3. Scoping

Existing OpenDRI projects have not been standalone efforts, but instead have been components of larger DRM initiatives. In each case, the country context has provide an environment where a network of partners were ready for the challenge of collecting, assessing, and curating data about the built environment.

Assessing the readiness of this network of partners for OpenDRI requires a scoping mission (site visit) that looks at the country content across the four areas that fuse into OpenDRI:

1. Open Government Risk Data. What data does the government collect about natural hazards, the built environment, and other risk factors? How does the government collate, coordinate, and analyze this data? How is this data made available to other parts of the public and private sectors?
2. Open Mapping and Technology. What is the status of the open mapping community in the country? What are the coverage (extent) and accuracy of the mapping data? What kind of open technology community exists to turn mapping data into useful tools?
3. Risk/Impact Modeling and Communication. What kind of risk or impact modeling does the country engage in? Who is responsible for which models? How do risks get communicated to the public and how does the country track how the public uses this information?
4. Hazard Monitoring, Modeling, and Communication. What is the status monitoring of major risks (including weather forecasting)? How does the country communicate those risks?

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Scoping Mission Objectives

The scoping mission assesses the readiness of government and community to engage in the systematic management of data around the threats that a region faces from natural hazards. In many ways, this process will always need to be customized to the context—it perhaps may always even be bespoke (made to order). For thousands of years, cultures have faced a unique blend of hazards with designs and technologies that reflect local beliefs. With rapid urbanization, globalization, migration, and population growth, many of these traditional ways have come under strain. That said, these approaches are familiar and trusted. OpenDRI missions often begin with problems that reflect the areas where societies are ready to make adaptation, providing a pathway to understanding how new techniques and technologies can be fit to local contexts, beliefs, and practices.

With this need for customization and sensitivity to local context, OpenDRI tends to start from a practical problems that can be solved in the immediate future. The scoping mission looks for the champions||early adopters and works with them to find how possible it is to build the basic feedback loop of OpenDRI using existing data on hazards and exposure, combined with existing models around vulnerability and risk.

In most countries, it will not be possible to aggregate all four types of information from existing datasets. (That said, in countries with sufficient data, the scoping mission team can work with the ministries to develop customized training programs oriented at connecting them with more advanced risk analysis).

GFDRR is developing a diagnostic tool to aid in understanding the readiness of a client country for OpenDRI, focused on assessing each component of the open data process. This tool will complement the existing World Bank Open Data Readiness Assessment Tool, which focused on general aspects of data management versus the more specific DRM data practices.

Staffing the Team

The scoping mission team should be multi-disciplinary, drawn together from the partners that will be sponsoring the project and connected to the contacts/early adopters in the host government. In most situations, the team will include:

• OpenDRI Specialist: surveying the open data ecosystem around the DRM cycle requires experience and expertise. The OpenDRI specialist will build relationships, identify early adopters, and establish the context for an OpenDRI implementation. He or she will lead the design phase and be responsible for building the readiness report.
• Regional/Country DRM Specialist: OpenDRI happens as one component of a larger country and/or regional DRM strategy. The scoping mission should include a DRM specialist who can incorporate elements of the local and regional strategy, and connect local partners to resources from other OpenDRI or DRM/DRR activities.

In an ideal situation, the team would also include:

• Risk Assessment Specialist (optional): some countries may require specialized technical assistance in risk assessment, modeling, and data curation. Such missions should include a risk assessment specialist.

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What and Why: Defining the Mission and Use Case

The scoping mission team should start by building consensus around the purpose of the trip and determine who will be the primary starting points for seeding the effort. When possible, it is desirable to perform much of this work ahead of travel.

Strategic Intent

The team should explore what outcomes OpenDRI might create in the country context. In some countries, the objective may focus on the aggregation of data that is spread across many organizations. In other countries, the data may not exist at all and may need to be created. Defining the outcomes will focus the interviews and open the opportunity to explore avenues that might otherwise remain unknown or poorly scoped.

Define the Use Case

Mobilizing collective action requires some goal—a problem, use case, or other organizing principle—to focus effort and create a practical, tangible outcome. The objective of the scoping mission is to uncover potential use cases that could mobilize action around open data, both initially as well as in the long term.

