Doing One Thing

Abstract

How have we operated broadly as part of the PeaceTech ecosystem, and what have we learnt about how to do PeaceTech? Often big projects start by ‘doing one thing’. I offer two stories relating to how we produced ‘single use’ tools, focused on doing one thing and doing it well.

1 Journeys and Single Steps

The stories that follow illustrate how often PeaceTech develops in response to specific problems. As we saw last chapter, the PeaceTech ecosystem evolved from this approach, and in turn supports PeaceTech as an eclectic set of digital peacebuilding interventions, more than a holistic digitally transformed field. In contrast, WarTech, has developed to digitally transform many practices of war—utterly. Is PeaceTech as an eclectic practice a strength or a weakness?

2 Ceasefires in a Pandemic

When the pandemic came upon us, as researchers with some PeaceTech capacity, we tried to respond. We had always tried to be digitally savvy not just in what we researched, but in how we organised as researchers, even in simple ways. Two years before the pandemic, influenced by how well our Yemen partners were able to work remotely, we had moved to online ways of working as much as possible. We were motivated by our own environmental concerns not to jump on planes or waste time travelling unnecessarily. When the pandemic hit, we looked startlingly prescient.

We immediately started thinking about how the pandemic might playout in the countries we were working in (see Bell, 2020, for initial thoughts). In deeply divided societies experiencing violent conflict, basic public services such as healthcare are often complicated to deliver. How they are delivered can create distrust, or can build trust. Governments may lack a will to treat all people equally, or lack capacity at all, with unfairness exacerbating conflict. Armed groups may occupy areas and control who enters and exits them, and impede access to vital health provisions. Check-points between lines of control can be difficult for citizens to cross. On top of that, conflict itself causes massive health needs in an ongoing way. People are killed and physically and mentally injured; health infrastructure such as hospitals are degraded; and Doctors, who are often internationally mobile, may be difficult to find.

3 UN Secretary General’s Global Ceasefire Call

With the global health threat of the pandemic and a world struggling to respond, the health threats of conflict seemed in a sense more unnecessary and preventable. It was therefore unsurprising that close to the start of the pandemic, the UN Secretary General (UNSG) publicly called for ‘a global ceasefire in all corners of the world to focus together on the true fight—defeating COVID-19’. In the days and weeks that followed over 180 countries, the UN Security Council, regional organisations, civil society groups, peace advocates and millions of global citizens all endorsed the Secretary-General’s ceasefire call.

The question was: would it make any difference? Would people go on ceasefire?

There was some precedent for anticipating ceasefires might follow. Getting humanitarian aid, including access to vaccines, often involves what are sometimes called ‘de-confliction’ agreements (a form of humanitarian agreement). These agreements can involve micro-spaces such as when and how at truck will pass through a check-point and with what permission and protection. Or a ceasefire may operate at a larger geographic area operating across a local area (see Haider, 2022; Dorith et al., 2021).

In any short ceasefire a window of possibility is created. The ceasefire may be agreed to cover a specific moment in time, or apply only to a specific task, but it may somewhat ‘disrupt’ the conflict, shifting its landscape. People can see what life without the conflict is like, and their response can influence armed actors who claim to represent them, to consider moving from conflict. Armed groups can take risks, and find new political opportunities open to them, including forms of international recognition, that give them confidence to move from violent pursuit of their goals. However, armed actors also fear even temporary ceasefires: armed activity is often ‘held together’ by ‘operations’. Particularly for those who operate as non-state armed actors to fight state security forces ceasefires can start in a sense to demobilise them.

4 Rapid Ceasefire ‘Data’

We already collected information about ceasefires as part of our ongoing agreement data collection efforts. Soon a group of practitioners who mediate ceasefires, monitor them, and generally advise parties on how to reach and sustain them, came together to exchange information on how the UN Secretary General’s call was being implemented and how to support the ceasefires, under the auspices of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). The group involved peacebuilding organisations, individual mediators, mediators from the UN Mediation Support Unit (MSU), and researchers with expertise on ceasefires. Collectively the group had direct contacts into a large number of active conflict situations.

