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Dawn: Hello, and welcome to today's TechSoup webinar
called Mapping Your Impact: A Case from Humanitarian Assistance.
I'm Dawn Krause. I'm a TechSoup webinar producer, and I will be your facilitator for today.
It looks like we have about 42 people online. We're expecting a couple more.
We have some housekeeping issues that we need to take care of before we move into our content
for today, our talk about GIS.
So today we're going to be interacting with you via the chat
that is located in the lower left-hand corner of your interface.
So please, whenever you feel the need, if you have a technical question
as well as a question about our content, please put that into the chat.
We'll address it right away if it's a technical issue. Or if it's content-related,
we'll get to it at some point in our talk, hopefully. All lines are muted on your end as the participants,
so you don't have to worry about any background noise there.
Should you lose your Internet connection, which I hope you don't,
you can reconnect using the link that was originally emailed to you.
If you lose your phone connection, same thing. Just redial and join again.
Sometimes with ReadyTalk, the interface will freeze up, so that's an instance where you would want to
get out and get back in via the email link. There's also the ReadyTalk support number there.
If none of those things work, then ReadyTalk support is very helpful,
so feel free to give them a call.
Today's session is being recorded. It will be on our archived webinar site,
the TechSoup.org Learning Center link. Don't worry about remembering that link.
You'll receive a link to the presentation as well as other resources that we're going to talk
about today. After the webinar, if we don't get to questions today,
we will continue discussion in our Community Forum. And I will send you a link
to the actual Community Forum in that email follow-up that I'll send later today.
If you are tweeting, you can tweet with the hash tag #TechSoup.
Who is TechSoup? For those of you who may not be familiar with us,
we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, just like many of you.
As of June 2010, we served more than 127,000 organizations
and we saved you all $2 billion in IT expenses all around the world.
Our mission is really to help you with the technology resources
and knowledge you need in order for you to fulfill your missions.
Hopefully we're doing some of that today by presenting some great webinar content.
Our presenters today are Dr. Andrew Schroeder and David Gadsden.
I'm going to introduce them a little more fully in just a second giving you some bio info.
I am your facilitator again, Dawn Krause. Assisting with chat and questions in the background,
Stephanie Gerding, Jon Rush, and Ariel Gilbert-Knight, all from TechSoup.
Just to introduce David who is going to be giving content first.
David is an account executive for ESRI, focusing on nonprofit, Native American,
and international development communities. He joined ESRI in 2002
and has since supported communities on topics ranging from disaster relief,
environmental conservation, international development and diplomacy,
energy transmission and federal and tribal governance.
David coordinates ESRI's Nonprofit Organization Program which aims to empower nonprofits
and NGOs around the globe with GIS technology.
And Andrew who's going to be presenting content second, is the Director of Research and Analysis
at Direct Relief International. Beginning in 2008, he initiated Direct Relief's program
in geospatial analytics and GIS. Since that time he's worked closely with a wide range
of Direct Relief's corporate and clinical partners to improve understanding
of humanitarian program planning and outcome evaluation
through data analysis and visualization.
Whew! They're busy guys!
Just to go over briefly the agenda, we are going to do three polls
to try to get some audience interaction and feedback on how you're using
these types of GIS technologies and even ESRI's products, before we move on with the content.
Then David is going to take over. He's going to talk about ESRI's Nonprofit Program as a suite of tools
that are available through TechSoup. He's also going to cover Community Analyst
which I think is a newer product for them. It's a cloud-based tool.
Then I'm going to switch it over to Andrew, and he's going to discuss Direct Relief's
use of web mapping tools in the 2010 Haiti Earthquake disaster recovery effort,
and he's also going to talk about his collaboration with UNFPA and the development
of the Global Fistula Map. Then we're going to have a Q&A with participants,
hopefully with your wonderful questions that you will put into the chat for us today.
Welcome, Andrew and David.
Andrew: Thank you.
David: Thank you.
Dawn: I'm going to go ahead and launch our first poll which hopefully you should be seeing.
And the question is, Can you describe your current use (or interest) in GIS?
So just tell us a little bit about what your interest in this webinar is,
or what your current use is in your organization. We have some general areas here
that you can simply click one of the boxes and submit. And for this one,
you can actually submit more than one response.
It looks like we're getting [indistinct] back here. Lots of people using it for project mapping.
Quite a bit with strategic planning and also mapping impacts.
Andrew will be happy to hear that.
Okay, I'm glad to see that there are people actually doing this.
