FEWS NET’s Future is a Blueprint

This article was originally published here.

Last week, Dr. Rajiv Shah, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation and former administrator of USAID, raised the alarm for FEWS NET – a globally implemented early warning system for the 38.1m people at risk of famine – that is at risk of collapse. Dr. Shah has a deep knowledge of the FEWS NET system’s importance and, as the head of a major philanthropy, is a powerful advocate in the effort to rally the resources and expertise necessary to reorganize global famine warning systems. But the problems facing FEWS NET, which is a massive global undertaking, are larger and increasingly common among critical pillars of the global development and humanitarian data ecosystem.

At a global level, amidst significant public and political upheaval, there’s a critical need to reorganize and redesign public interest information systems technically, organizationally, and financially.

It’s hard to write and even harder to do – but it’s not without precedent, and there’s a lot of valuable experience to consider (and avoid). This post does three things, quickly-ish, it: (1) explains the problem – why is this happening?; (2) highlights common learnings, challenges, and opportunities between different initiatives solving similar problems; and (3) describes a few of the concrete steps this initiative can take to ensure that its work not only rebuilds FEWS NET, but serves as a blueprint to the many information ecosystems struggling with this exact need, whether they know it or not.

How we got here

Global data collection is a logistical nightmare – not only operationally, but technologically, legally, and (especially now) politically. And yet, we all live on the same planet (at least physically) and so one of the things that, until recently, most of the world’s governments have agreed on is the value of and need to collect, share, and coordinate the use of data. We’ve built an extraordinary amount of public, institutional, commercial, and social sector infrastructure designed to collect, collate, synthesize, and share data on everything from public health to human rights evidence to weather and climate to economic and trade indicators among many, many other things.

The core value of shared infrastructure is the way that it contributes at least marginal value to a wide range of efforts – but those margins vary, as does the value of those efforts.

The cost and complexity of the enterprise has historically meant that these public interest data infrastructures have been at least funded, if not implemented, by governments, development assistance budgets, and philanthropists. For a lot of reasons, and in a lot of domains, there’s good and bad news: The good news is that many of those initiatives have been successful at establishing global information systems capable of protecting our core interests – like the WHO for public health, INFOSAN for food safety, NCEI for weather and climate science, CICED human rights evidence, and many more. The bad news is that those funds and, in some cases, those funders are gone – and the cost of their absence is not temporary, it is existential. Governments are not just funders, they are guarantors of the integrity of public interest systems, and their ability to ensure stability in unstable political environments means that defunding does a lot more damage than a pause in data collection. The organizations behind a number of these initiatives have lost staff and institutional knowledge, public trust and legitimacy, and a lot of the relational and operational machinery that makes complex data systems work.

Said slightly differently, the shape of the problem is not the transfer of ownership of a data collection system, it’s the remaking of the political, technical, financial, and governance system that continues to fund, feed, and use the data generated by these initiatives.

Patterns in the process(es)

FEWS NET, like a lot of large-scale public interest data systems, was originally organized by public interest funders who conceived of, and supported the implementation of these systems, because they “should” exist. And they are right – many of these systems produce tangible, actionable, depended-upon data infrastructure, but they also tend to rely on those same communities of funders (or secondary lines of business) in order to sustain these efforts, as opposed to generating enough operating support, by operating, to function independently. Until, like now, those funders change their minds.

It should go without saying that every structural redesign of a major, global data system is unique, but what follows is some hard-won synthesis about some of the similarities and common characteristics/patterns in those transitions:

• From ‘open’ to use-driven investment. Ultimately, data’s uses should inform the means and methods of production – not only because specializing data production efforts improve the output’s ‘fitness for purpose’, but also because data regulation is increasingly relational. In order to prove value and, arguably, secure sustainable revenue, complex data systems are increasingly finding ways to document their highest-value use cases.

• Centering focus on impact and value over production. A number of research, measurement, and data collection ecosystems focus on the interests and challenges of producing high-(technical)quality data, as opposed to specific measures of the impact of the data production (whether in process, output, or outcome). Often, these efforts have had to frame their value to specific funders or their cause, as opposed to having to make the operational case for the value of the data they produce directly to stakeholder groups.

• Revenue modeling and unit cost engineering are best explicit. Global data initiatives require revenue to sustain operations and, critically, integrity. Funding is an absolutely critical form of participating in a data system, but it is only one of many required in order to build the scale of distributed infrastructure necessary for global informatics. There’s an understandable priority placed on the data production and publication preferences of those willing to pay, but those imbalances embed long-term fragility (and sustainability challenges). Designing for revenue flows that stakeholders agree on is not only good business practice, it’s a critical foundation for building the trust needed to implement distributed data collection and contribution efforts.

• Resource limitations inevitably drive politics. The practical costs of maintaining large-scale data systems force decisions about what data is valuable, why, and to whom – all of which are more commonly decided by politics than by specific technical considerations. Politics in these systems are inevitable, both because of what information reveals, who it serves, and what it seeks to accomplish – the most resilient data systems plan for engaging with their politics as opposed to hoping that purpose or effectiveness will obviate them.