Ceasefires are commitments by those involved doing the fighting, to stop fighting, temporarily or permanently. They can also be called truces or armistices. They involve armed actors committing to each other, often through signed documents also endorsed by other international actors, to stop fighting. These agreements often need to be detailed. ‘Stopping fighting’ needs defined. Does it involve all forms of fighting, or do they need to be listed specifically: shooting bombing, but what about things like kidnapping, or ‘recruiting’ (which can often be forcible and connected with kidnapping). Or rape and use of sexual violence? Does the ceasefire need to include things like ‘moving troops’ and ‘moving heavy weaponry’ as well as actual violence? What will it take to ensure that people stick to the ceasefire: demarked zones that armed actors pull back to? Some sort of monitoring commission? Who will be on the monitoring commission, armed actors, citizens, international actors?

Explore Ceasefires

You can explore further how ceasefires work in our peace agreement data, by searching on ‘ceasefires’ at the PA-X website. For an interesting project on both written and unwritten ceasefires see the ETH Zurich ceasefire dataset of also one of the collaborators in the ‘ceasefires in a time of Covid-19 tool’. For our ongoing analysis of ceasefires see our key findings, and policy recommendations.

The group exchanged information on pandemic ceasefires in a sense generating ‘data’ on what was happening with ceasefires. Surveying country experts is a recognised form of data collection. While not set up to provide a comprehensive survey, collectively the group had up-to-date information as experts and mediators connected to many of the conflicts and to multiple ceasefire initiatives. Researchers in the group who were already engaged in documenting ceasefires, with established methods of unearthing them, could add to this, such as ETH Zurich’s Govinda Clayton, and ourselves at PeaceRep Edinburgh. Triangulating this information gave a comprehensive understanding of what type of ceasefires were happening, what were not, and what the nature and impact of the ceasefires were.

5 The Covid Ceasefires Tracker

To support the group’s thinking, and to make information more widely available we suggested building a small online interface for recording and exploring them. This was to become the Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19 Tracker. Originally, the aim was to pull together all the information we had, to create a small dataset, to enable easier ongoing monitoring and public information, and perhaps even engage people in contributing ceasefire information.

We were able to offer to create the interface because we had designed a previous database to have a structure that could easily be repurposed and reused—the Amnesties, Conflict and Peace Agreement Database providing open access to Professor Louise Mallinder’s data.

5.1 Creating a Dataset

However, having information about Covid ceasefires and constructing a coherent dataset was more complicated than we had anticipated despite a level of ceasefire expertise. It is not possible to simply ask—‘is there a ceasefire, yes or no’. We found many initiatives being reported as ceasefires that were armed group ‘no-first-strike’ policies. These may look similar to a ceasefire, but technically involve a unilateral commitment not to undertake armed action if none is taken against you. Yet, discussions also revealed that sometimes one group’s ‘no-first-strike’ policy, can cause another group to reciprocate positively with its own no-first-strike policy. Issues such as these meant that defining ‘what is a ceasefire’ and classifying them, needed thought, something we engage in a lot as regards agreements!

The process revealed substantive research insights (Wise et al., 2021). Different groups were calling ceasefires for different reasons. Some were unrelated to Covid-19 or the UNSG’s call, and had been reached because of a particular moment in the conflict, perhaps in a country not much affected by Covid at that point. Some armed groups who were not very active, in low-level conflicts, declared a ceasefire as a way of reminding the world ‘we are still here, we are still fighting for our cause’.

Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19 Tracker

An open access tool that tracks ceasefires and related events, such as commitments to move towards a reduction in violence, or subsequent ceasefire breakdowns, which have occurred during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It is a collaborative project between PeaceRep Edinburgh, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the Centre for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich, Conciliation Resources, MeiatEUr (European Forum for International Mediation and Dialogue), and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), with contribution also from the UN MSU in the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. The data is available: (a) on a timeline, which can be filtered by region, country and declaration type; (b) through a search tool that displays information in entry boxes, and (c) on a map where it can be triangulated with Covid-19 infection data. A formal write up of the tracker is in The Lancet, where it received interest from medical professionals in the field (Allison et al., 2020).