I'm going to close that poll. It looks like we're done there. And I'm going to move on to our next one.
What types of ESRI mapping technology are you currently using?
And of course, you can always choose the option that you're not currently using it.
Oh, no, we have a lot not currently using it. By the end of this webinar you'll be interested.
Okay, so overwhelmingly, not currently using it.
Okay, I'm going to close that one, and here's our next one.
What types of ESRI mapping technology are you currently using?
Oops, that's the one I did. Sorry. Here we go.
Which version of ArcGIS Desktop are you using? So we might got get too many responses here
because it didn't look like many of you were using ESRI products yet.
You said you weren't using it.
Okay. Looks like a couple may be using 10.1, version 10.
Dave, I hope that was helpful for you to move on with your portion of the talk.
I'm going to close that poll.
Dave: You bet. Yes, it's really helpful actually.
Dawn: Okay, and over to you. Take it away.
Dave: Okay, great. Well, thanks, everyone. It's really wonderful to have an opportunity
to speak with you today. I really am just doing a little bit of an introduction.
Andrew's the real presenter today, and what he'll be doing is showing you actually
how his organization has put this body of technology to work.
My role at ESRI is to coordinate our support for nonprofits globally.
That includes our relationship with TechSoup and the offerings that we currently have in place.
What I won't be doing today is giving you sort of an overview of each specific product
and offering that ESRI is offering, both through TechSoup and through our own program.
The reason being that we're in the process of releasing a lot of new offerings through TechSoup
and so that will be a webcast a little bit later in the year so far as the total offering that's out there.
What I did want to do, and I think it's pretty relevant seeing that many of you are new to ESRI
and new to potentially professional-grade GIS, is to spend a little bit of time
just giving you a high-level overview of who we are as an organization, and what's possible.
From there, we'll have the opportunity for Andrew to show us in detail how this technology
may apply to work like the work you folks are doing out there in your own organizations.
So, a little bit of introduction of ESRI, we were founded in 1969 by Jack Dangerman
and his wife Laura. Jack had studied landscape architecture at Harvard University
and had come out and had some ideas about computer mapping really making a difference
in the world and helping people better understand where they were working,
where they were building things, where they were delivering programs, etc.
So he formed a nonprofit actually with a small loan from Laura's parents, and ESRI was born.
That's the Environmental Systems Research Institute.
After a few years of supporting a handful of organizations that were using computers
to manage landscapes and activities and to develop basically the origins of computer mapping,
those organizations came back to Jack Dangerman in a user group meeting
with about 20-some people in the room, and said,
"Jack, we love you, but we just want to buy your software."
And Jack said, "Well, that's great." — And I've actually heard him tell the story. —
"That's great, but you're really going to have to tell me what to build
and we can make that change, but it's going to be a partnership."
With that sort of value base, ESRI's grown to be a very large, very successful organization.
We're a privately held software company. That user conference that we had in 2012
had over 14,000 attendees. We're used very broadly all around the world.
And when it comes to professional grade mapping systems,
ESRI leads that marketplace by a wide margin.
If you're interested in finding the nearest restaurant
or more consumer-type mapping applications, there's a lot of other brands
that might come to mind before ESRI. But when you're looking at data that you need to sort of own
and manage on your own, and not hand that content over to a different organization or platform,
or if you're looking at really integration of data from many different sources, public, private, open, etc.,
then that's really where ESRI's technology excels.
So our nonprofit support is a serious commitment. As I said, we began as a nonprofit.
More than 20 years ago, ESRI founded a conservation program
that was actually much more broad than conservation, to provide grants and support
for organizations around the world. We've extended that through our relationship
with TechSoup. We also have our own offerings that you can learn more about
at www.esri.com/nonprofit. Some of the technologies, individual software packages
you might be interested in that will be available soon through TechSoup,
you might find that we have available today through our own offering.
And that includes Community Analyst, which we'll talk about in detail in just a moment.
A conservative estimate is well over $150 million in software donations.
That's actually a pretty low a figure.
Now, what does ESRI offer technically?
What we offer as a platform is a complete solution for creating geographic information,
bringing geographic information in from different sources, taking data that's in spreadsheets
and turning it into what we would call geographic information through mapping it or associating it
to an address or a coordinate that places it on the globe.
Our offering extends across nearly every type of phone that's out there.
We have free software for running on your iPhone, your Android phone, or your Windows phone.
You can go into the app stores of those platforms and bring ESRI technology onto them
that will open you up to a world of available maps and literally tens of thousands of organizations
and individuals from around the world that are publishing and sharing
mapped geographic information through ESRI's platform.