• Multi-stakeholder governance makes equity a sustainability strategy. Data production efforts are typically governed by the people and organizations most concerned with data production and, in other cases, commercialization. By comparison, very few complex data systems are governed equitably by stakeholders with multiple types of interests or representing multiple stages of the supply chain to the intended use case(s). Any system that’s predominantly driven by one set of interests can fall out of balance and, in-time, use, by the people it’s designed to serve. Multi-stakeholder governance can build trust through mutual dependence and shared investment.

There are as many questions as answers about how we build politically independent, financially stable, technically secure, constantly evolving, and impactfully applied public interest information systems. Perhaps the only thing there’s no question about is whether we need more work, learning, and infrastructure for the organizations navigating, transitioning, and building public interest data infrastructure. If there is a silver lining, it’s that there are a lot of examples to learn from, and a lot of tangible, practical steps that the teams working on initiatives like FEWS NET can take to build the blueprint for successful digital public infrastructure transitions.

Laying the foundations

The first step to transitioning a global data system is a lot like eating an elephant (disclosure: the saying goes – no elephants were harmed in the drafting of this post) – one step at a time. The work of building durable, sustainable digital infrastructure involves the, at times messy, work of mapping supply chains, renegotiating relationships, formalizing terms of participation, and reinvesting in practical infrastructures to deliver on shared needs. And that’s the design phase – the organizations, institutions, and/or networks that end up with the operational responsibility for implementing these systems also need ongoing governance that can respond and evolve to changes in their operating context. All of which is to say, there’s plenty of important and practical work involved.

When our teams at Digital Public and Development Gateway have supported similar systems and institutions through these transitions, we’ve seen great results from:

• Assemble primary stakeholders, affirm and prioritize points of alignment. The first step is to build support for the process by reaffirming the core, intended mission and impact, which become frameworks to evaluate ongoing investments.
• Map the supply chains, stakeholders, and dependencies for priority use cases. Every transition involves reevaluating the ways that different use cases, production efforts, data sources, and infrastructure choices relate to achieving the system’s intended purpose. Mapping the value, cost, and impact of the most visible and priority use cases is a critical foundation for rebuilding coalitions and conditions for sustainable, resilient support. For FEWS NET, that is both national-level investments in data production, but also tracing those efforts to domestic use cases and contextually relevant value propositions for its role.
• Strategic analysis and use-case specific viability mapping. In order to ensure the sustainability of priority use cases and impacts, the next step is treating each use case as a standalone, multi-stakeholder initiative – and then reverse engineering viability strategies. Approaches vary, but typically involve exploring successor funders and funding models, organizational hosting and shared services models, identifying overlap with the existing data production ecosystem, and/or cost minimization and redistribution to network contribution models. For FEWS NET, this process should consider both country-level data production and specific, impact and use-based cases, as ways to frame and explore sustainability.
• Technical implementation design. Structural transitions are organizationally, legally, logistically, financially, and technically complicated, and rarely executed effectively by large groups. Instead, these processes typically appoint multi-stakeholder working committees with the mandate of designing (and implementing) specific, technical aspects of these transitions – with surge capacity based on the contextual needs of each process. For FEWS NET that will mean working with stakeholder communities to consider the technical architecture, funding, and governance, for each country-level program and/or impact-focused use case.
• Risk assessment and accountability design. One major trend in the transition from strictly open publishing to use-based data regulation is that digital public infrastructures increasingly need to not only serve a positive purpose, they also need to ensure that they are not used to cause harm. The main purpose of this step is to compel system designers to (a) consider what harms they could be unintentionally abetting, in the hands of malicious actors; (b) model the ways that people access their systems – and their degree of control over those points of access; and (c) propose models of mutual accountability and enforcement that are appropriate to the context of the action and harm.
• Coordinate renewed alignment and formalize agreement. Ultimately, digital public infrastructure relies on the ongoing investment, understanding, participation, and support of the communities it serves. That agreement can only stay implicit for so long, before operating costs get swept up in politics (again). At this step, the stakeholders involved in implementing next steps need granular, explicit agreement on the operating model, the governance approach, and how to manage the unexpected. Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges in building governance systems in any context is ensuring that, as the system grows and changes over-time, it is (willing and) able to protect the core uses and relationships that created it.

The design and redesign of digital public infrastructures is, in a way, what people mean when they talk about digital democracy – and Dr. Shah’s urgent call to build a coalition in support of FEWS NET is an emergent vein of international digital civics.

All over the world, and especially recently, individuals and civil society groups have taken extraordinary steps to save public data sets, to find new homes for valuable software, to support open source sustainability, to preserve the knowledge and data generated by the international development community, and to build local mutual and relational digital infrastructure. Every single one of these initiatives is both a new expression of public initiative to save and protect our digital lives and infrastructure and a very old vein of communal and relational protection. And, hopefully, organizations and funders will rally to do the work to rearchitect FEWS NET, too – it is an extraordinary feat of global digital infrastructure.

The structure of this problem, though, the need to design for new networks and structures that program public and expert participation into resilient, independent, high-integrity digital infrastructure and information – is happening in an extraordinary number of domains, like science, public service and infrastructure measurement, law and accountability, and earth-sensing and environmental information. At a minimum, I hope these efforts and initiatives will find ways to collaborate and learn from each others’ technical experience, toward getting the best outcomes possible for each public infrastructure. And, really, these emerging approaches to digital civics can, should, and are becoming a new blueprint for public participation in digital spaces.