Interestingly, this detail also meant that we did not call the tracker the ‘Covid Ceasefire Tracker’ even though we use that name as shorthand. As some ceasefires were not responsive to Covid, and sometimes it was hard to tell what the motivation was, we felt ‘in a time of Covid-19’ was more accurate.

To make the different types of ceasefire more visible and searchable, we then categorised ceasefires as: unilateral; unilateral-reciprocated’; bi-lateral; multilateral. We also found that when ceasefires were declared they were often declared for specific durations of time—e.g., three months, at the end of which time armed actors sometime ‘extended’ the ceasefire. We registered ceasefires as ‘temporary’ if a clear end date was stated, but did not classify any as ‘permanent’ (because, how long is permanent?).

We registered ceasefires as unilateral where they were made by one conflict party, and bi- or multi-lateral if they included some element of agreement between armed actors. If a unilateral ceasefire was positively responded to by a (unilateral) ceasefire from opponents, we marked these ceasefires as unilateral-reciprocated, which meant that people could see that there was a de facto ‘bilateral’ element to the arrangements, even though made unilaterally.

To present the full picture we included a category also of ‘Update’ to include ceasefire extensions or terminations, so that viewers could find out if the ceasefire was still formally in place. We also included ‘related events’ as part of the picture of what was in force—for example when a government or group rejected the unilateral ceasefire of another group. The UNSG ceasefire call itself was included as a ‘related event’.

5.2 Iterative Design and Co-creating with End Users

When we presented the interface back to the group it generated discussion, and someone suggested—a timeline rather than a searchable tool might be more useful to end-users, and maybe a map. We had capacity to do both. For some time we had used a little timeline tool from NorthEastern University, Knight Lab, US, designed for open access re-use, for our main peace agreement data. It is available for ‘no-code’ use, so that it timelines can be created without coding skills. However, they also give access to the code to customise and adapt the tool. We could therefore simply share Knight Lab’s simple google doc tables, for people to input data. This created a quick and easy mechanism for cross group collaboration.

However, we also developed computer code to customise the timeline for our version, and a mechanism to import and refresh anytime a new ceasefire happened, or an existing one terminated. The customization enabled different ways of moving through the timeline, and exploring it by country, or by type of ceasefire. We also used our visualization capacity to put the data onto maps. We worked to create toggle mechanisms on a map, to explore types of ceasefire, or regional patterns.

At each point in design, we went back to end-users—mainly those in the support group who were the perfect model of our end-user, but also others in country field missions who are part of our own practitioner ‘ecosystem’.

We were not, however, the only project producing Covid data and interfaces. Countries were all trying to match health capacities with need, and as a result health dashboards proliferated and saw increasing innovation. Elsewhere in our University social scientists explored the phenomenon of ‘dashboarding’ (see Falisse & McAteer, 2022). We all became a connected through University funding modalities, but also because we had found ways to work together previously meaning our work could draw on a wider knowledge base. This wider research infrastructure supported us to situate our work in wider questions of how data and visualization connected to outcomes.

5.3 Reuse and Repurpose: Future-proofing All Tools

For our main PA-X Peace Agreement Database we have been developing a thing called an API, or ‘Automated Programme Interface’. That is a mechanism whereby you make your data structure public and ‘readable’ by others elsewhere. An ‘open API’ means that others can automate pulling your data into their platforms. APIs provide a good solution to the barriers of institutional ownership of data (the fact that people want their data on their own website). It means that you can have your own website with your institutional branding, but that data can be brought together by a range of people with their data, independently of long and complicated legal agreements, and without any loss to your ownership.

John Hopkins University was at that point providing some of the world’s best infection data on Covid supporting world-wide monitoring. They made their API public with clear terms and conditions for how you could use it. We could therefore ‘pull in’ their data onto our ceasefire map, which we did in ‘bubbles’ that showed how and when ceasefires called overlapped with infection levels. We thought this was interesting to do, although it did not in the end yield any startling insights. To be honest, we did not mind because it helped us learn how to use APIs, and learn to overlay data of different types and create user-friendly ways to toggle between views (see further, Bhattacharya et al., 2021). This was a capacity we wanted as part of our wider ‘peace analytics’ ambition.