If you need to sort of take that kind of infrastructure, the ability to share maps
across your organization and maybe do that in-house, or your own IT resources,
we also have serve technologies that you can install and operate in that fashion.
I'm going to talk in a moment about how cloud computing has really transformed
our entire platform. But if you're a developer and you'd like to just take a few components
of ESRI's platform, develop something custom that's specific to your needs,
you have a wide array of options there, and that's a community that we serve very closely.
If you look at the differences between consumer mapping —
again, I sort of flippantly referred to finding the nearest restaurant or whatever it might be —
and professional mapping, what are the differences or what are the core capabilities
that an ESRI platform would offer that you wouldn't find in a consumer platform?
This sort of total ecosystem of management of geographic information is managing your data,
whether you've collected or you found it from another source,
whether you're having a transaction with another system, a financial system or a fundraising system
within your organization, keeping things up to date, backed up.
It's appropriately secure so you have the right sort of eyes on the data
and the right editors keeping it up-to-date. Using that to develop solutions for planning and analysis
— and you'll see some of this from Andrew — how you can take that information
and see where you're delivering your programs. Compare that to potentially other data sources
on poverty or other indicators to see how that impact is working, and potentially shift your assets
around using that map as a backdrop. Taking all that into the field,
pulling your phone out of your pocket, seeing what has been delivered in that area,
getting some details about a potential new donor, being able to find that donor
and walk up to their doorstep with some offer you might have, all of that extension of the GIS platform
or the geographic information platform is the kind of thing that ESRI's ArcGIS platform enables.
Visualization, maybe you're going to make beautiful maps for a report,
maybe you're going to provide a web map for your donors to show all of the impact
that you're making in a given, let's say, following a hurricane response.
You have programs you're delivering across a given territory.
You might have photographs and graphs and charts and even time-based data
that shows your response over time. All of those things are possible
when you have well-structured data and when you leverage the whole platform
to take the devices into the field to collect the photos. That can be brought together
into a dashboard or a rich web map that allows your donors or even your beneficiaries
to review and explore the services you're providing.
And then increasingly the migration of social media into that geospatial domain,
so in our web mapping templates which I won't go much into detail on today,
you can take that data that you've created and you can basically pour it into a template
that does the photos and graphing and interaction that I'm referring to.
You can also link in Twitter, or link in Facebook, so that you can do a geographic search
of who's tweeting what in a given geography. You can also give your users the ability
to geographically comment or express a need or desire on a web map that you may put up.
And that becomes meaningful information that you're soliciting from your community of practice.
It sounds like a lot, right? I mean it's really enterprise-grade stuff.
One of the critiques of ESRI over the years is, "Well, that's really interesting.
And if you're a Ph.D. I'm sure you can have a lot of fun with that, but that's not really relevant to me."
Again, I've been at ESRI for ten years. I've been in the industry for 20, academically or otherwise.
And the radical change that's happening to us underfoot right now
is the migration to cloud computing. All of these capabilities that I'm describing, not long ago,
even a year or so ago, if you wanted to accomplish those you had to have the wherewithal
to install your own GIS server, install your own database, configure that database
for appropriate access and use. And you were looking at a solid day or two.
Andrew's probably laughing right now because of the amount of time that he spent
to work on the platform he'll show you in a moment. But it took some effort and it was expensive
in staff time and resources and hardware and other things.
What's happening today is ESRI's taking 40-plus years of software development into enterprise GIS
as a platform, and we're migrating that into the cloud.
That allows us to basically enable us to provide that operational enterprise system for you
by just turning it on, and just giving you a view into an operational platform that ESRI's
already stood up and configured, and is supporting tens of thousands,
and soon hundreds of thousands of our accounts.
So really, cloud computing takes ESRI into a totally different environment.
And many of you or a handful of you out there that are using the desktop and doing good mapping,
that remains extremely important, but that work doesn't need to live on your desktop any longer.
You can take that map or even that analysis that you've conducted
and you can publish it to the cloud, and share it across your organization or share it publicly.
So www.arcgis.com is ESRI's cloud framework. It's a place where you can go to learn more
about that framework. We refer to the entire platform as ArcGIS Online.
And there's a lot that can be said about this. I would encourage you, when you visit the site,
is scroll down to the bottom and just open up the personal use maps, look around for some data
that is of interest to you, some places that are of interest to you.
We have base maps from around the world. That includes Microsoft's Bing image and street maps,
ESRI's image and street maps, OpenStreetMap, a beautiful map of the world
from National Geographic.
