Welcome to the Innovations Community of Practice

The IFRC is developing its capacity to use mobile phone technology in the collection, management, and analysis of data. The use of the mobile phones has considerable benefits in the efficient, and reliable input, quality assurance, and timely analysis of data. Such potential is particularly well-suited for humanitarian as well as recovery settings.

With a variety or program areas, as well as 186 national societies, there are more than one example of mobile phone technology being used at the IFRC for data collection, management, and analysis. The following table summarizes some of the major software options: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=ti8s28xw2pj6cSgZhlR7AMw&ndplr=1#gid=0

Pilots have already been conducted in IFRC malaria prevention programming using Episurveyor, a nonprofit open-source software for the design and management of surveys online and enumerated through mobile phones with the use a downloaded application.

Initially, we will build upon the lessons and best practices of the use of mobile phones for data collection with household surveys (baseline/endline), triangulated with other methods to measure impact. However, there are also potential applications of the phones being used for other monitoring and assessment purposes, including needs assessment, beneficiary and context monitoring, and volunteer management.

I hope that some of you, like me, will be taking time away from work during the month of August. You may also, like me, head off on leave with high aspirations of using the time to explore new ideas and to catch up on reading all those interesting books that may slip by at other times of the year.

As I plan my leave, I thought others in this group might be interested in one title on my reading list: 'Adapt' the latest book by economist Tim Harford:

The theme of the book is around learning from failure, and sets out three rules for failing successfully:

1) Be willing to fail - a lot
2) Fail on a survivable scale
3) Learn to spot failures and address them early on

I think these rules should be of interest to those attempting to bring innovations to bear in humanitarian setting, and would be interested to hear if others feel that these rules ring true from their experience, and what failure on a survivable scale looks like for humanitarian agencies. And of course other holiday reading suggestions also appreciated!