5.4 Funding

Originally, we started working on this project out of our interest and wish to be relevant to attempts to end conflict, and support pandemic relief. However, over time, we started to get funding for this and other work, from a mechanism called the Covid Collective (CC) that brought together a range of practical research projects across disciplines and institutions. The CC was fantastic as it gave us a wider set of researchers and end-users to engage with. This funding also supported longer-term collection of the data than we could otherwise have managed. We kept collecting data until March 2022. At that point we felt that there was no real relationship between ceasefires and a pandemic that had largely eased so we brought the data collection to an end. Interestingly, John Hopkins also stopped collecting Covid 19 infection data from 10 March 2023.

5.5 Ceasefire Tracker Outcomes: Quick Evaluation

The Tracker was useful to enable a wide range of people to learn quickly what was going on as regards ceasefires during Covid. It was the most detailed and accurate data that existed, and more detailed and accurate than news reports of ceasefires where we found often to be wrong.

It played a role in supporting particular ceasefire efforts. Some of this impact continues, as we all learnt more about ceasefires in the process, and in particular added analysis to understanding the long-term effect of short-term ceasefires. As double disruption means that conflict are less able to be resolved in a ‘comprehensive peace accord’, we are currently considering how various types of humanitarian agreement create ‘islands of peace’ through initiatives such as temporary ceasefires, that might unwind aspects of a conflict that cannot be resolved through a comprehensive agreement, including in Ukraine (Wittke, 2023).

Remote information, such as our data, played a particular role in a pandemic, where international actors were less present in country than at other time. The Tracker remains useful to informing ceasefire construction more generally, and we have been able to use it to consider when and how ‘health ceasefires’ work and do not work, by bringing this data together with other historic cases of ‘vaccine ceasefires’ (See Russell et al., 2021). Long-term there is little to no cost to keep in place an historic dataset and tool that has ongoing relevance to conflict resolution.

5.6 Doing PeaceTech: Covid Tracker Lessons

The project indicates the different elements that the project had to have to be successful:

Data collection and creating a dataset. Technical data collection had to be triangulated with ceasefire expert information, and analysed to understand and classify ceasefires into a dataset.

Focus on end-users. Thinking about why people might want to look at the data: in this case primarily because they would want to understand whether anyone was responding to the pandemic ceasefire call, and whether other ceasefires were being agreed during the pandemic, even if not technically ‘in response’.

Analysis of the data. To understand what was going on: how and why ceasefires were agreed. Here again the connection to a group of experts was invaluable because it supported understanding ceasefires that helped us categorise the data in ways that made sense of it, and then give access to data capable of providing answers to practitioner questions.

Visualising. We had to design a visualization of the data that was intuitive to the same types of experts we were engaging with. To do this we needed capacity to work with visualisers, and database designers. This involved writing clear ‘specifications’ in language that everyone understood, and ongoing liaison with visualisers through iterative design processes.

Data ownership. We had to deal with the attribution of ownership. Here the data interface was produced at University of Edinburgh, but the group had co-created the data. We enabled joint ownership by making the ceasefire tracker able to be i-framed into any website, so that anyone in the group could ‘own’ the outcome institutionally. The joint ownership of the product was then acknowledged through use of logos rather than needing legal agreements, although getting organisational permissions still required a level of bureaucracy.

Past ‘future-proofing’ as design. The project was also enabled by previous technical work and ‘reusing and repurposing’, assisted by the ways in which we had designed past interfaces to be able to be re-customised for other uses.

Low-code speed versus bespoke capacity. Moving fast was enabled by using cool ‘no-code’ tools from other projects, and from the fact that other projects had made their APIs open access with clear terms of use for having permission. APIs pulled through updated data in an automated way without us having to invest further time and work to update manually.

Funding. The fact that we received funding was also useful. A relatively modest amount enabled us to extend data collection and spend some time analysing it in ways that are useful for future pandemics or temporary ceasefires.

6 The PeaceFem App Story

The PeaceFem App also arose out of collaboration in a practice-based project. The project was called ‘Enhancing Women’s Leadership for Sustainable Peace in Fragile Contexts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region’, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).

