Overview

The Digital Situation Report (DSR) 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.

Background

The DSR is a direct recommendation from OCHA's Field Reporting Review (FRR). The FRR was a two year process that consulted with 1,500+ humanitarians about OCHA's reporting efforts. Clear demands of moving OCHA's products to more real time (vs Bulletins being weeks-out-of-date), moving the content online & into a consumable format on all devices, and reducing the field-level burden on publishing such reports are all driving factors in the DSR project.

Presentation

For more details on the DSR, you can see the presentation given at the OCHA Communications Workshop in Nairobi in April 2019 as well as the Questions & Answers (Dec 2018) document.

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.