Rebuilding GO, with love
This year, the GO team have been exploring the use of shorter, more focussed sprints to help increase our development speed. Up to now, these sprints have focussed on workflows and design, with the IM team and UX designers taking the lead. At the end of May, we brought together the developers working on GO to figure out and plan some big changes coming to the platform, exchange coding tips and tricks, and build a stronger team understanding and rapport.
The GO study continues to be our framing for the medium term. The dev work we focussed on in the sprint naturally flowed therefore from our mission to enable GO to be more widely used by our National Society members, to be more operationally useful, and for GO to integrate data from different sources and become a single source of truth for the network.
Setting the foundations
GO has been built with various teams from inside and outside IFRC, resulting in some inconsistencies in how code is implemented and documented. It also means there are discrepancies in the look and feel of some elements, such as the way users can filter and sort tables. To enable more rapid development, we are rebuilding the platform using repeatable patterns and components, meaning GO will be:
1. Quicker to load
2. Easier to update
3. More consistent in user experience
4. Better documented to enable more teams to contribute
5. Mobile friendly
In some ways we have been inspired by the British Red Cross approach to building an Atomic Design System. Through this effort, we hope to allow GO to act as a core system for the IFRC network, allowing developers and designers to see clearly how everything fits together, in different environments and settings. This foundational documentation will be crucial if National Societies or the IFRC secretariat wish to re-use elements of the GO code base for other applications.
Operationalising GO’s mapping service
The GO team manage, host and visualise spatial data that can be used by the whole IFRC network. The GO map layers are found on IFRC websites and multiple dashboards and other information products. With the support of dedicated staff from the British Red Cross, we have been adding more granular data to the GO geospatial database to enable more targeted data collection, analysis and visualisation.
We have also been collecting, verifying and geocoding National Society local unit and IFRC office data. The next step will be to surface this data, provide tools to allow the membership to maintain and export it, and build a catalogue to help people discover all the spatial datasets we host and use on the platform, including those we curate from external sources.
Providing the tools to allow National Society users to make maps in GO will unlock its ability to improve evidence-based planning, preparedness and even tasking in the early stages of an emergency.
A single source of truth in emergencies
One of the main goals of the sprint was to find solutions to help simplify and standardise emergency reporting on GO. We aim for GO to provide the IFRC network with reporting tools that enable quicker and more frequent updates, build on rather than repeat previously shared information, refer to relevant secondary information to help triangulation, and enable validation processes at membership and secretariat levels to ensure greater data quality.
There are currently many different forms on GO, such as Field Reports, 3w forms, DREF applications and operational updates, Flash Updates etc, which could all relate to a single emergency. GO also surfaces emergency-related data such as impact forecasts, crisis categorisation and historic and risk information. A fundamental rebuild is required to tie all these data points and flows together. This will also ensure that GO can adapt to National Society needs, as well as reflect changes to IFRC processes such as annual planning and reporting on global programmes. We are aiming for an outcome which builds transparency and trust across the network, as well potentially enables greater analytical tooling to help us to derive insights from the data.
The building block for future emergencies will be the Global Crisis Data Bank. This is an ambitious initiative which aims to bring national and global emergency reporting datasets on to the same taxonomy, structure and schema. Led by IFRC, in close collaboration with national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Disaster Management Authorities, as well as agencies such as WMO and UNDRR, the Global Crisis Data Bank will form the base unit to which all other reporting on emergencies will be appended. This collective effort will unlock crisis-specific interoperability, feedback to enable improvement of early warning systems, as well as a common evidence base upon which we can all learn and improve.
On the IFRC GO side, there are many wires to untangle to ensure we deal with semantic, structural and procedural issues to our reporting, ensure teams are given tools to maintain quality, as well as adapt reporting processes to the reality of our IFRC network.
For those with interest to dive into the details, please find our notes on current status and next steps for the various areas we discussed during the sprint here:
From Nepal, with love
The sprint was impeccably hosted by the Data Friendly Space’s Nepali development partner ToggleCorp. We worked at the ToggleCorp offices — a special place with music at lunchtime; the sound of laughter and table tennis bubbling between floors; a genuinely communal vibe, not least when taking lunch on the roof; the key tap of developers hacking out code and the hum of a room full of analysts hunting for humanitarian information to tag in the DEEP.
We stayed to discuss potential collaboration between IFRC GO, the Nepal Red Cross Society (NRCS) IM system and the government’s BIPAD portal. We see great potential for NRCS to become a champion National Society in adapting GO to their needs and context. A coordination meeting involving management at NRCS and the IFRC membership in Nepal (American RC, Finnish RC, Danish RC, Japanese RC) was held to develop an action plan supporting the digital transformation of critical disaster management functions in the NRCS’ Emergency Operation Centre, with GO bringing significant potential to contribute or support.
Final thanks to all those who have contributed to the GO codebase, including particularly Development Seed, who have been with us from the outset. The GO sprint brought together developers, geospatial experts and data scientists from Nepal, India, Hungary, Colombia, Liverpool and Zimbabwe, for many of whom GO has been a labour of love over the past few years. Despite the long hours and hard work, sharing this experience with such a diverse and joyful group continues to be a gift.