The ‘Enhancing Women’s Leadership’ project brought together several project partners, including ourselves, under the auspices of UN Women. Its central purpose was to enable peace processes to be more successful and more inclusive of women, and more reflective of their needs and demands. You can see a fuller explanation of the project and what it achieved in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen here.

As one element of this project, we sought to make data and knowledge on gender inclusion more accessible to mediators and to women—and of course to women mediators! We have really good data on peace agreement provision on women in the PA-X Peace Agreement Database in what we call PA-X Gender. This data serves as an example of what can be achieved in peace processes, and acts as guidance or inspiration to support drafting for those seeking to have peace agreements deal with specific gendered issues.

Women and mediators find previous drafts on gender useful, but also want to know ‘how did those provisions get there’—what did women do to get their needs written into peace agreements? And ‘what happened next’—was the agreement successful, were the provisions implemented, and was the situation of women improved?

Answers to those questions are not simple and not easily quantifiable. However, another of the partners in the project Inclusive Peace, a ‘think-and-do’ tank focused in particular women’s inclusion, in peace processes, had some answers. It had produced a set of country case studies that documented both the actions that women had undertaken to try to influence peace processes, such as ‘mass mobilisation’, and ‘being at the negotiating table’, and some of the outcomes. We were also aware that another project (Towards Inclusive Peace), whose work we used a lot, led by Jacqui True at Monash University, had also designed case studies with a quantitative methodology for assessing gender provision strength, and implementation of provisions. To supplement our data we reached out also to collaborate. The full story of how we brought all this data as a piece of research and what we learnt, is told by Laura Wise (2023).

6.1 PeaceFem—What Is It?

The result was the PeaceFem mobile App, which can be used on Android and iPhones. It illustrates women’s inclusion in peace processes around the world. PeaceFem provides information about strategies women’s rights advocates have used to influence peace agreements, information about the enabling and constraining factors that shaped the space for influence, and the gender provisions in the peace agreements that resulted and information as to how well they were implemented.

6.2 Doing PeaceTech: PeaceFem Lessons

For my ‘how to’ purposes of storytelling, the following were the lessons of PeaceFem, and they overlap with those of the ceasefire tracker.

End-users. The project grew out of a need from and connection with end-users, and a wish to have a small but very instantly accessible way to support women in peace mediation, in particular in the Middle East.

Data interoperability and literacy. A key initial issue was what case studies to focus on, and whether we had data on all the issues across those case studies. In other words, what did our data collectively allow us to do? What gaps existed? To what extent did ‘where’ we could data match across case studies, match with the peace processes that were useful for women to have information about.

Iterative design process, and complexity of contracting. On this project we needed to bring together end users, two other data producers, an App-design team, a visual designer, and UN Women who were the funder and commissioner, together with our expertise in data matching and conceptualising how the App could work. At University of Edinburgh we brought our peace agreement data and expertise in digital innovation, including how to write technical specifications, and knowledge of the issues to be traversed technically and legally.

All of this was quite complicated in practice. UN Women contracted all the partners, and the App company who were based in India. However, we led the design process and were their main point of contact for the work. So contracting the work, and implementing the work were done by different organisations. This affected capacity for iterative design. We had a good working relationship with the App company staff who were very competent. But it was difficult for them to price App development tasks in ways that would allow for an element of iterative design. It was also difficult for us to work just through specifying rather technically, rather than ‘co-creating’.

While excellent technical experts, the App company had no ‘domain’ expertise in the subject matter, and distance and contracting meant there was little opportunity to build knowledge across their team and ours (although we do feel we all ended with good relationships). This meant the process was more ‘back-and-forth’ and demanding that our usual one. An additional complication was that UN Women also had their own ‘designer’ who in essence was to provide a new ‘skin’ (that is new set of fonts and colours) for the prototype provided by the App company. In the peace and conflict field things like colours can be complicated politically. This added a layer of complexity in a three-way relationship related to the usability of the App, albeit one that improved the end-product.

The University of Edinburgh team did an initial ‘product design’ of the types of relationships between the data that would be needed, and the type of App interface that would make those relationships easy to explore. We looked at other App design and where and how they enabled navigation, including for very different purposes, such as language Apps, to think through what types of ways they enabled data to be searched, and navigated.

