The ICT4Peace Foundation and the Swiss Government supported OCHA to build The Humanitarian Response – Common and Operational Datasets Registry to make critical information during a humanitarian crisis available to the public. Access the datasets here.
The Common Operational Datasets (CODs) are critical datasets that are used to support the work of humanitarian actors across multiple sectors. They are considered a de facto standard for the humanitarian community and should represent the best-availble datasets for each theme. The Fundamental Operational Datasets (FODs) are datasets that are relevent to a humanitarian operation, but are more specific to a particular sector or otherwise do not fit into one of the seven COD themes.
The CODs and FODs were developed by the UN Agencies and NGOs under the leadership of OCHA and are also one of the central parts of the UN Secretary General’s Ban Ki-Moon Crisis Information Management Strategy (CiMS) (see his report to the UN General Assembly in fall 2010: A/65/491 p.38 and https://ict4peace.org/updates/report-of-the-un-secretary-general-underscores-crisis-information-management-strategy).
The Crisis Information Management Strategy Strategy is based on the recognition that the United Nations, its Member States, constituent agencies and non-governmental organizations need to improve their collective information management capacity in the identification, prevention, mitigation, response and recovery of all types of major crises, natural as well as man-made. The strategy will leverage and enhance their existing collective capacity and provide processes and technologies to effectively integrate and share critical information across all parties affected by crises. The CiM Strategy process is inter alia a follow-up to OCHA’s Global Symposium +5 in 2007, a process that began five years earlier, where the Statement on Best Practices for Humanitarian Information Management and Exchange was endorsed.
The UN Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) of Assistant Secretary General, Dr. Soon-hong Choi and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) lead by Under-secretary General Valerie Amos, with the support of the Swiss Government and the ICT4Peace Foundation, have worked closely with other United Nations organizations including the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and the Department of Field Support (DFS), Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Food Program (WFP) in developing and implementing the Crisis Information Management Strategy.