Looking back on 150 GIS & IM Hours — Examining the impact of a geospatial community of practice
Introduction
The GIS & IM Team at British Red Cross runs a weekly, digital drop-in on Zoom where anyone from the organisation can come and ask us a question about GIS & IM. It’s called GIS & IM Hour and is our equivalent of having an open door policy at the same time every week.
It is an evolution to our team’s pre-Covid, in-person daily stand up where people outside of the team could come and get to know us and ask us questions. We’ve found that the investment in time to run the sessions each week is vastly outweighed by the value generated in impact for attendees and the organisation. This blog is about how we do it and gives an overview of what we’ve found.
What and how
We started in January 2021 and have just passed 150 sessions since then. We have a mixture of attendees: some are people coming for the first time to find out more about what we do, but often we have people coming back regularly (not necessarily every week) as part of longer term relationships, to discuss the next iteration of a product or ask a question about the next stage of how to do something. What’s good about this mixture is that the former group gets to see what the latter are working on — this often prompts questions and provides inspiration about accomplishing similar things themselves.
To give the best help, we focus on understanding what people want to achieve and why they came to us to help them achieve it. To do this we use the space in a variety of ways:
- Introductions to our team and what we do though tangible examples. We can show real and often live examples of where GIS and Information Management has contributed to projects, demonstrating impact in the UK and overseas.
- Live troubleshooting and demoing, usually by participants screen-sharing and us giving them how-to advice and options to overcome challenges.
- The start of a conversation about working together, then directing people to submit a formal support request, if appropriate (these are triaged and prioritised with other requests and the team’s capacity).
- Signposting when our team is not the most appropriate starting point; deferring to and linking up with other, more appropriate teams (e.g., the Business Intelligence or Data Science teams) and Communities (e.g., the PowerBI Community of Practice). This also happens in reverse with people being signposted to us from others (e.g., from Business Partners or Operations Managers).
Principles
Our approach is always about enabling others as much as possible to answer their questions themselves, by providing appropriate tools and the guidance about how best to use them. We think of this as our small contribution to both localisation and digital transformation.
As a general rule of thumb, during the session we prioritise questions related to live operations, then planned conversations about known questions or projects, then we tackle general questions and introductions. Our mental model for this is akin to the Eisenhower Matrix (“Do / Schedule / Delegate / Don’t do”).
We also deprioritise questions where our help isn’t the answer, such as “I want this by tomorrow!”, “I want this, but I don’t have any data…” or “Can you do this for me, I don’t have time?”. We always ensure that our de-prioritisation of questions like these is justified and explained, so that a participant is better able to get what they need next time they attend.
We’re tool agnostic, so always aim to suggest a solution using a tool that is most appropriate for the use case. It may be that we can help someone by:
- Giving feedback on a map they’ve made in a desktop GIS, such as QGIS, that shows impacted population after a flood event
- Showing them how to write a survey form that could check a household’s eligibility for a cash programme, using the XLS standard and in-form calculations, that could then be uploaded and used in Kobo Toolbox
- Showing them how to geocode a set of UK postcodes, add these to an interactive map in SharePoint or Excel, then add other contextual layers like severe weather warning areas or deprivation data to the map (see image below)
- Showing the data- and media-rich narratives they could write about their work using an ArcGIS StoryMap, like this, this, this or this
We signpost people to the drop-in as much as possible, as a part of the process of requesting support from our team. Often the help someone needs is a quick fix, but without the contextual conversation with them, the fix would take longer. By building in time upfront to (a) understand the context of the problem and (b) understand what they are trying to achieve, we can suggest solutions that are much more likely to work for the long term.
In addition, having a dedicated time to talk to us has reduced the amount of email, Teams traffic and meetings we would otherwise have from people asking for support — helpful for a small team such as ours. By channelling people to a known, defined time and helping them there, we are often helping multiple people at once who are wanting to reach similar outcomes, but are coming from slightly different contexts.
Overview of the 150 sessions
We have a tracker spreadsheet where we note down a summary of what has happened during the session each week (we’re data people — so of course we do!).
We record who has hosted the session, who has attended, what people asked each week, whether a follow-up was needed and completed, and whether the query needed to be logged in Jira.
This tracker sheet has proved invaluable over time and has helped us improve how we offer support. For example, attendees working on a specific problem often return over several consecutive weeks, or might return in several months — we can use the tracker to check back on previous parts of the relationship with them, see what the challenges were last time and see how we helped. This approach to problem solving builds relationships and creates higher quality outcomes, including through longer term, impactful solutions we’ve been able to provide for questions that have consistently arisen.
A secondary benefit of the tracker is that it’s made it much easier to include overview statistics of GIS & IM Hour in this blog!
393 people have attended a drop-in session since January 2021. 67% have attended to ask a specific question and 27% to receive an introduction to what we do.
Note: these are not necessarily unique attendees — people often return over several consecutive weeks to work through a problem. More on this below.
50% of attendees are from our UK Operations directorate, 22% from International and 19% from Internal Services
In UK Operations, 57% of attendees are from Crisis Response and Community Resilience. For International, 75% of attendees are from Programmes and Partnerships. For Internal Services, 71% of attendees are from our Digital, Data and Technology teams.