Licencing arrangements to use the data. The three research organisations providing data—ourselves, Inclusive Peace and Monash University, all had to sign licencing agreements with UN Women, who technically ‘own’ the App. For this this was complicated as our Intellectual Property includes not just our coding and country data, but the design of the relationships between it, which were built into the App. So getting the right licence took time across partners, even though everyone’s data was already open access and there was good will for it to be made available and used in this way. None of us could risk inadvertently creating an accidental intellectual property obstacle to continuing to develop and use our own underlying data in the future.

Languages. It was critical that the App was available in Arabic as well as English. This meant getting translation and we have found that Arabic translation needs really proofed by local language speakers to see if it really works. It also meant that the App design and navigation had to be one that worked not just reading left to right but right to left. Having Arabic speakers on our team was really helpful. The content of the App needed translated—but also the ‘rubric’ of the search terms, and this was something that was easy to forget.

Future-proofing. All the partners wished to extend the App to include more case studies over time. We made sure technical specifications included provision of a ‘back end’ that was user-friendly to load new data. This meant thinking through all the components of a new country entry that would need uploaded, such as the country map.

In practice, the App attracted a lot of interest beyond the Middle East, so we recently updated it. This involved adding new languages. We had budget restrictions so added French, which at least makes the App more accessible in areas of Africa where English is not spoken, and also Indonesian, and Burmese to make the App more accessible in conflicts in Asia. We had no further money for translations, so we worked to future-proof the back end to enable new languages to be uploaded in the future without further App design.

We found that personnel within UN Women changed over time, so that relationship had to be built over again with people that were less familiar with what the project was about, and how to commission the work from the App company, or even what the previous licencing arrangements for all our data was. This type of complication is common when working with international organizations, and points to the importance of documenting the project as you go, across those involved.

In terms of developing the App further, we are limited by what is appropriate for App to do. It cannot provide a comprehensive data interface and information, it can only make short-form information accessible. This is also important to keeping the download size usable for women with limited data download capacity.

6.3 PeaceFem Outcomes: Quick Evaluation

PeaceFem is downloaded by women all over the world and can be used online and offline. Many of the Middle Eastern peace processes it was designed for, sadly did not progress. While some still contain possibilities for agreement, it is also likely that women will struggle to be heard as the focus is on deals between armed actors. The App is perhaps most useful in providing information quickly, that can be useful to people drafting clauses, or thinking about how issues can be dealt with in a peace agreement. It also works more generally as a ‘bill board’, for both the types of activism that women used, and the types of provisions they were able to influence. While App gives basic information, it contains clear links to underlying detail of the case studies and partner websites. Women can use the App as an entry point for a deeper dive into comparative material. The App connected to the wider ‘Enhancing Leadership’ project that had ‘regional and global convenings’ of women mediators and peacebuilders regularly, which brought women together across countries to learn from each other, in what was in-effect a large global end-user group.

7 Work Flows

To what extent do the Covid ceasefire and PeaceFem projects give an indication of a digital innovation ‘work flow’? I would suggest it is the following:

• Identification of a problem. In our experience we always in a sense co-identified issues that digital innovation might help with, with people in the field. This seems to me the only way it can be done. It does not work to say ‘we have a tool, how can we use it’. Neither can one be vague about what the digital tool aims to do, such as ‘we want to help end conflict during the pandemic’. A more specific question such as: ‘how can we collectively monitor ceasefires during Covid and make the data available’, is a better statement of a problem that digital innovation can help with.

• Identify to what extent you have information or expertise to address that problem. How good is your data, is it the right data, do you trust it, is that reasonable, and how could you improve it? Do you need to form new collaborations? In particular:

  • What relationships of trust do you have with others who seem to have relevant pieces of information or data to bring to the table and can you find a way to collaborate?

  • What are the ‘ownership’ and legal difficulties with bringing that data together poses? Are these solved by licences, and do you have organisational capacity or support to do that? Are they solved by simpler non-legal agreements on how the data will be presented and used and who will be acknowledged and thanked?

• Identify the end-users and establish mechanisms of feedback. For us and our partner organisations this is an ongoing process.

