GO is 2!
We hosted the event in order to celebrate continued progress, but more importantly, to drive engagement from across the Red Cross Red Crescent network help direct us to make the platform be more useful, connecting information on emergency needs with an early, effective and efficient response.
We heard from key users, from IFRC Senior Management, HQ and Regional Offices as well as Disaster Managers from the Chilean Red Cross and our biggest National Society supporter, the American Red Cross. They each answered different questions from the GO survey, which we launched to get inputs into the way ahead from across the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.
Please do take 5 minutes to answer the GO survey
Xavier Castellanos, USG for National Society Development and Operations Coordination, explained how he uses GO to get an overview of different operations and regional strategic priorities. He emphasised the potential role GO has in digital transformation of the IFRC, pointing towards a future where it can be optimised and adapted for different National Society use cases.
Jessica Letch, IFRC Emergency Operations Coordination Manager for Asia Pacific, described the current use of GO as a common repository of IFRC emergency data and elaborated on the future role GO could play to liberate critical information currently locked in pdf and shared by email.
Florent Del Pinto, IFRC Emergency Operations Centre Manager, who oversees the global Surge, DREF and IM teams, highlighted the role that National Society field reports play to raise awareness and drive anticipatory action through rapid deployment of funds people and assets through the network. Recalling his time as Head of Emergency Operations (HeOps), he also mentioned the role GO played in the response to TC Idai in Mozambique, where it hosted an interactive webmap of results from an aerial assessment, enabling a common situational overview.
Guillermo Garcia, Executive Director, International Response & Programs (IRP) at American Red Cross shared the story of how years of investment in use of data had transformed both domestic and international response. He said GO represents a revolution in the way the RCRC Movement demonstrates its collective impact, enabling adaptive management and an increase in reach and efficiency.
And finally, we caught up later with Ricardo Cabrera Salas, Disaster Management Coordinator at Chilean Red Cross, who sadly couldn’t make the event. He explained that the Chilean Red Cross had submitted more than a hundred field reports around the COVID situation in the country because it provided a single information mechanism for the RCRC Movement. Ricardo praised the new translation functionality but looked forward to more tools to engage volunteers and communities directly.
We ended the event with a thank you to the wider GO team. The team includes web developers in Kathmandu, Goa, Amsterdam and Budapest, National Societies who kickstarted the prototype GO platform nearly 4 years ago, and continue to share time and funding to keep the platform progressing. It also includes Sune Bulow, whose vision led to the birth of the platform; the IFRC IT department who help maintain the infrastructure; and all of you, the members of the Red Cross Red Crescent family who continue to engage, collaborate and push us to do more.
It is humbling to be working on delivering the critical emergency platform for the world’s leading humanitarian network. While we celebrate that gift and recognise the work we have ahead, we also like to have a bit of fun. In that spirit, here is the song we played while closing the event..
Using Microsoft Teams ‘Live Event‘
This was the first time an MS Teams Live Event was hosted at the IFRC so we learnt a lot, including that our presenter should stick to IM and not attempt a career in simultaneous co-production, panel moderation and backstage troubleshooting from his bedroom / office.
The reason we chose to use this novel meeting format was that it allowed live subtitling and to translate into French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Our most recent release was to translate GO, so this made sense. To help you decide, here is a list of our likes, dislikes and a checklist for next time:
We liked ..
- Professional production controls, particularly to mute participants’ inadvertent sound sharing
- Real time multi-language captions & translations into, among other languages, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Klingon
- Split screen option to enable view of panelist/speaker and slide/browser
We didn’t like ..
- Not knowing who or how many people had joined the event until later
- The number of button clicks required to come off mute, back on video, switch content and presenter and then move slide
- The lack of ‘intimacy’ and general unfamiliarity of the format
And remember to ..
- Send a calendar invite for the meeting separately to presenters 15 mins before the start of the event to check sound etc
- Share a collaborative doc with the running order with presenters
- Assign someone to attend the event, who is responsible to check sound and feedback to the producer if any issues (noting 20–30 delay), since the presenter of video content can’t notice if the computer audio is not shared
- Set up ‘waiting music’ and a screen assuring participants that the event is about to start
- Mute system audio (like Outlook notifications) during screen (and audio) sharing, otherwise these can be heard in the broadcast
- Seed some generic questions for speakers / panel to stimulate further questions / in case of a lack of relevant questions
- Avoid clicking on any of the screens (even the not-shared screen) while playing a Youtube video, otherwise the video pauses
- Keep in mind to share the computer audio, if videos needs to be played during the content sharing
- Note that only one presenter can share content. In case another presenter starts sharing, the content goes live automatically (skips the queue). There is no option at the moment to queue up content from multiple presenters
- Use multiple monitors: one for the event dashboard, another one for sharing the content