You can actually take your own data that has potentially addresses in it,
so if you have an Excel table with addresses and places you're working,
you can open up the map in our ArcGIS.com and you can drag that Excel table onto it.
You can save it initially as a CSV just to flatten any of the fancy Excel bits that would confuse us,
and you can drag that CSV onto the map. And you'll have a map that you can then share,
put on your Facebook page, you can tweet. You can form a group around that,
invite your colleagues to participate, and it's really quite powerful.
This again, is one of the offerings that we'll be bringing to TechSoup.
Everything I just described is free. That ability to create maps, share them, tweet them, etc.,
that all works great for that. If you'd like to take kind of what you're seeing in that entire platform
and not have it be ESRI anything, but just have it be your organization's mapping platform,
that's also possible. So that becomes a bit of a subscription that we discount.
Again, we'll have a real favorable offering through TechSoup.
That allows you to rebrand this as your site. So you have your own map gallery.
You have your own colors, your own logos, etc. It gives you all those capabilities I'm describing.
So really, in the industry we think about enterprise GIS and it's the difference
between taking a desktop mapping bit of software and making a PDF or making a map
or just doing something on a desktop, and the role of GIS
within a broader information management framework within your organization.
That's the kind of thing that us geeks in the industry get real excited about.
It's not just GIS for a report, but GIS as a platform for better understanding
in allocation and analysis. Really, ArcGIS online gives us the ability to just turn that analysis on
or turn that platform on to enable you to experience that without those server investments,
or without that really deep need for capabilities.
So we call this sort of the "One Map," right? That's the map that maybe you publish on the desktop,
maybe you drag a CSV file onto the web. That same map that you saved from that CSV file,
you pick up your iPhone or your Android phone, with the free ESRI app you log in to ArcGIS online,
you interact with that map, you potentially update new information and take photos,
and that goes right back up onto this web map that others may be viewing.
I just recently had this experience in Tanzania working on a little project for World Vision
where we happened to have — it was a bit of chaotic pilot ad hoc thing,
but we had an iPhone and a Windows phone and two Android phones.
And we were able to work in a very rural community and go about
and visit all of the great work that World Vision had done to dig wells, and give people cows,
and bed nets for mosquitoes, all the things they do, and visit them, snap a photo,
answer a quick question about what was done there, and four different vehicles,
four different phones in different locations, all that data was uploaded directly to a web map
that other folks were able to view. We're now taking that all into a more rich web mapping platform
so donors can see how important the work that's being done up there is.
It was a really neat experience. If that can work in rural Tanzania, I know it can work for you
in the United States. If you're working in more challenging international environments,
definitely let me know and we can help explore what kind of architectures might work for you.
Finally, Community Analyst, so the other opportunity with the cloud is that —
sending you a very powerful bit of software but saying "Good luck finding data"
is sort of the approach of the 1990s, right? Like you got some expensive GIS software
and it opened up and it was just a blank white page. You had to then start the really hard work
of getting data organized. Community Analyst is ESRI's effort to organize a very large repository
of data. I can paste a link in here quickly that will give you an opportunity to go poke around,
perhaps after the presentation. Let's see.
I'd encourage you to look at the data page in particular. There's like 11,000 different variables
on things like income, employment, poverty, nutrition, etc. And what that allows you to do
is visit that cloud platform, work with that data, bring in your own data, produce maps, do analysis.
And it's something you can access again through this cloud subscription approach,
rather than having to wrestle with that data on your own. So I'll stop there,
maybe take one or two questions but then let Andrew carry it away.
Dawn: Thank you, David.
We actually so far have only one question that came in, and John Rush from TechSoup
might want to come in here as well, but Emily asked
what kinds of special plans are available for nonprofits?
David: Well, I think the plans were — I'm assuming Emily, that this is about the ArcGIS Online
subscription and sort of the hosted plan offerings. Otherwise, you can go on the TechSoup site
and see what the software licensing options are for desktop and other things.
The plan offerings generally speaking is that we do a 50 percent discount.
That's what we have today. Again, we're in the process of rolling that out through TechSoup,
and there's a few other logistical pieces to get into place to make that happen,
but that's generally what we're able to offer. There's real cost here to third parties,
to other cloud providers that ESRI is on the hook for,
and where you need that subscription specifically is to take ArcGIS Online
and brand it for your own organization, as well as create GIS layers that you can edit with phones
and with websites and with other things. That's when you need to think about a subscription.