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Who: Create an Initial List of Contacts

OpenDRI generally begins with a request from an official at a government ministry. This champion should be able to guide the Scoping Mission Team on who to talk with. Such entities might include:

Government Ministries

Which government ministries are involved in the DRM cycle? It may be useful to create a matrix of the hazards that the country faces with the datasets that often accompany the study of the

Incubators/Tech Community

Is there a logical place to host OpenDRI? What incubators exist and how well connected are they with the tech community?

Existing OSM Community

What is the state of the existing OSM community and its leaders? What does the map look like? What are their strengths and constraints? How would capacity building change the OSM community?

Universities

Which universities have a geomatics or GIS department? Which have civil/structural engineering?

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs)

What CSOs exist in the areas which need to be mapped? What capacities do they have?

Private Sector

What private sector entities are involved in the collection, curation, and sale of data within the DRM cycle? Some countries contract with outside entities to be stewards over datasets, such as hospitals, schools, and critical infrastructure. What license has the government negotiated for this data?

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How: Survey the Ecosystem for Opportunities and Constraints

The OpenDRI mission team should set about building connections from the initial list of contacts. The primary purpose is not to sell OpenDRI; it is to listen to problems and think about appropriate solutions, many of which may not be solvable with the OpenDRI approach. OpenDRI fits best in context which are ready for it and where it will address immediate problems.

Identify Champions

The most important factor for success is to find the champions who are already trying to perform this work (sometimes without the authority, resources, or convening power to bring the whole system together on their own) and to LISTEN to their challenges. Often, this work will require toggling between two different modes of thought:

• Inside Government: What factors will drive or constrain the release and integration of existing data that is fragmented across ministries and the organizations that are supporting the ministries or managing their own operations around DRM?
• Development Partners. Within the country’s OpenStreetMap community, local/municipal governments, universities, UN agencies, start-ups, and other development partners, what factors will drive and constrain the collection of new data and the curation of those data by the communities that the data describes? How open is this data?

Determine the Fit

Client ministries and the offices of international organizations/development partners at the regional and country levels set strategic objectives that may include risk assessment, disaster preparedness, mitigation, post-disaster needs assessment (PDNA), and recovery. OpenDRI can fit into each part of the DRM cycle. For the World Bank, regional DRM leads will need to determine if and how an OpenDRI project fit into broader DRM agenda.

The key step in determining if OpenDRI fits into strategic intent is to listen. Listen to the potential partners and the problems they are having managing risks from natural hazards. Where do they want to start? What politics and constraints are they facing and why?

Assess Government Support/Constraints

One of the biggest impediments to opening data is the practice of selling government data. The scoping mission team should ask—are ministries selling data that are core to risk assessment: satellite imagery, maps, demographic data, cadastral data, hydro-met data, etc? What support is there for opening this data? Are there legal constraints or regulatory issues? Privacy issues? If so, are there ways to work through those issues and lawyers/legal advisors who are willing to build solutions instead of putting up roadblocks?

One approach that has worked is collecting and analyzing the revenues against the lost uses of the information for DRM (an opportunity cost). The scoping team may wish to build a spreadsheet, tracking who is selling what data to whom, at what cost, compared to the expenses around the data’s production and the expenses to administer the sales/licensing of the data. While it may seem that data is generating revenues, they are often very small, especially in comparison to the costs of their administration. When the ROI on open data for resilience is higher than the ROI for sales of data, a strong case can be made for ending the sale of certain data sets.

Survey Data Sets

While donors may not fund the collection duplicative datasets (at least not intentionally), entities in country may collect data which already exists. This may happen for a variety of reasons: licensing of existing data may not allow for reuse or derivative works, no one may know of the existence of the data, the data may be of poor quality, etc. The scoping mission should try to find data sets that already exist within government. (note on snowball technique, reference to USAID report on Nepal mission, duplication of open space and building footprint datasets.)

Assess Open Technology and Mapping Community

Another set of tactics around creating open data for resilience centers on harnessing the energy of the open technology and community mapping communities in a client country. By analyzing the efforts of university departments, civil society groups, and the open-source software/community mapping communities, the scoping team can find new avenues for expanding data sets as well as applications that make those data useful to a wide audience.

