The Digital Situation Report aims to simplify OCHA's current portfolio of field reporting products (Flash Update, Situation Report and Humanitarian Bulletin) by moving out of static PDFs and consolidating into a single online format. It will be more dynamic, visual, and analytical. The platform will save users' time by automating distribution and design.
As the system develops further, it will be adapted to pull data and information automatically from other platforms, which will promote consistency across products and facilitate access to wider analysis. By moving to modular, online content, OCHA will advance significantly in its humanitarian reporting.
Technology
We used the following technologies to produce the Digital Situation Reports:
We chose Contentful as our content infrastructure in order to focus development efforts on presentation and publishing across various channels, instead of spending effort building and maintaining a backend. We used Vue.js and Nuxt to build the frontend. Vue enables us to build a robust, modern web application. Nuxt provides server-side integration to output static HTML that does not require JavaScript to display the site's content. We serve the frontend using NGINX. The code is open source on GitHub.