If you just want to create an account, create maps, bring CSV files and SHP files onto those maps
and save them and share them in formed groups, that's free. It's free for personal use.
We also extend that to nonprofits. So there's a lot you can do for free.
There's a lot you can discover and share and even rebrand. What I mean by that is
if you save a map in the sharing options in the map viewer. You can choose to share those
on Twitter or Facebook. You can also create a new web application, which takes that map
that you've discovered, potentially with some of your own data,
and wraps it into another simple sort of web map viewer. It's all free,
so I would encourage you to start there and then let us know specifically.
And you're correct Sandra, that there is a limit to the free storage, which is 2GB per user.
Then when you get into the subscriptions, that increases dramatically.
I'm trying to glance at some other questions here. How up-to-date is the data?
We're continually working on updates. They do major releases twice a year
to the Community Analyst data sets. There are literally hundreds
of different providers that we're bringing together.
One quick comment on that is that we do also projections.
So we have a team of professional demographers that study not only what's coming
from the Census Department and data that we acquire from other organizations,
but we do our own modeling of what's coming in regard to demographic change.
That's generally a pretty high-end marketing data set you would pay a premium price for.
We're one of the only entities that then when there is real data from a census,
we publish our results. We actually show you how close we were with our estimates.
If that's important, let me know. Otherwise, I'll probably take a pause there.
Technical support is available through the TechSoup licensing.
That's not the case for the desktop through the ESRI program,
but there are some other nuances there I won't go into, and price is one of them.
Why don't I stop there just to allow plenty of time for Andrew?
And I'll also paste my email address in here. If there's any question
you need me to follow up on directly, please feel free to reach out to me.
Dawn: Thanks, David, great information. Andrew, do you want to take it away?
Andrew: Sure, thanks, and thanks, Dave. The ESRI nonprofit program in particular,
we make pretty extensive use of GIS at Direct Relief.
And I will say that there's just no way we could do it without the support
that the ESRI nonprofit program has been able to offer us, and TechSoup in general,
for a whole variety of technology needs at Direct Relief. It's been great to work with you.
I'm going to go through some examples of web mapping that we've been doing.
I'll start off with a little bit about Direct Relief, what we're using mapping for,
a couple of projects that we've put in place to help us think through some of our work,
and to communicate what we do, the difference that our programs have made.
And I'm going to close with a look at Community Analyst, an example from Community Analyst.
We are an international organization but we do a lot of work in the United States.
And Community Analyst has been really valuable in terms of being able to help us think through
program planning and evaluation in that U.S. context.
Direct Relief is a global, humanitarian, medical-material assistance organization.
We're headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.
And as a bit of context as to where our work with mapping fits in,
we're a channel for central medicines and medical supplies to get to people in need all over the world.
We work with private pharmaceutical and medical suppliers to identify needed materials
and efficiently and effectively get it to medical infrastructure and need all over the world.
Everything that we do has a spatial dimension, and that is where GIS
became a really sort of obvious pick for us in terms of thinking through
how we analyze our programs, how we communicate what we're doing.
In order to accomplish our work, we use a lot of information technology
and ESRI sits within an ecosystem that for us is dominated by SA
which is our enterprise data system, as I'll show you in a second with a map that we did
for the Haitian earthquake. One of our goals has been to — SAP is tracking all of our transactions.
All the material, all the pharmaceuticals, all the medicines that we're moving to people in need
around the world is being tracked through SAP. We've linked GIS directly
into that enterprise data set in order to be able to show how those transactions
are changing over time, and where that material is ending up,
and how that links to the people in need that we're trying to help.
In our case, it fits. We developed it to fit within that ecosystem
and we've been moving steadily towards doing things that are also more sort of semi-autonomous
in the kind of cloud environment that Dave was describing earlier.
We're also thinking about this from the standpoint of an interface with our partnerships.
So we maintain in that context a web portal that facilitates a lot of the communications
that allows us to be able to understand what medical need is in a humanitarian context.
As you'll see with the global fistula map I'll show you in a minute too,
this facilitates a survey interaction with us so that we can actually not just identify transactions
that are working through our enterprise system, but also survey our partners
and survey institutions that we're looking at how to assess for their humanitarian needs
about sort of what conditions are affecting them, what kinds of materials they're in need of,
and how we can actually formulate programs that are designed to help them.
To give you a little bit of context for what you're going to see then in the technology side,
I'm going to look at a couple of different web maps. We use ArcGIS Desktop to build the base maps
and ArcGIS Server to serve out web services that feed our online maps.