Community mapping efforts work best when situated in an existing community organization that can act as a sponsor. In places where such organizations exist, the scoping team should explore the readiness and enthusiasm in those organizations for hosting community mapping. In places where no such organizations are ready or willing to help with community mapping, the scoping mission team should look for ways to harness or found an incubator/innovation lab to catalyze the development of both community mapping and open technology communities.

Leadership

The leaders of open technology efforts span a wide variety of leadership styles and capacities. It is critical for the scoping mission team to identify and meet with these leaders to determine if they are aligned with the values of the effort and if they have the leadership and management capacity to administer a complex project. In some cases, leaders may need training in a specific area; the scoping mission team should note this need and plan to provide it as part of the training curriculum in the design phase. (It may be important to think about ensuring that leadership is spread among a number of individuals).

Organizational Capacity

To write a contract to support an effort, it may be legally necessary for the organization to be incorporated or formed into an entity with the authority, governance, and fiduciary structures to commit to performing certain actions and receiving money, and providing a clear account of work performed. The scoping mission team should inquire into the status of each open technology organization. Is it incorporated? Is it capable of receiving funding from the government or international institutions? How capable is it of performing on contracts? What training do members need?

Community Mapping

OpenDRI encourages the collection and curation of data about the built environment to be in open platforms like OpenStreetMap. The scoping team should determine what platform is going to be best in a particularly context. This will entail inquiring into the coverage and accuracy of existing data, while also analyzing the curation capacity.

Assess Risk/Impact Modeling Partners

To determine the data structure for field surveys about the built environment, it is often prudent to build partnerships with structural engineering, architecture, and other risk assessment partners. The scoping mission team should inquire into potential partners and determine the fit with the project. What kind of data do they already have? Will such firms make past, current, and/or future data collections open?

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Assessing Readiness

When the team arrives back from its mission, it must build a set of recommendations about actions. Is the context ready for OpenDRI? Who will be the primary partners, and what will be the use cases that drive that partnership? Who has invested in DRR/DRM activities and at what funding level?

Convene Open Data Advisory Working Group meetings

It is important to keep the process of engaging and developing relationships among the early adopters between the scoping mission and the design and pilot phases. The scoping mission team should convene meetings of an open data working group. In some cases, this has been done online via voice over IP (VOIP) calls, such as Skype. In many contexts, these meetings are led by a local country representative. These meetings can provide a forum for discussing online issues, exploring ideas, and generating connections between members of the community who might not otherwise know each other.

Outputs

The key outputs from the work after the mission are a mission report and a readiness report.

Mission Report

The Scoping Mission report captures the narrative experience of the team, as well as their analysis of the use case and recommended actions.link to scoping mission report template

Readiness Report

Readiness Report is a diagnostic tool that will be used to assess if a country is ready for OpenDRI. link to readiness report template

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Malawi

In early 2012, GFDRR received a request to send a scoping mission to Malawi around the Integrated Flood Risk Management Plan for the Shire Basin (IFRMP). The mission had two objectives:

1. Raise awareness about community and data preparedness
2. Solicit input from stakeholders at multiple levels of government around community mapping and a planned data preparedness exercise.

The team traveled to Malawi in April 2012, meeting with the Department of Management Affairs (DODMA), Department of Surveys, Department of Physical Planning, Department of Water Resources, Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, National Statistical Office, and the Chikhwawa and Nsanje District Civil Protection Committee, as well as UN agencies.

Use Case

Across various interviews with a task force of government officials, the team discovered a need to ensure that data created by a number of past or ongoing projects is maintained in an online platform so that this information remains accessible and useful to the Government of Malawi.

Champions

The GFDRR team found the task force very willing to co-design a data catalogue with the World Bank, and subsequently drafted a Terms of Reference for a firm to develop a GeoNode for Malawi and then train officials in its use through the data preparedness exercise.

Outcome

1. The World Bank gave start-up funding to install a GeoNode as a data catalogue, to be managed by the National Spatial Data Center with the participation of the other members of the Shire River Basin Management Program Technical Taskforce.
2. The task force worked with the firm to collate data from a variety of sources, focusing first on the data from “Economic Vulnerability and Disaster Risk Assessment Study”, “Water Resources Investment Strategy” that was collected for Malawi (http://gfdrr.org/gfdrr/node/148). The result can be viewed at http://www.masdap.mw/.
3. The firm held trainings in partnership with local universities and ministries, including the representatives of departments in the region.