Hi again future world changers!
In the last post we discussed:
The importance of using data to ask questions about the world in order to understand global issues.
AND
The importance of determining the credibility and truth in the sources we use.
Remember: Finding the good data helps us understand a situation or circumstance before taking action in changing the world.
Now, let's take that idea and apply it to real life examples of how it's used to take action in the global community.
In the Humanitarian and Peacekeeping world, organizations like the UN use data for humanity missions to do things like ensuring the security of the mission.
Specifically, UN Peackeeping missions "record the date and location of reported incidents, such as movements of militia and arms, summary executions and abductions, raids on villages, displacements of refugees and threats to UN staff, as well as political affairs such as meetings and treaties" (UK Research and Innovation).
So yeah, data is pretty important.
However, the UN and researchers found there to be a problem with this collection of data: it was being used during missions, but then being archived and unavailable for researchers and NGOs to use afterwards.
This wasn't necessarily a malicious act done to keep people in the dark, this important data was simply not being used to its full potential.
So researchers decided to start a project taking data from a mission in Dafur, a region in West Sudan, and making it more public.
Now this data is available along with other data collected from Media sources, other NGOs and academic data resources to provide a more abundant wealth of information for Humanitarian groups to use. This new data being released can provide significant truth opposing or similar to what is already available. For example, "[about] interaction between indigenous and external actors, and the changing dynamics of conflict" (UK Research and Innovation). And this could change policy and create further innovation within the Humanitarian sector.
Like we discussed in the first blog, one can see the importance of good data and the source of good data.
The overall objective of the project was almost exactly that: "help those working in the humanitarian field better understand the information they have gathered, and develop ways in which the information can be made policy-relevant" (UK Research and Innovation).
Jordan Young
Side Note: If you would like to look at the details and project yourself, here's the link to check it out!
https://gtr.ukri.org/project/494E4AD1-F7A2-4AD3-B474-FEAC43CA18B8
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