1. Situation Reports and Information Sharing
SitRep Project
Situation Reports and Information Sharing
in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA)
Elisa Oreglia | John Ward
Master’s Final Project, UC Berkeley School of Information
Advisor, Jenna Burrell

2. Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
BACKGROUND
Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
Preliminary research among Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) suggested difficulties and inefficiencies in the sitrep process:
Lack of standards
Little support for information gathering & sharing
Unclear picture of emergency response
Sitrep exploratory project in Fall 07
- Project is a brainchild of Nick Rabinowitz, our 1st year colleague. We should say right away that even though there’s two of us here presenting today, this sitrep project is in fact the work of 4 people – Nick, Megan Finn PhD student, and the two of us. So we take all the credit for the good parts, and pass the blame on to them for what is sub par.
- Nick wanted to take a closer look at situation reports, a type of document commonly used in humanitarian operations, and widely despised. We began to do research on sitreps among NGOs in Fall 07, within Nancy Van House’s Users needs and assessment class and the Information Service Design Clinic, which gave us the chance of testing different methodologies and lay the foundations of this semester’s work.

3. Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
BACKGROUND
Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
SITuation REPort:
Internal or public document used by agencies involved in emergency response
About the situation on the ground
Response efforts
Usually a semi-structured Word document distributed via
Before we move on, let’s clarify what sitreps are. Originally a military document, now used in different humanitarian agencies and governments.

4. Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
BACKGROUND
Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA

5. Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
BACKGROUND
Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA

6. Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
BACKGROUND
Origins of our project | What is a Sitrep | What is OCHA
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA):
“facilitates, mobilizes and coordinates humanitarian assistance delivered by international and national partners to populations and communities in need.”
Issues public sitreps about natural and complex emergencies
Currently reviewing some of its core information products, in particular sitreps
Last semester we looked at NGOs sitreps, which are internal documents not shared with the public, and we encountered a big obstacle: that nobody wanted to share their sitreps with us, which made it difficult to find a client. Earlier this semester, OCHA got in touch with us – they are the office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, and their sitreps are public. They are in the course of reviewing their own sitrep product, and heard about our work. Suggested we collaborate, and here we are.

7. Understand sitrep process within OCHA
OUR RESEARCH
Goals | Methods
Understand sitrep process within OCHA
Understand the process in the wider context of information sharing in the field
Propose tactical and strategic ways to clarify sitrep confusion
While working with NGOs, we realized that we needed a much better grasp of the process that leads to sitreps, before we could understand the documents themselves. As we began working with OCHA we set as our research goals to understand their process, see how it fits with what we had learned about information sharing mechanism in humanitarian response in our previous research and from lit review, and finally to propose a set of recommendations to OCHA to address what OCHA itself perceived as shortcomings of its sitrep document.

8. Interviews with OCHA and its sitreps’ users:
OUR RESEARCH
Goals | Methods
Interviews with OCHA and its sitreps’ users:
OCHA:
39 interviewees (8 senior managers, 31 operational staff)
2 roundtables (1 Desk Officers, 1 Info Advisory)
External users:
NGOs, 12 field officers interviewees
Donors (governments), 2 phone roundtables
During spring break, the 4 of us traveled to NY, OCHA’s headquarters, where for a week we interviewed people. Followed up with phone interviews with field officers, and users of OCHA sitreps, that is NGOs and donors, who, as we’ll see, turn out to be a crucial audience for OCHA. Btw, when we say donor, we usually mean ‘government in their capacity as donors’

9. OUR RESEARCH Document Analysis Goals | Methods
101 documents – one month of OCHA sitreps
35 sitreps from different countries to get a broad understanding of field practices
26 sitreps to track an entire emergency sitrep cycle (Pakistan cyclone and flooding, Summer 2007)
Also did extensive doc analysis; finally we had a huge corpus of docs, and we took full advantage of it.
We did different types of analysis – one on a month-worth of sitreps issued by OCHA, to identify, confirm or not issues that came up in interviews;
The second, divided in two parts, was a more classic document analysis which looked at a wide sample of sitreps from different countries, and tracked sitreps through one emergency, from beginning to end, to see if and how they changed.
Note that the two methods, interviews and doc analysis, are very organic – we went back and forth from one to the other to answer questions and find answers. A sort of proxy to being in the field.

10. FINDINGS “
Sitreps are often a source of significant confusion, written without clear guidelines and clear goals for unspecified audiences whose needs are not fully understood.
Let’s jump to conclusions ”

11. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
Are sitreps for sudden events or for updates on on-going emergencies?
“When I think sitrep, I think urgent…”
(OCHA)
“We saw that there are often multiple products that overlap, with no clarity about what each product offers. Can you clarify what’s a sitrep?” (Donor)

12. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience

13. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience

14. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
No guidelines about appearance
no centralized guidelines or style sheet
Most sitreps follow a similar outline, but authors use different words to mean the same thing, or the same words to mean different things (examples?)
Confusion for users!

15. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
Unclear goals for writers
Unclear purpose for readers
“it’s one of the reasons why sitreps are like, ‘F***, I have to do a sitrep!’ Because the amount and the kind of information – it’s like a ravenous beast.” (NGO)

16. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
Everybody agrees that sitreps should have consolidated # on Needs–Response-Gap

17. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
Everybody agrees that sitreps should have consolidated # on Needs–Response-Gap

18. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
Everybody agrees that sitreps should have consolidated # on Needs–Response-Gap
Part of the problem is that OCHA is not involved in assessment, which makes its sitreps reactive: it gets what other sources give it in terms of response, and other sources are interested in highlighting what they are doing, not what the general situation is.

19. Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
FINDINGS
Confusion | Guidelines | Process | Audience
- Humanitarian operators - UN agencies - governments - donors (governments and private entities) - the press - internal OCHA audience - the field - headquarters
Or, in the words of an OCHA interviewee: “sitreps brief everybody about everything”
“For our draft, we have a clear image of what audience we serve, but we never asked them.” (OCHA)

20. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Confusion around sitreps is a symptom of a flawed process
Technology: from Word docs to database-driven reports?
Flawed process: no guidelines, no explicitly shared practices, uncertainties about audiences and content.
Information Management review within OCHA suggested to break documents into information components that can be easily reused; in the long-term, the idea of having ‘reports on demand’ where every audience sees only what it wants to see is very attractive. However, if the process around information collection and analysis is broken, and the goals OCHA wants to achieve with the information it gathers are unclear, then moving to information components in a database will make things worse, not better. In this spirit, we suggest two ways forward to OCHA.
“A viable system must embrace not just the technological system, but the social system – the people, organizations, and institutions involved.” (The Social Life of Information)

21. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Tactical decisions as quick fixes to mitigate the perception of chaos:
Document analysis shows similarities in sitrep practices at field level
Recognize and codify these shared mental models - audience knows what to expect - burden on field to justify exceptions

22. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Implicit rules from field , e.g. out of 101 documents only 29 use the actual word sitrep in their title (even though they are sent out as sitreps, and authors themselves often refer to them as sitreps), and they’re mostly acute emergencies

23. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Among the rest, there are clusters of documents, organized around frequency of updates or typology

24. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Style-guide, to give sitreps a clear OCHA brand and to avoid inconsistencies
Mailing list
Inconsistencies such as 33 documents out of 101 not saying what time period they covered, or 27 sitreps without contact information
Sitrep mailing list small but indicative issue: there is a mythical list that was set up maybe 15 years ago, and never revised. Desk officers inherit it, but don’t know who’s in the list, how to add people and how to delete them; to add insult to injury, they also have to manually deal with bounce backs every time they send out a sitrep. Users, on the other hand, don’t know how to get in the list, how many lists there are, how to get out of it or change preferences
“There’s all kinds of mailing lists on Lotus Notes maintained by a small group of elves…” (OCHA)

25. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Strategic decisions that OCHA should take around the sitrep product to clarify its role:
Role of politics in sitreps: ‘neutral numbers’ versus ‘humanitarian advocacy’
OCHA’s presence in a country depends on its good relations with host governments
1. No great sense that information is socially constructed, in fact a lot of faith from both sitrep writers and users about ‘just give the numbers’ as if numbers about Internally Displaced Population weren’t quintessentially political.
2. In fact, looking at recent emergencies: OCHA isn’t in Burma, and it not in China either.
Quote. Also donors, some are adamant that OCHA’s place is not to do political analysis, some want to see humanitarian analysis
‘In some sitreps, you are talking about governments, and they can be very soft on human rights, protection issues... Then we get pushbacks from the NGOs – what’s up with OCHA and human rights?’ (OCHA)

26. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Other strategic decisions:
Are sitrep operational documents or do they record the situation for external actors?
Who is the audience?
‘What’s in it’ for information providers and sitrep authors?
Re what’s in it: OCHA is becoming a major donor in the field, so that might take care of the ‘what’s in it’ to share info for NGOs = money is in it! Also clarify for writers that they are not writing to feed a beast, but for a specific goal.

27. Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
MOVING FORWARD
Technology | Tactics | Strategy | Limitations
Humanitarian sector is changing
Our work heavily focused on headquarters
Didn’t talk to enough sitrep users
Not clear about what happens in the field
Humanitarian sector changing very rapidly, with several reforms in past few years which are heavily impacting the sector; some of these changes are already seeping through sitreps (clusters), but not sure how they are going to evolve;
Focus on headquarters, so our next step, if we continue to work on this, will be to go to the field and find out what happens

28. THANK YOU! Our advisor, Jenna Burrell
Our supporters, moral and financial, Eric Kansa of ISD clinic and Tom Kalill of Big Berkeley
Noise & BSG mailing lists, for contacts and inspiration
Bob Glushko for doc analysis evangelizing
Nancy Van House & Liz Goodman for feedback on proto-sitrep project
Anonymous sitrep coder & stylist

29. QUESTIONS?