7. Sustaining

When OpenDRI has been successful, governments and communities will have new tools and methods to collect and curate data about their exposure to natural hazards. They will have met the goals that the partners outlined in the design phase and adapted along the way.

Sustaining a changed way of working with risk data is the work of the host nation itself. However, sustaining change is difficult. Without continuous funding, communities of practice often fall back to using familiar, older methods; thought leaders move onto the next problem; and experts find opportunities to grow their skills further in new organizations. The risk for OpenDRI is that after the project is over (and the consultants and firms have moved onto other projects), key stakeholders will revert to the approaches that they used for data sharing prior to the OpenDRI engagement.

OpenDRI’s designers take a practical approach to this problem, acknowledging that an occasional influx of energy and resources may be necessary to keep work going. The development partners who funded and catalyzed the change can take steps to ensure the effort remains vibrant and productive.

Objectives

The first and last task of the OpenDRI management team is to create the framework into which they can inject these bursts of sustaining energy. The sustaining phase creates an architecture for continued work. This design must include a plan for ongoing training, occasional funding for small projects, and a framework for champions to grow a locally owned, long-term, sustainable open data ecosystems,

A key problem between the scaling and sustaining phases is to determine when OpenDRI has met its intended goals. This task may not be easy. The original objectives set forth in the initial Concept Note may have shifted to more advanced risk thinking. As the pilots evolved into a larger efforts across greater areas, the effort may have grabbed the attention of high-level leaders, who want to continue low-cost, high-output work. This shift is itself a success, but also may require additional capacity building.

What

There is a point in the maturation of risk thinking that OpenDRI must clarify its scope to be around data collection and curation, not risk assessment. When tasks around OpenDRI become more focused on the analysis of data than the management of the data, OpenDRI can cede to other efforts in DRM capacity building and risk assessment.

The goals of the Sustaining phase can include:

• Creating opportunities for training and networking that increase the interconnections between members of the network of data collectors, curators, analysts, and decision makers.
• Linking the projects with other development partners, including handing off the OpenDRI program to other organizations.
• Building trust in the accuracy and authority of the data.
• Encouraging academic institutions to include OpenDRI training materials, software, and data in their curricula.
• Catalyzing the development of organizations around data collection and management, often as social enterprises.
• Funding small software development projects that extend the use and utility of OpenDRI data.
• Funding the start-up costs for Living Labs, where individuals from across the open data ecosystem can gather to work on start-ups, continue projects, and have a neutral space to work on inter-organizational problems.

Why and How

The mix of sustaining efforts may change over time, but they will also need to be tailored to the context. The range of tactics include:

Ongoing Training and Networking

The more connections OpenDRI creates between ministries, analysts, data collectors, data curators, and communities, the greater value that network will bring to the individuals who join it. The greater the capacity of each member of this network, the more capacity the network will have to analyze its risks. OpenDRI has been catalyzing these connections and capacity through training programs. Some meetings bring individuals from the region to a site where they can meet each other, discuss shared problems, and explore common solutions. Other meetings occur via webinars, where one or more speakers can broadcast their presentation to dozens or even hundreds of individuals.

Academic Partnerships

Universities are core partners in most OpenDRI engagements. Their academic departments around geography, geomatics, and GIS provide many of the students who volunteer to engage in community mapping. They also train many of the individuals who will curate geospatial data in government ministries and the private sector. When OpenDRI can integrate methods around open data and community mapping into the curricula of university programs, it ensures continued extension of an open approach to data collection and curation.

OpenDRI has also enlisted universities to perform evaluations of the quality of data produced by community mapping. Having a professor from a local university assess the accuracy of data collected by volunteers provides a clear set of recommendations for improving operations at the same time that it provides an honest understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the data. Knowing the accuracy of the data has enabled national mapping agencies to set policies around the integration of community mapping data into official government data.

Development of Organizations around OpenDRI Data

The more organizations that make use of OpenDRI data, the more likely the data are to be updated. Embedding OpenDRI into entities like a Living Lab, Innovation Lab, or other community-based organization has proven to be an important step in the process of building an ecosystem around open data. It is through these incubators that social entrepreneurs learn about the data, how it is collected and curated, and how they can build applications or even revenue models around services that make of the data. Not all such technology may be related to risk management. Mapping a cities roads and infrastructure is a crucial step to providing information services around mapping, logistics, and transportation. In Port-au-Prince, the Tap-Tap group taxi network has been mapped, as have the matatus in Nairobi—both based on the OpenStreetMap work done in the country.

Software Development around OpenDRI Data

In the process of expanding the use of OpenDRI tools and practices, government ministries may encounter software interoperability problems or discover the need to extend a tool to include features that were not foreseen during the initial OpenDRI implementation. This moment is ideal for a small investment—potentially in the low $10,000s USD—to help add features to the software. Because OpenDRI is an open-source software model, licensing is already established to allow for the feature to be usable by other countries as they encounter similar challenges or desired functionality.

Partnerships with other international development organizations

Several institutions are building open data initiatives, several of which are partners to this field guide. An OpenDRI program can be integrated with this work. At the very least, data services can be connected. More desirable would be full integration and coordination of the efforts, so that open data enables the system of actors to better understand what each is doing, better target their investments and activities, and better listen to the actual needs of the client through better data.

Who

Building the plan for sustaining OpenDRI should include those who are the core partners to OpenDRI, including:

Ministry Officials around Open Data

The Open Data Working Group owns the commitment between ministries to share data. As such, they are ideal hosts for the training and networking events. They are also a key source of information about how well software is working for national needs and how it might be adapted for the future.

Academic Community

University professors and their students in geology, geomatics, geography, and GIS are key partners in sustaining OpenDRI.

Social Entrepreneurs

The youth who discovered the Internet and mobile phone are now building software to tackle the challenges with which they grew up. In many cases, their needs are simple: a reliable internet connection and electricity as well as mentors and a space to work. Enabling these social entrepreneurs with guidance around their code and their revenue models is an important aspect of sustaining OpenDRI.

Outputs

The most important output from OpenDRI is a changed approach to risk management. When politics, practices, and tools reflect the impact of OpenDRI on a society’s thinking about DRM, the initiative has been a success—even when the specific tactics or projects with which OpenDRI began have ceased.

Other outputs from OpenDRI sustaining phase are more proxy measurements around this change to thinking, and should be used as signs of process that is working rather than direct measure of OpenDRI itself:

Living Lab Sustainment

When the Living Lab becomes a sustainable organization, with its own revenue model, the community gains a stable place for other activities to occur. It also establishes a neutral space between government, private sector entities, and community-based organizations. The financial stability of this living lab is an important aspect of OpenDRI sustainment. The founders of this space should be encouraged to seek grants, contracts, and other financial support to keep the space vibrant and growing.

“Apps” and Software

When entrepreneurs and ministries are producing open-source software based on OpenDRI data or software, it is very likely that these products would not have emerged without the OpenDRI engagement. The success of the sustaining phase can be viewed, in part, by the creation of spaces for this type of software development to occur.

Training Program Impacts

An active training program around the management of risk data and its application to risk assessment is an important activity from the training programs. It may be possible to measure the impact of these trainings on practice, though this particular output is beyond the scope of OpenDRI per se.

Case: Caribbean Community of Practice