• Work iteratively (again!). Improving digital tools over time, based on feedback from end-users leads to better results. This requires thinking about whether and how your relationships with technical providers have been established and will be paid for over time.

• Try to locate yourself into a wider ecosystem on the very specific subject/practice area, as well as within ‘PeaceTech’. In our case, it was vital for both PeaceFem and the Covid Ceasefire Tracker, to be in a wider research and practice set of relationships with people in the areas of gender and peacebuilding, and ceasefire mediation. It was also valuable to be part of a wider research community beyond the peace and conflict community, interested in how dashboards, their visualisation, and ‘things to do with Covid’ were being developed at that time.

8 Using the PeaceTech Ecosystem

Business analysts seeking to understand ‘what works’ in digital transformation have noted that trying to implement digital transformation across your business requires a set of commitments to embrace change, which often includes spending money differently, and even staffing organisations differently. In the business world, most transformation project fail. We will examine the reasons further in Chap. 12.

For us the main challenge was: it can be really hard to get even apparently simple digital transformations to deliver and be useful!

Knowing you need different forms of expertise, finding the right experts and bringing them together, enabling them to have a conversation across very different types of expertise with very different language, and actually producing a good and useful PeaceTech product, is in fact very difficult. In our experience as ‘PeaceTech entrepreneurs’, there are real obstacles and challenges at each stage. The projects I described above nearly fell at all of the little hurdles of inter-organisational conversation, licencing, contracting, and just because turning qualitative and quantitative data into a small usable tool, is conceptually quite difficult.

I always felt that ‘doing one thing well’ was what we did best. But I felt that this was a sign of our limitations, and reflected where we were on the learning curve. In fact, having now worked to embrace change by re-training somewhat myself, I have been encouraged to learn that the advice from the most ambitious digital innovators in the world is often to begin with a distinct problem to which digital innovation appears to offer a smart solution, and begin there. Do one thing, do it well, and move forward from there.

The idea of a PeaceTech ecosystem as set out in the last chapter is a valuable one as it operates to build a sense of community across what are quite disparate enterprises. In so doing, and in PeaceTech enablers bringing people together in actual networks, the ecosystem has a reality that can be very valuable for finding people and initiatives that inspire, and even practical support. But it can also at times feel a bit remote. It seems to operate at a super high-powered level that can feel a bit competitive. BIG INITIATIVES can look impossibly impressive, whether they deliver anything immediately useful or not. Listen carefully though, and a lot of things are ‘proof of concept’—that is, showing that something can be done, but not quite delivering that ‘something’ as a final usable product (we too have done this by the way, and perhaps even sounded impressive).

Ecosystem builders themselves can appear impossibly well-connected. You wonder will they be bothered with you and are you really needy enough, or is your idea good enough, to ask for their time and energies. There can also be a slight feeling of—who to reach out to—sometimes everyone seems to be offering ‘PeaceTech Central’ or claiming to be ‘the one’ to deliver the coordination the field needs and centralise its resources,—to frame and map PeaceTech the best, to provide the network to end all networks.

Or maybe this is just me!

Yet in practice, various PeaceTech networks all co-exist, collaborate and are proliferating.

Perhaps the best advice is: don’t expect to feel connected to the big and apparently connected PeaceTech world ‘out there’. Focus any PeaceTech initiative focus on the problem you are trying to solve. Build the connections you need when you need them, and, inevitably, these will be with those engaged with similar problems to you. Actively draw on the ecosystem when useful, and seek to connect what you have done back into the ecosystem. Be prepared to be in multiple networks, to the extent you have time.

In practice, you will probably need to create your own immediate ecosystem—your own little garden as it were. You may even need to build mini-ecosystems around particular projects, experimentally, and responsively. Sometimes getting from the ‘nearly there’ to the ‘usable there’ will take years of further development and work. Some projects will falter, but the failures will enable other projects. Other projects will deliver and thrive.

Questions

• 1. How convinced are you by ‘one good thing’ projects?

• 2. Can you see other lessons from the stories?

• 3. HAVE YOU DOWNLOADED PeaceFem? You know you want to.

• 4. HAVE YOU EXPLORED the ceasefires tracker? Did you realise all this was going on in the pandemic?