they are a complement, signaling where more data might be collected. With UN staff scrambling to build data from scratch, complements were a luxury, especially in cases in which the data’s provenances are unknown and methods are untested. Many simply felt they could not use—or did not have time to figure out—the data collected from the V&TCs. What was needed was a formal interface into the humanitarian coordination system for the V&TCs. The challenges to making this happen are the subject of Chapter 3.
Interface between the formal and informal humanitarian communities For all the work that the V&TCs performed around Haiti, few made direct connections with the field staff at UN agencies and the NGOs that were working under the cluster system. The reason was simple: although the V&TCs had personal relationships with people on the ground, these individuals were too busy to both perform their jobs and lobby for the use of V&TC tools (which would have required changes to standard procedures) during an emergency operation. Even if these individuals had made requests to integrate the information from V&TCs, and even when V&TCs sent staff to the ground, several barriers emerged: 1. Lack of Channel. Field staff had no formal channel to link these new flows of information into existing workflows. Those V&TCs which were more successful in connecting into the UN system either did so through UNOSAT or other back office connections or by deploying staff to the ground. 2. Verification of Data. Field staff had neither time nor methods for verifying data from V&TCs, aside from the easy-to-see accuracy of street-level data in OpenStreetMap. Crowdsourced reports were not (and are not) a replacement for formal assessments;
Credit: Mark Turner
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