TOR129: Humanitarian Data Exchange with Sarah Telford

For those of you who've been listening to the show for a while, it is fairly obvious that there is, quite literally, a ton of data out there related to development initiatives and humanitarian assistance. If you had the time, money and desire, you could find data about almost any aspect assistance: things like baseline data about a population, damage assessments, geospatial data, demographics of the people affected by a crisis, or things like which organizations, governments and companies are on the ground helping. The problem is, in the humanitarian sector, organizations don't have the time, money and people power to hunt down this data. And, even more of a problem is the fact that the data is locked in spreadsheets on individual laptops, only captured in written notes or, unfortunately, kept hidden as a potential competitive advantage.

Sarah Telford, my guest for the 129th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, is on a mission to change all of this. She is the Chief of Data Services at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and oversees the continuing development of a global open data platform called the Humanitarian Data Exchange. The goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis, and, as of July 2014, has been accessed by users in over 200 countries and territories.