Design for Impact Framework: Integrating Open Data and Risk Communication for Decision-Making is a new resource for project designers working with risk data and information. It aims to provide project designers with a framework to guide them in developing projects that have a tight handshake between the development of open risk data and real world decision-making.The core Framework consists of:
– 10 Guiding Principles to guide all risk information projects
– A Decision-Making Context Scoping Tool to help understand key local elements of a project
– A Tactics Selection Tool to help match these contextual elements to appropriate project tactics to deliver impact
The publication features over 20 case studies that exemplify the application of the principles and tactics of the Framework. It also contains a detailed deployment scenario for the Framework. The scenario guides project designers in using the Framework to support the extreme weather preparedness of city planners and communities in a coastal city. This publication presents a first foundational iteration of the Framework. OpenDRI anticipates further refinement and customization of it following feedback from the Understanding Risk and OpenDRI communities.
Executive Summary
The most effective decision-making takes place when it is informed by reliable data. Pillar 3 of the Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) seeks to support the appropriate use of data in decision-making in a range of resilience planning, risk reduction, financing, preparedness, and recovery contexts. OpenDRI does this by supporting the adoption of tools and processes which support engagement, risk visualization, and communication.
Advances in technology are generating unprecedented volumes of data. Governments, international agencies, and scientific institutions are increasingly making their data available to planners, civil contingency managers, and responders as open data. Our knowledge, however, of how best to design projects that take advantage of these new data opportunities to create impact is inconsistent and unconsolidated. A clear and validated framework that relates the capture and analysis of risk data to decision-making is missing.
Design for Impact Framework: Integrating Open Data and Risk Communication for Decision-Making represents a foundational first attempt by OpenDRI to address this challenge. It aims to provide project designers with a framework to guide them in developing projects that have a tight handshake between the development of risk data and real world decision-making.
The Design for Impact Framework (below) has its intellectual grounding in a review of academic literature related to risk communication, climate information services, civic technology, citizen science, and design for community resilience. It draws heavily on the guiding approaches and tactics used by over 23 successful projects developed to reduce disaster risk and build resilience in an extensive range of geographies and contexts.