We want to provide access to user-friendly, intelligible and helpful data on humanitarian assistance. Ultimately, we think that we can do better by using new technology and data visualisation techniques to help make the data more accessible.
As a first step, we want to share our own humanitarian data sets, working spreadsheets and analyses via downloadable Excel files. Some of these files are annotated.
We're also starting to share the data on third-party sites like Many Eyes, which means that we can create visualisations and hopefully encourage others to use our data to do similar things.
Publishing our data in Google Spreadsheets enables us to create interactive Motion Charts. Google Spreadsheets are user-friendly and provide programmatic access to the data.
If you can't find the humanitarian data you need, or if what you're reading isn't clear, let us know as it will help us to improve it. Equally, if you think you can help us better visualise our data or have any suggestions, please do let us know.
To view Motion Charts, you will need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player, which you can download from adobe.com
To view many eyes charts, you will need the latest version of Java, which you can download from java.com