The first map you're going to see is built with something called Adobe Flex Viewer
which is an Adobe product supported by ESRI and that is a really simple way
to be able to produce very high quality web maps that are posted online.
The next map that you'll see will be something that we built using the Java script API.
You'll see the differences in how they look. They're the same concepts,
but they're built with two different APIs, two different ways of doing web mapping.
And I can talk about why those differences are important and what they do in some different ways.
In the first content — let me actually share my screen here to give you a sense
of the actual application. Hopefully, this works. Okay.
This is a map that Direct Relief built in 2010 following the Haitian earthquake
in January of that year. After the earthquake, we began identifying partners
that we could transfer medical assistance to. We wanted to be able to do rapid assessment
and to be able to track where all of our assistance was going.
Our primary goal here was thinking about program transparency. So in this case we were looking at
how do we show in as great a detail as we possibly can the breakdown of assistance
that has gone to each place where we're actually offering medical assistance.
So we put the points on the map and linked them back into our backend database
and allowed for a way to navigate that material, which can often be a little bit obscure to people.
I mean we often don't really know very much. We're not really told very much about what kind of
assistance is reaching what area, particularly under crisis situations.
It's at a very high level of aggregation.
So here, we're actually pulling in from our inventory what kind of material went to which place,
and allowed folks to actually navigate that and see what the breakdown is for each site
that we're looking at. What kind of material did they receive?
What is the general value of that in terms of this evaluation
in the way that in-kind donations are valued? And we can measure that
against the overall distribution of aid to the country and give it a quick sort.
So if we want to see just where medical instruments were sent
we can sort the map really fast, and we can see this same information broken down
by product hierarchy here, so that we're looking at a slice of that overall data.
This is helpful for us from a program planning point of view, from thinking about where our material —
so what's the different landscape for different kinds of materials that we're sending.
It's also really valuable in terms of thinking about communications and program transparency,
so wanting to be as transparent as it's feasible for us to be about where every dollar of assistance
was being spent, and what kind of assistance that meant, and where are the organizations
that are using that aid. In this case, we're only using a fairly basic set of additional layers,
but we can also bring in layers showing changing weather patterns,
web services that were developed by the U.N. say, to show detailed geographic information
about the country.
I will say that that is the first web map that we built, and we really derived it from an application
that was developed by the State of Maryland, which is always surprising to people
when we say it. But this was an application, it was an Adobe Flex Viewer application
that the State of Maryland built to track stimulus funding
following the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
One of the really great things that ESRI does is it facilitates the posting of that code online,
so as we were in rapid development mode after the earthquake,
as a million and one things were happening, we decided to build this application.
If we had to build it right from the ground up at that time, it would've been virtually impossible for us.
But because we had the base code that had already been written and was available free online,
we just took that code, modified it for things that were useful to us, and changed the icons
and posted it online. Within about three weeks' worth of work, we actually had an online map
that was functional, and that folks were using to be able to look at where our assistance was going,
how much it was valued at, and what kind of help was reaching people in need
during the post-earthquake experience.
So we built from that more applications that were built off of the Flex platform.
In this case, this is an application that was developed for hurricane preparedness
in the United States. Direct Relief supports safety net clinics around the country
and in the Gulf Coast which is stricken by hurricanes virtually every year.
We preposition medical material so that when an event like the recent hurricane
that hit the Gulf Coast happens, we actually have material that is already on hand,
so that folks are prepared to be able to [indistinct] a surge capacity
for their patient population when they need it. We wanted to be able to track
where those partners were, and then to have a read on how storms are coming as they happen.
So this is current information that you see that's being pulled in from NOAH.
The same technology as the Haiti map, different code package that's actually building this.
And it allows us also to bring in some additional layers here, say evacuation routes.
So this is pulling from a web service that FEMA publishes that we can grab from FEMA's website,
and can look at where our clinics are relative to where posted evacuation routes are.
Again, this is something that we host as a public service that communicates
where we're actually supporting or prepositioning materials.
And it also becomes a way for us to think about how an event is unfolding as it happens.
We want to understand which of our clinics is on an evacuation route.
This is, because it's on a web service, as it changes it updates our map
and we don't actually have to go in and do that updating. It's just reading off the web servers.
That's a slightly deeper take on what we had started to do in the Haiti map,
which was just to be transparent about the transactional information.
Here, we can link out to the website for a particular clinic,
give some information about where they are and what kind of clinic they are,
and then also bring in real-time information that's changing that will show you the situation
as it happens. Again, this is all essentially open source code running off of web services
that are published online from a variety of different sources.
