The Humanitarian Genome Test Event - 25 January 2013‚ in London!

In the past months, the HIF-funded Humanitarian Genome Project has been working towards making valuable documented humanitarian experiences, from within evaluation reports, accessible in an exploitable, speedy and reliable manner. The Humanitarian Genome is a free, open source web based tool, which facilitates knowledge sharing and use of evidence.

The idea behind the Humanitarian Genome’s name is to create the possibility of a ‘sectorial DNA’. Humanitarian actors would be able to tap into this DNA’s past hereditary information and in a matter of seconds generate sectorial wisdom, which is based upon past documented experiences. The Humanitarian Genome will not tell users what is best to do or not to do but rather it will assist users in informed decision making founded on a wealth of documented evidence, enhance knowledge sharing and creation, as well as contribute to the utilization of past evaluations.

The data within the Humanitarian Genome comprises numerous evaluation reports provided by the Emergency Capacity Building (ECB) Project in collaboration with ALNAP. These reports have been identified as containing valuable information that is underutilized. The analytical process in which the Humanitarian Genome extracts data from these report to enhance utilization is based on a comprehensive coding scheme (developed in prior research) formed on the basis of academic and practical insights on humanitarian programming, organizational learning and management. As the coding scheme is applied to the evaluation reports, it generates a collection of text segments, which are then organized by the Humanitarian Genome in a hierarchical manner. The hierarchy is determined by a grade that each segment receives which is a result of the qualitative codes algorithms within the segment. The result of this process is that the user searching the system will receive a number of text segments results organized according to hierarchical order. The first results would be the ones, which contain the most valuable experiences, on the topics searched, and ones which, when read, enhance learning and or contain value for the purpose of utilization.

Who are intended users the humanitarian genome? The envisioned users of the Humanitarian Genome work in management and support positions in humanitarian aid with a task of information collection, synthesis and analysis. This could range from management team members and regional directors to country desk officers, health experts, and monitoring and evaluation officers.

An example of how and when the humanitarian genome can be of use You need to write a project proposal over food security and would like to focus on targeting the most vulnerable? What would you do? Apart from talking with experts, you could search through the archives of tens/hundreds of random documents for best practices or ideas or, do a word search in an existing document for specific terms…

The first option will probably take a long time and be rather subjective and the second option would produce mostly irrelevant results. In such a case, searching the Humanitarian Genome for your specific search terms: Food security + Vulnerably prioritization + Conflict will present you with the most valuable experiences that have been documented in numerous reports available in the Humanitarian Genome. The results will be presented in a sanitized manner, which you can quickly scan through. Accessing these past experiences would assist you in making informed decisions based on existing evidence and past experiences.

A few additional examples for use of the Humanitarian Genome would be: extracting positive practices in a specific sector; finding out the most critical experiences in Human resource management in times of rapid response; or finding out what methods organizations use for rapid needs assessments.

A test workshop on 25 January (London) The HG project is very much in development mode and would therefore like to incorporate some feedback from potential users! The HG team therefore will kindly invite potential users from the humanitarian sector (evaluators, people in information management/M&;E positions, Funders) to participate in a test workshop of the HG tool on 25 January 2012 in London.

The HIF will host the workshop from 10:00 -17:00. The aim of the workshop is to generate feedback on the contents and actual use of the tool to a limited audience (of a maximum number of 50 participants) from the humanitarian arena. We will take care of a welcoming atmosphere and have coffee/tea, lunch and some time to meet and greet.

Workshop components are a short presentation of the rationale and workings of the tool followed by test rounds of the actual Humanitarian Genome and small group discussions and feedback. Feedback will be incorporated and acknowledged into the development of the prototype of the Humanitarian Genome, which will be presented in May 2013. The test workshop is, of course, free of cost.

Have a look at the video below to get a glimpse of what the Humanitarian Genome does