, along with suggestions for technical approaches appropriate to an improved system.

Phase II

We plan to conduct the second phase of the project during the of the summer of 2008. This phase would be a continuation of this research, centered on visits to NGO and OCHA field offices in several countries. To date, the majority of our work has been with staff in the U.S.-based headquarters offices of the various agencies, supplemented by phone interviews with staff in the field. Our proposed research for the second phase would include visits to at least two countries in which OCHA and NGO staff maintain a significant presence, as well as a visit to OCHA and NGO offices in Geneva, a key nexus of communication and interaction between organizations involved in international disaster relief. These visits would include a range of interviews and roundtables with staff responsible for collecting and reporting key information in emergencies. Contingent on the resources available to the project, we also hope to conduct one or more surveys of sitrep recipients and to perform an additional in-depth document analysis, both focused on emergencies in the countries we visit. This combination of methods could offer a rich and nuanced understanding of the reporting context in each country, informing a more accurate and effective approach to data modeling and technical implementation.

Phase III

Contingent on the findings and organizational partnerships established in Phases I and II, the third phase of the project, spanning the 2008-2009 academic year, would focus on finalizing the document model and implementing a prototype for an improved sitrep system. Though we believe that this work could have significant benefit for organizations involved in disaster response, it is our strong contention that its success - and indeed its justification - must be founded on the in-depth research we conduct in Phases I and II, and that it would be premature to scope this phase out further until we have prepared our initial results.

Required resources:

1. Total project needs: $17,550
2. Other:

   We are currently seeking funding for Phase II of our project. As outlined above, we would like to send several members of the project team to Geneva and at least two cities where OCHA maintains field offices. While there are many countries that would be useful for us to visit, we have focused on Colombo and Nairobi as two locations likely to yield important research, for the following considerations:

   1. Both locations serve as bases for OCHA and NGO field operations in response to long-term, complex emergencies. Sri Lanka has also been the site of significant response to sudden-onset natural disasters, including recurring floods as well as the 2004 tsunami.
   2. We have support from NGOs to work with their staff in these locations, and OCHA will support us in organizing further interviews and conduct appropriate data collection.
   3. Sri Lanka has been a testbed for several new initiatives in the field of information sharing in emergencies (most importantly the free and open source disaster management software Sahana), and its OCHA office is considered an example of best practices within the organization. Recognizing that any complex emergency can be dangerous, we will place a premium on the safety of our research team, following U.S. travel advisories and the advice of OCHA and NGO staff as we plan our trip.

   The budget that we are proposing is as follows:

   • Airline tickets: $2500 * 3 = $7500
   • In country transportation: $250 * 3 = $750
   • Accommodations: $50 * 3 * 20 = $3000
   • Salary: $20/hour * 300 hours = $6000
   • Recording equipment: $100 * 3 = $300

   Total: $17,550

Project page URL:

• http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/sitrep/