Project background
The Oliver platform supports UN Global Pulse, which is a United Nations innovations initiative created by the UN secretariat. The main purpose of Global Pulse is to develop tools to cover the information gap between the onset of a crisis and the availability of detailed monitoring data – a time gap in which irreversible harm and development reversals can occur if aid and actions are not targeted at vulnerable areas and communities.
The Global Pulse team is creating in-country innovations laboratories (“Pulse Labs”) and developing methods to use new data sources and techniques to cover this information gap. Oliver platforms will be delivered to the Pulse Lab teams; the platform software and its design will also be available via Github, under the GPL3 open source license, to give non-UN folks access to openly-available datasets, toolsets and projects too.
- The project exists to deliver a network of software platforms that support in-country analysts searching for early warning signs of crisis onset across all areas of human activity.
- Each platform will support a group of in-country analysts by providing secure access to lists of data sources, tools and projects relevant to their work.
- Platforms will be connected to each other to allow analysts to share ideas, projects and information with each other across country boundaries (within country security limits on data access etc).
- The platform software will be capable of hosting, and preferably of running, the Global Pulse toolset.
- The platform should be designed to be shared with the CIMS crisis information management initiative.
- The platform design must be open source.
- The platform design must incorporate open data principles, and where possible, data outputs should comply with existing open data standards.
- Analysts have faster access to global and local datasets (e.g. lower discovery time, and lower time to access data once discovered) than is possible without the GP platform.
- Analysts have faster access to tools than is possible without the GP platform.
- Analysts have access to support mechanisms from people using and developing the same tools and techniques.