A most recent project had been a project that we did in collaboration with UNFPA,
the United Nations Population Fund, and the Fistula Foundation to respond to the occurrence
of obstetric fistula around the world. Obstetric fistula for those that don't know,
is a really awful injury that happens to women in very low resource settings.
It involves a tear that does not heal and where women experience very severe incontinence.
And often this can last for many, many years. It's a very simple surgery to repair,
and so it's really something that should never happen,
but it's one of the real signs of failing obstetric systems around the world.
One of our goals is not only to provide assistance during emergencies,
but to provide assistance all the time to people that need it,
and in this case to really provide information that folks can build off
in terms of assessing where problems are, how they are distributed across space,
and what we can know about them to really develop programs that will address the problem.
This again, I told you is a Javascript API application, again being driven by web services.
And the goal with the map, this base data was built off of a survey that we were able to execute
with the assistance of UNFPA where we sent a survey out
to a combination of different kinds of providers. Some of them were fixed infrastructure clinics.
Some of them were surgeons that actually travelled between clinics.
Quite a bit of fistula surgical repair is actually conducted by essentially travelling surgeons
that provide care at more than one facility.
And we wanted to know — not a whole lot is know about the prevalence of fistula.
There are studies, but they're scattered and had not been systematically connected.
This was the first time that we were looking at being able to put these facilities on the map
and see what happens at them.
First you will see that we geocoded all the facilities. And this will give you some base information
from the most recent year that we had survey information from, 2010,
how many patients received fistula repair, how many beds are at this facility,
how many surgeons are on-site, where is this facility, what kind of facility is it.
Here's one in Uganda where quite a lot of the services are provided.
You know, some basic waiting, in terms up here of the variables that you will see on the side
about how many patients they actually saw.
One of the things that we wanted to be able to do that we couldn't do before was to filter that data
so that we could get down to a subset of the population really quickly.
One of the things that the Javascript API let us do really fast was to apply a set of filters
down to this information. If I only want to know really high population areas,
I can remove all those lower population ones, every one from 100 patients or less,
and I can see where the really big providers are very clearly. And I can jump to a country.
Since we're asking not just about patients, we're asking about surgical capacity,
where are surgeons, if I only want to see places that have a fistula surgeon,
I can unclick a permanent surgeon. I can unclick this answer,
so this will only show me large institutions that have a fistula surgeon.
From our point of view, this is looking at what kinds of institutions do we need to support.
This has also been extremely useful for other partners that are aiming to look
at program planning around this area. So the Islamic Development Bank has used this map
to be able to plan interventions in maternal health services and the role that fistula repair plays
within maternal health services, and likewise other NGOs.
Being able to, as Dave was saying earlier, put additional layers in here to be able to look
at some sense of the distribution of certain variables. In this case, relative to the survey data
that we've been collecting, in this case looking at critical variables that are predictors
of the need for obstetrical fistula repair services. Like I said, it's an indicator of failing systems
for maternal care. So in this case, the likelihood that a woman doesn't have a skilled attendant
at the moment of delivery is one of the predictors, and we wanted to look at that,
in this case from a country level and see how that matches up against where we're actually seeing
reports of high incidents of fistula repair surgery. We're going to be iterating on this map
so that we can update the data, make it exportable,
and allow for a lot more bridged interaction.
I think I'm almost out of time but I want to just quickly jump back to a project
that we've been doing, like I said, in the United States looking at Community Analyst.
So again, in the program planning and evaluation mode, we support safety net clinics
which are base-level, primary care institutions. This is looking at the city of Detroit
where we support roughly 23 institutions around the city.
And these are points that represent some of those clinics.
Data is often the biggest stumbling block. Data acquisition and management
is often the biggest stumbling block to being able to rapidly do meaningful analysis.
So recently I'd been thinking about the role that the recent collapse in the housing sector played
within poor communities that we're attempting to help in terms of their medical infrastructure.
So what can I know really fast about the communities
where the clinics we are supporting are actually located in,
the patients that we're actually serving that are proximate to those facilities.
This brings in really quickly, 2010 household income status from the 2010 census,
and again, post it online so I don't have to actually manage it, to filter that down
to get to exactly the census tracks that I'm interested in.
So these are folks that have average household income less than $10,000 annually.
So these are the poorest census tracks in the City of Detroit. You can see a number of the clinics
that we support are either right in there or around there,
so that looks at it from the standpoint of income.
