Design for impact framework: Integrating open data and risk communication for decision-making

Advances in technology are generating unprecedented volumes of data. Governments, international agencies, and scientific institutions are increasingly making their data available to planners, civil contingency managers, and responders as open data. Our knowledge, however, of how best to design projects that take advantage of these new data opportunities to create impact is inconsistent and unconsolidated. A clear and validated framework that relates the capture and analysis of risk data to decision-making is missing. Design for Impact Framework: Integrating Open Data and Risk Communication for Decision Making represents a foundational first attempt by Open DRI to address this challenge. It aims to provide project designers with a framework to guide them in developing projects that have a tight handshake between the development of risk data and real world decision-making. The Design for Impact Framework has its intellectual grounding in a review of academic literature related to risk communication, climate information services, civic technology, citizen science, and design for community resilience. It draws heavily on the guiding approaches and tactics used by over 23 successful projects developed to reduce disaster risk and build resilience in an extensive range of geographies and contexts.