The GO team are committed to transparency and acting on feedback. We invite all users of the platform to a briefing every 3 months to demo and review new and upcoming features.
It has been 4 years since the launch of GO so we spent a bit longer listening to different user stories from a variety of perspectives, as well as two in-depth descriptions from the Netherlands and Argentinian Red Cross Societies on how they use GO for international and domestic activity tracking and reporting respectively.
Additionally, we shared how we plan to respond to the GO study and the 2023 GO development workplan. Read on for a summary, the slides and an edited recording from the two sessions.
Digital evolution of the DREF
The IFRC IM and DREF teams have been collaborating for the past 12 months to digitise the DREF — moving from emails and multiple pdfs to an online form, speeding up the process and improving the evidence base for resource allocation decisions.
In September, we launched the DREF application form. In the first month alone, 17 different National Societies used GO to rapidly access funding for early action and immediate disaster response to small and medium-sized disasters that might otherwise have occurred in silence.
The inclusion of an evolved DREF on GO will have many positive impacts on the IFRC network. From the perspective of the GO platform, the following are key:
GO study results and next steps
We debriefed on the results from the GO Study, a comprehensive analysis of GO’s use cases, interface and potential services for the IFRC network. Initiated by the IFRC Regional Office IM Coordinators and overseen using user-centred design practices by Yellow Umbrella, the key learnings were summarised as the following three aspects:
Focus on National Societies — GO is seen as a good vehicle to support the IFRC’s Agenda for Renewal, however there is plenty of scope to develop services and awareness to allow National Societies to benefit from the platform for domestic emergency operations. We are encouraged to work directly with National Societies to learn their needs for the platform.
Be Operationally Useful — GO is widely used and recognised for strategic level decision-making and representation; it is less used at the operational level except as a reference. We need to move GO from “show and tell’ to “show and do”, meaning we should prioritise new features and data analysis flows that explicitly serve decision-makers’ needs.
Harmonise, Integrate and Leverage IFRC data — GO is the key information source on IFRC network emergencies. This role should be reinforced and leveraged to enable more agility, lighter processes while also building the collective evidence base and potential for analysis.
We presented a high-level summary of some planned improvements and features which respond to those recommendations, in the short and medium term. A more detailed explanation of the background, insights and how the GO team have made action plans around the main learnings can be found here.
Information to help us act earlier
The IFRC is committed to shifting our response towards a more anticipatory approach, with a flagship commitment to bring this to 25% of our humanitarian response funding by 2025. As detailed here, the GO platform is a key systematic enabler for this shift going to scale.
The risk module was launched on GO in March, providing access to information on past crises, known risks, as well as impact forecasts for imminent crises. We continue to improve the quality and range of information provided.
Building on newly available inundation forecast maps from NASA, our partner Pacific Disaster Centre is now providing us with information for many more floods than previously–including many small floods that go undetected by other systems. In August, we added multi-month selection for seasonal analyses of risks within a region. And we’re working to introduce a number of new features in coming few months including more hazards and impact forecasts, semi-automated Risk Watch bulletins, sub-national risk information and pre-population of Field Reports and DREF requests.
Different ways to use GO
Four years since the GO platform was launched, we have heard many different stories of how it has helped the IFRC network to strategise and prioritse actions during the pandemic, gain wider attention for domestic operations, standardise reporting, enable peer exchange, advocate to donors, digitally transform disaster management workflows, integrate and harmonise national level data, and surface and visualise data to improve evidence-based decision-making. A short video compiling these stories is below.
Henk Hoff, Information Management Coordinator for the Netherlands Red Cross, has been involved with the GO platform pretty much from day one. It should have come as little surprise to see how many ways the NLRC have put the different GO data schemas and services to good use, however it was still really impressive to see the full potential of the GO API put to use. Please take a look to be inspired by how your National Society could apply similar approaches to semi-automatically share information with GO.
Tomas Sarkis, National Coordinator for IM and Risk Analysis for the Argentinian RC, demonstrated how they use GO to surface reporting on domestic operations to the global IFRC family. Nevertheless, there is clearly much more that could be done to help National Societies streamline the reporting process. We are currently consulting on a simplified Field Report process, and aiming to incentivise more frequent reporting through exportable reports, maps, and other data visualisations.
Looking ahead
In the short term (by end 2022), we aim to complete the DREF’s digital evolution by including the Operational Update and Final Report processes, as well as introduce IFRC Country Plans, on the platform.
In the medium term (by end 2023), the GO workplan provides an overview of the enhancements we aim to deliver on the platform next year, as well as how those features and functions link to other key IFRC data processes. Please get in touch if you are keen to contribute or collaborate on any of these features.
Looking further ahead, we aim to work with a newly convened GO Advisory Group to develop and launch a vision for the next 4 years of the platform’s development. Stay tuned!
90% of GO development is funded directly by our National Societies, and we depend on their continued support to deliver on these plans. If you would like to hear more about our work, or offer financial or material support, please contact im@ifrc.org
