As a belated Happy New Year, we are sharing an update on recent enhancements to the GO platform, a couple of words on progress last year and a quick look ahead to what’s coming next.
National Society preparedness analytics
The revamped Preparedness area provides a new lens to analyse and understand National Society capacities using the Preparedness for Effective Response (PER) framework.
The Global Summary provides a simple way to measure progress of the initiative. The Global Performance tab allows you to dive into the data, helping to answer questions on the global and regional capacities for different components of the PER framework, enabling us to understand where we need further investment. The Catalogue of Resources provides a single interface to find resources aimed at strengthening preparedness capacities. Finally, the Operational Learning dashboard allows you to access evaluations from DREF operations, with specific points categorised by area of focus and PER component.
These are valuable resources which can support planning and preparedness across the IFRC network and we invite you to explore for your area and region of concern.
Regional overview
Following user consultations and feedback, we improved the design and structure of country and regional pages. IFRC Regional Offices have been the driver behind the changes and the changes allow them to profile their operations information, ensuring alignment while allowing flexibility as each region has different concerns, capacities and information to display. The country page slider aims to help navigation.
Emergency operations information
We revised the structure of emergency pages, introducing new data-driven pages and giving Regional Offices and Operations Managers more customisable options. The result takes us some steps further towards the original vision of GO as a modular and adaptable emergency operations centre tool.
Geospatial data on GO
We have been making a number of changes ‘behind the scenes’ to the way in which GO handles spatial data. Most obviously, the maps on GO have changed appearance. More fundamentally, we are moving towards GO acting as a ‘single source of truth’ for the IFRC, providing an open source geospatial service for the network.
Looking back at 2020
Last year challenged us to be adaptive and ambitious. By listening to our users we managed transformational change to the platform. We removed language barriers, saw a doubling of overall users and an almost complete coverage of National Societies proactively reporting crisis information to GO.
Up next..
After a period of rapid functional upgrade we are taking a pause to pay-off some ‘technical debt’. If you encounter anything unexpected on GO, please let us know.
We will be revisiting the GO 3w tool in the first quarter of 2021 in order to enhance its potential to provide an overview of the RCRC Movement picture for specific emergencies. Over the rest of the year, we intend to introduce more risk analysis and enhanced alerting functionality as well as help to automate some routine analytical tasks. We also have a number of feature requests, including several great ideas from the GO survey, on the backlog but if you have an idea, please get in touch at IM@ifrc.org.