It’s great to see that our guiding principles of prioritising operational support are borne out in the data . What’s also interesting is to see where our least well represented Directorates are — more on this later.
Emergent and compounding value
When we started out, we didn’t set any expectations of what value we wanted to create, only that we wanted to provide people a forum where they could get to know us and share their geospatial and Information Management challenges with us. As it turns out, the value created is diverse and sometimes intangible, but here are some of the most consistent successes that have emerged:
- De-siloing of approaches and ethos for data collection, analysis and data visualisation between the different parts of the organisation — most notably between our International and UK Operations directorates, but also from our home in Data, Digital and Technology (DDaT) into the operational side of the work the organisation does. We often help bridge the gap between operational questions and strategic questions too, by demonstrating that answers to both usually rely on the same data!
- Building relationships and making connections between participants through the drop-in has enabled people to see similarities between their own work and that of others and has enabled colleagues in different departments to help each other on related issues.
- Identifying common challenges and contributing to short and longer term solutions to overcome them — by having this forum, we’ve been able to pinpoint some persistent gaps in the data and tools that participants have access to. For example, in the short term, by providing guidance that enables people to map postcodes exported from other systems in an Excel workbook or SharePoint site, we’re helping them to see where their volunteer, staff or vehicle capacity is. At the same time, we put effort into developing longer term solutions via automations, so that data is available to map in a good-enough form, meaning people don’t have to export data from other systems in the first place.
- The PowerBI Community of Practice evolved out of this space — we were increasingly fielding questions about that tool and, although we are users of it, we felt like the appetite was high enough and outside of our traditional skill set that it should become its own group. That community has formed its own weekly surgery and complimentary Teams channel too, so that questions can be asked asynchronously (an idea we are considering duplicating ourselves!).
- Blog posts and guidance documentation related to common questions that have been shared and spread organically, for example here, here and here.
- An informal development opportunity for Information Management Register members. Through their participation and sharing of perspectives and solutions to overcome challenges, people have received better answers to their questions and the confidence of those on the IM Register who contribute has grown.
Challenges
Setting up a drop-in session requires minimal effort (being in Zoom for an hour a week), however to do it well requires time to nurture and steward the space, the attendees and the questions. Consistency is tricky — sometimes many people come, sometimes no one comes — the value created by holding the same space each week is worth the effort.
For example, for one week in September 2023, ¾ of our team was either on leave or on training courses and we considered cancelling the drop-in for that week — we didn’t and eight people attended! We got through as many of the questions as we could in the hour, logged the remainder in our tracker and on Jira, and sent follow-up emails to ensure everyone got what they needed when our capacity returned.
We’ve also found that one of the main challenges is created by that consistency: by holding the call at the same time each week, anyone who has another commitment at that time is unable to attend — we’re thinking about how best to tackle this problem at the moment, with some solutions outlined further in this blog.
We also recognise that we’re not a “formal” help desk and can only answer the questions we receive during the session with the capacity we have at the time. We are a relatively small team and also have our business-as-usual work to do — to make things sustainable we have to set clear expectations about what we can and cannot do.
Future
We want to adapt and change the space to make it more useful to more people, but we’re conscious of doing so slowly and incrementally (so we don’t break the good thing we have now!). Developments we’ve been thinking about are:
- Having a complimentary space, with the same format, on an alternative day of the week, to enable people who have a clash during our regular slot to still engage with us
- Having a complimentary space on an alternative day of the week that’s just for a specific sector or focal area, such as for Emergency Response in UK Operations
- Making it themed, e.g., just primary data collection and tools
- Making it available in some form for other National Societies too
- How to use what people consistently ask as an evidence base to development long term solutions (e.g., to gain a better spatial understanding of volunteer data)
Whilst we’ve identified common questions and themes, what’s also notable to us is the inverse too: the questions and themes that don’t come up as often as we’d like, and therefore the topics that we want to focus on socialising in future. For example, we’d love to have questions about:
- Incorporating GIS and IM thinking into parts of the organisation with which we have less contact
- Setting up tasks for Missing Maps and using MapSwipe to engage even more volunteers to get communities on the map
- How to use SketchMap to map a community’s experience and perception of risk in their neighbourhood through participatory mapping on paper, then how to transfer this data to an interactive map
- How to access the capacity of the Information Management Register of humanitarian IM experts to fulfil operational needs
- How people can get GIS & IM skill development on their Professional Development Programme, perhaps including studying GIS as part of the organisation’s apprenticeship programme
Conclusion
Over the 150+ sessions, GIS & IM Hour has proved its value. Having a dedicated forum for geospatial and Information Management knowledge sharing and problem solving has meant we’ve been able to increase both the breadth of support we can provide and its impact.
Sticking to a set of principles that prioritises live troubleshooting of operational questions has meant that we have had a tangible positive impact on the work of people delivering our services. It serves the immediate needs of participants but also acts as a platform for broader technical development and collaboration.
We’re looking forward to developing GIS & IM Hour in future, so that we can more usefully share knowledge and address geospatial and Information Management challenges, thereby helping the organisation to more effectively respond to the needs of those in crisis.
