Every quarter we invite all registered GO users to hear about new and upcoming features, as well as invite their co-creation of the platform.
Please find the slides and a summary of the briefing below, as well as an ‘edited highlights’ of the three sessions combining the different National Society perspectives here.
These briefings do not focus on current functionalities and we suggest users to navigate through the site and watch the GO user videos on the Resources page to learn more.
GO data summary — Q2
The numbers of users to visit GO doubled from 2019 to 2020 — driven largely by the role of GO as a global, Federation-wide tool for coordination of the response to Covid. The number of users has sustained through to 2021, as shown below.
We are also pleased to note that the majority of regular users are from National Societies.
In Q2 alone, National Societies reported 184 new emergencies using field reports from across the globe, demonstrating wide coverage. Nevertheless, there is much work to increase our user coverage as Q2 saw less than half NS login, from a known IFRC network email address.
New functionalities — Q2
Alongside a number of site improvements and bug fixes, we worked on some higher profile items over April-June period, which we describe briefly below.
3W— We described the user-centred design approach taken to gather new requirements for the 3w. New features include a global interface which compiles all 3w projects around the globe and visualises some global topline figures. There is also a new view dedicated for National Societies which work internationally or support other National Societies with programming. We also addressed a number of issues reported with the user interface (including export functionality, maps, charts) and provided a single URL per project for linking to a specific project. We are finalising the 3w upgrade over the coming weeks and will share this in a dedicated blog post when final changes to the platform and guidance have been completed.
Covid-19 — The Covid-19 emergency pages is the most visited on GO. As this is at the same time a global operation and a localised response, documents, information products and dashboards from all over the world are compiled here. We have improved accessibility to this rich information by introducing highlighted documents and links. We also demoed the Covid-19 dashboard, due to launch on the platform in July 2021.
GO user library — A new resource for GO ‘power users’ to include Brand & Design guidelines, templates, instructions on how to use the GO API, as well as re-usable open source code UI components. We described the value of a design system, more eloquently explained by the British Red Cross Digital Team here, and thanked that team for making this happen.
How National Societies use GO
To provide inspiration to the GO team and the 250 participants at the briefing, we invited three National Societies to explain how they use GO.
Nepali Red Cross — Deepak Dawadi, NRCS IM Coordinator described the IM system created to track and manage responses across the country. The system re-used the open source GO code, allowing NRCS to collect, verify and monitor key response data from across the country.
British Red Cross — Luke Tredget, Head of Emergencies, Surge and Technical Advisory at the British Red Cross outlined their ‘heavy’ use of GO to track deployment alerts, financial data and to provide a situational overview for emergencies. Luke made some great points about how GO could be used to support Movement coordination at country level and reduce the number of IFRC information platforms.
American Red Cross — Jonathan Garro, Data Engineer with the AmCross International Services team, gave a full picture of the varying information needs served by the GO front-end and API. Front-end users tend to be Operational Leads and Sector Advisors who prefer curated analysis and access to information on a specific disaster that we’re considering contributing funds/personnel towards. The AmCross IM team pulls appeal, beneficiary, budget, deployments and other information from GO via the API to integrate with their own IM system to help understand how AmCross contributions fit into the wider operation.
Coming soon in Q3
More details on all the work items being completed in Q3 can be found on the updated GO workplan, linked here. Some highlighted features are briefly described below.
Disaster Relief Emergency Fund application process — The DREF aims to provide immediate financial support to National Societies, enabling them to carry out their unique role as first responders after a disaster.
The DREF is available to all 192 member National Societies of the IFRC, as either start-up funding to respond to large-scale disasters or respond to small- and medium-scale disasters and health emergencies for which no international appeal will be launched or when support from other actors is not foreseen.
The idea is to bring the DREF application system on to GO, enabling more structured collection and re-use of data to inform decision-making and early response actions. This will build on the functionality and familiarity of the field report system, while also introducing additional data analysis and evidence to the DREF process. While the detailed specifications are still being worked on, we aim to have this system up and running in 2021.
Risk module — This will bring together and visualise a range of internal and external data sources to help strengthen the evidence underpinning anticipatory action and risk-informed programming. It will support horizon scanning, response options for imminent events and deepen our understanding and awareness of trends in our response.
The GO developer team have already started work on this and we aim to have a working prototype ready for testing in multiple languages in September, ahead of a release date of October for the first and highest prioritised functionalities.
Surge page enhancements — We are working on enhancing the Surge page based on the evolving needs. In August 2021 the Rapid Response Database will be launched and this will automatically integrate with GO so that all personnel alerts, deployments and stand-downs are easily found on GO, enabling more accurate and real-time data.
The global surge page will introduce 3 tabs
- Deployments aggregated by operations and connected with the Rapid Response database
- Operational Toolbox, including documentation, guidelines, checklist and examples of products that are vital for every operation
- Surge catalogue of services.
We are also redesigning the surge information on emergency pages to be able to see in more detail the deployments of each operation, including gantt charts to help plan for future gaps in response capacity.
Alert Hub — The IFRC Alert Hub will be launched in beta form in the coming months. This new service will aggregate alerts issued by national alerting authorities and make them accessible and useful for National Societies and IFRC response.
The initial beta release in Q3 will enable us to carry out more detailed user story mapping with our membership, to investigate how they might use the platform to engage with their national counterparts to improve the standardisation and efficiency of alerting.
NB The GO Briefings were held in English using MS Teams on 6th July at 7am, 10am and 3pm Geneva (CET). A recording of the 3 sessions, with subtitles in all four IFRC languages is here.
