SIMSSurge Information Management in the IFRC

*International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

NetHope Crisis Informatics WebinarThursday, July 28th 2016

Kat Hicks, GIS Analyst, British Red Cross

Introductions

Introductions

Background in geography

Based in British Red Cross for past

two years

Involved in both development and

response work of SIMS

Feel free to get in touch: khicks@redcross.org.uk or @katmhicks

What is SIMS?

What is SIMS?

Stands for Surge Information Management Support

Network of IM/GIS specialists based in American and

British Red Cross

Remote response tool to provide operations managers with

information management

See our draft website for more information: http://rcrcsims.org/

BASICS

What is SIMS?

See our draft website for more information: http://rcrcsims.org/

PROCESS

Activation Response

Disaster

Surge team

alert

Request for

SIMS

SIMS

activated

Transition

Coordinator

assigned

Establish

support

Phase out

Hire delegate

Continued

remote

Close out

What is SIMS?

See our draft product guide here: http://kathicks.github.io/sims_cookbook

RESULT

How do we work?

Innovations, processes and team building

How do we work? PEOPLE

Remote capacity

Volunteers

Mixed skill set

FIELD

REMOTE

(Team building)

How do we work? PROCESS

Iteration

Conversation

Network

Read more on some of these developments here: medium.com/@simon_b_johnson

(Ongoing innovations)

How do we work? TOOLS

Tool agnostic

Open source

Kanban with Trello

TO DO

Sign up to Trello for free at: www.trello.com

DOING DONE

What are our lessons learned?

Best practices and ongoing work

What is our main lesson learned?

Tools

Process

People

“Information management is not a

technology problem, it's a

people and process problem.”

Best practice is to prioritise

people over platforms.

What are our key challenges?

Scaling

Data literacy

Handover

Access full list of tips here: http://simonbjohnson.github.io/im-tips/

What are our next steps?

Workshops

Skills shadowing

Data collation

And tech innovations: forecasting, identifying missing base maps & microsites

Read more on some of these developments here: medium.com/@simon_b_johnson

Thanks

Further information

http://rcrcsims.org/

http://kathicks.github.io/sims_cookbook

http://simonbjohnson.github.io/im-tips/

https://medium.com/@simon_b_johnson

Featured tools

http://trello.com