If I wanted then to think about that from the standpoint of vacant housing
and the role that the collapse in housing has had within these neighborhoods,
pulling in information again, in this case from the census, looking at the proportion of housing units
within the census track that have a 25 percent or greater, or less than 25 percent vacancy rates.
As of 2010, this is what the landscape looks like for the housing units that are in the neighborhoods
that the clinics we're trying to support serve. But they've also done these projections
which allow us to time-series this out really quickly. So looking at the estimates
that are at least within ESRI's read on the census data about how the housing market
is going to change within the core downtown City of Detroit,
and you can see that at least the projection, spatial distribution of that projection
looks pretty bad. And we want to be able to then zero in on particular clinics
that are in some of those worst areas, so being able to zero in and pull a report
for one neighborhood that one clinic is located in. So it puts a buffer around there and I can pull stats
for each one of those areas that's proximate to that clinic.
That lets me quickly compile a read on that neighborhood and not just the stats at the clinic,
which is really valuable in that sense for collaboration with other organizations.
We're trying to forecast out what's going to be needed
and what are going to be the real hot-spots that we're going to have to think about supporting
as we go on into the future.
That's an overview of how we've been using GIS software.
And I think we have time for more questions.
Dawn: Thanks, Andrew. Wow, those were some hefty projects there.
Looks like we do have a couple of questions coming in.
I think David might have answered one woman's question,
but if you had any comment there. She said, "Community Analyst provided data
for the Detroit map versus some functionality of the map." and David answered "Both."
Andrew: Yeah, that's right. The data posted is all U.S. Census data.
You could download it yourself from the census, but the census is gigantic
and getting that organized in GIS is often really cumbersome. So it's nice to have it on tap.
And then those, at least those basic GIS functions are embedded in Community Analyst
so being able to buffer it and then pull a report for the buffer,
like how many people are within five kilometers of that point say,
is something that's embedded in Community Analyst, and a bunch more.
David: Yeah, exactly. So it's not only just the data, it's the ability to create your own service areas,
or to bring in your own locations where you're working. When we talk about service area,
it's not only selecting an existing geography and saying, okay, I'm in these zip codes or whatnot,
but you can do what's called a "drive time." So from a place that you start with, a given address,
you say I'm going to drive 30 minutes or an hour, an hour and a half from here,
and the software will actually run out on every possible road network, every possible direction,
and create an area for you which is the area that you can reach in 30 minutes, an hour,
hour and a half from that location. And then you can use that area basically as a cookie cutter
to go cut down through those 11,000 variables that are in Community Analyst
to say what's going on in this geography for nutrition or poverty or income or whatever else.
Andrew: Actually one question came in earlier about web services
and real-time mapping information. Real-time mapping information
comes in the form of a web service, so either a WMS or a KML network link,
something where it's being hosted by a service that's on the Internet.
And this is one of the real — they're called "Open Geospatial Consortium Standards."
One of the real advantages of a cloud environment is that other folks
are maintaining that Internet connection, and you point your web map to that source,
and that source will read the information and display it.
And as it changes, you're not maintaining the change, you're just maintaining the connection.
I see a question here about the accuracy of mapping decline in rural areas.
You know, I think historically that was the case. I think as the example that Dave was talking about
earlier in Tanzania, and at the point where it was really difficult to get a cell phone signal
in a rural area, it was difficult to be able to do accurate point mapping.
A lot of that has changed lately, so the accuracy of point locations
in rural areas has gone up substantially.
Then the other thing that's become really important for mapping of rural areas
has been the increasing distribution of accurate satellite imagery.
There's a variety of different sources and some of those actually are, in the case of emergencies,
are actually dialed up to an even higher level of accuracy
for the International Humanitarian Community. But that availability of satellite imagery
and then of road information, like OpenStreetMap which is actually user-contributed information,
that actually has accurate information for a number of very rural areas in the world,
has become much more widely available. So I think it probably used to be the case
and it still is to some extent obviously relative to poor urban areas, but it's gotten a lot better.
Dawn: Thank you so much, Andrew and David. We actually are one minute over.
I do want to be respectful of people's time. We did have some additional questions that came in.
So thank you so much for what you presented today, and I'm sure you'll help us
with the additional questions on the Community Forum.
We'll provide everyone a link to the Community Forum in the follow-up email that we will send.
I just want to go ahead and close things out. There is an evaluation on the webinar
which we would love for you to fill out. We really do value your feedback,
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Thanks so much to our behind-the-scenes folks from TechSoup who were helping us on the chat.
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