The Humanitarian Information Dashboard (HID) tracks and analyzes community views and humanitarian related data during emergencies. The platform aggregates feedback from affected communities to give humanitarian responders unprecedented insight into community information needs and make informed decisions that save lives.

In order to analyze feedback from affected communities, local media partners typically track multiple incoming information flows manually. Journalists must monitor, collate, and categorize information from various sources, then structure the feedback in a way that is usable for the design of information programs that can answer expressed needs. This is incredibly resource-intensive, and simply managing and maintaining this process typically precludes any systematic learning of trends, gaps, or insights that reveal themselves throughout the program life cycle.

The Dashboard works with outreach workers from local partner organizations, as well as local journalists, who are trained and mentored by Internews to report rumors and community concerns through an SMS hotline. The Dashboard then aids in the categorization of these information needs by location and topic and the development of verified responses including key members of the government and humanitarian agencies who can assist with further information.

All the information coming into the platform, once categorized and tagged, is then viewable in chart format. The visual aids help identify trends, such as changing information needs, by location and time. The charts can be compiled into reports and sent to local media, response agencies and all relevant organizations that can use this information for the design of more targeted programs.

The Humanitarian Information Dashboard is in the early stages of development and is released here for the purposes of testing, contribution and review. This current version of the software is not recommended for deployment particularly in a humanitarian crisis or emergency or if the users, content and analysis could be deemed sensitive in any way.

Are you interested in this project? We are looking for partners, technology companies, NGOs, coders, that are interested in working with us on this exciting project, so let us know.

For more information contact Ben Grubb or Anahi Ayala Iacucci.

The Humanitarian Information Dashboard is a project of Internews.

To run all the tests, you need phantomjs installed.

With node/npm

npm install -g phantomjs

Or, on ubuntu

apt-get install phantomjs