Good Practices: Information Sharing in Complex Emergencies

A Project of the Virtual Diplomacy Initiative

The U.S. Institute of Peace's Virtual Diplomacy Initiative is launching an effort to establish good practices in field information sharing. Good Practices: Information Sharing in Complex Emergencies will complement the work of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in building consensus among practitioners about the essential elements of a generic information-sharing model.

Efforts by the Virtual Diplomacy Initiative in this area over the past several years led to a conference held in April 2000 and entitled "Taking it to the Next Level: Civilian Military Cooperation in Complex Emergencies." One of the strongest recommendations emanating from the conference was a call for a standardized humanitarian coordination and information-sharing structure.

Then in August 2000, the UN Secretary General announced the results of an assessment of UN peacekeeping operations. Among the recommendations in the "Brahimi Report" were specific actions to improve information sharing between civilian and military groups during complex emergencies. In particular, it recommended the design of new information management and planning capabilities involving humanitarian, human rights, and other entities engaged in complex emergencies.

Such calls for improved information sharing come at a time when new technology has dramatically increased the speed and amount of information exchange. This exchange influences the response of the international community in complex emergencies. Today's 24/7 news coverage forces all international players to react quickly and adjust planning according to the rapid and visual unfolding of events. Current technology allows military and humanitarian organizations working in the heart of emergencies to collect and synthesize new forms of information and distribute the information to policymakers, practitioners, and citizens in a timely and effective manner using these new mechanisms.

In this context, the need for a routine and dependable yet flexible information-sharing structure is urgent. While many examples, such as the Humanitarian Community Information Center in Kosovo (HCIC) and NGO councils, have played important and variously successful roles in field information sharing, each instance has been an ad hoc development. To date, there has been no established agreement on mechanisms, procedures, responsibilities, systems, or funding for information-sharing structures. Moreover, the scanty documentation has prevented others from learning from these past experiences.

Building on "Taking it to the Next Level," the Good Practices project will assemble and make available case studies of current and past field information- sharing structures and hold a conference to review practices and solicit feedback on information-sharing models. The project will focus on five questions:

1. How was the information-sharing mechanism developed and structured?
2. What were the information and communications infrastructures and services?
3. How and what was the information shared?
4. What were the most valuable/successful aspects of the structure? And
5. What were the greatest obstacles/failures?

For More Information

Virtual Diplomacy coordinators Sheryl Brown and Margarita Studemeister can both be reached via email at virtual_diplomacy@usip.org