00:00:00 Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome to today's webinar "Creating thematic maps with ActivityInfo." My name is Fay Candiliari and I work with the ActivityInfo team writing various guides and documentation to help you use the platform. Together with Mr. Alex Bertram, the technical director of BeDataDriven and founder of ActivityInfo, we will be hosting this webinar broadcasting from The Hague in The Netherlands. We're excited to see such a big interest from all over the world so thank you very much for joining us.

Before we start, I would like to quickly share some housekeeping rules for everybody. Your microphone is muted, but you should all be able to see the shared screen. The webinar is being recorded, and you will receive the recording after the webinar. It will also be available on our website in a few days' time where you can also find recordings of previous webinars. During the webinar, you can send your questions via the Q&A which you can find in the toolbar.

Now I would like to introduce to you Mr. Alex Bertram who will be presenting today. Mr. Bertram is a graduate of the American University School of International Service and started his career in international assistance 15 years ago working with IOM in Kunduz in Afghanistan and then with Altaai consulting in Kabul where he worked on the planning and analysis of large-scale nationwide surveys. He later worked as an information management officer with UNICEF in DRC. Frustrated with the time required to build data collection systems for each new program, he worked on the team that developed ActivityInfo, a simplified platform for M&E data collection. In 2010, he left UNICEF to start BeDataDriven and develop ActivityInfo full time. Since then, he's worked with organizations in more than 50 countries to deploy ActivityInfo for monitoring and evaluation. Welcome Alex, and without any further delay, the virtual stage is yours.

Thanks so much, Fay. It's really a pleasure to introduce a feature we've been working on; a lot of improvements to the mapping functionality this year in ActivityInfo. I wanted to highlight some of the different use cases and really walk step-by-step through using the tools to achieve goals for humanitarian assistance and monitoring evaluation.

This is the agenda for today. We're going to walk through a couple of exercises and I'm going to take two breaks in the middle and then at the end for question and answers. We will also share the steps I am following after the presentation so that if you want to go back afterwards and do these exercises on your own, you can do that as well. Though if you've got two screens available or maybe just one screen with two windows, I encourage you to follow along as well. To that end, all of the exercises that we're going to do today are going to use data from our template library.

00:06:30 Designing 3W maps

We're going to start with looking at 3W maps: who does what where. This comes from the Simple 3W template database that's on the website. Let's just take a quick moment to look at the data that we're working with. The idea is that this is actual data I adapted from some published data from Myanmar. It's a bit old at this point but the point is just to have some information to play with. It takes the form of a very simple table of activity. This is 3W not 4W, so we're not capturing indicators yet. This is a useful tool in the onset of an emergency to just start to do gap analysis to see who's working where. This is data by organization, the sector we're working in, and the project title and status.

Immediately from this table view, you can switch to the map view. This will bring up all of these points on the map where you can explore the data. If you zoom into a single activity you can see the details of the sector here and if you zoom into a cluster here you can see the two activities that are there. This is the reviewing view, but ActivityInfo also has the ability to do more interesting analysis. We might want to show which different sectors are working and where on the map. To do that we're going to use the analysis feature. You just click on the 'Analyze' button here and we're going to start with a map.

This will start you off with building a report for this particular form. You can do something simple like just drag the count of all records and you can see something similar to what we saw before. These are just symbols showing the projects, but we can also do an icon. We can choose to represent these points on the map using icons and we have a pretty extensive library of icons here. So we can choose for example maybe something specific for education or food security.

Of course, at this point, we're still showing all of the sites; we're showing all of the projects whether they're food-related or not. To make this change, to actually change this layer so that it's only showing the food interventions, I'm going to use some formulas here. Formulas are a powerful way in ActivityInfo to select and to control exactly what you want to see. I'm going to open up the formula editor and I'm going to craft a filter to show only the sector name, specifically the food sector.

We can add multiple layers to the map. For example, if I want to show the non-Covid related activities, I can choose from this list. I can change my layer name and this will show me all of the other activities. A thematic map is one that shows data using different colors or symbols. We can do that by clicking on analyze and clicking on 'Add map'. From here we're going to build a thematic map that's composed of one or more layers. Each layer on the map is going to use different symbols and different colors to show different types of data.

I will add another layer. I'm going to go back to 'add calculated field' and I'm going to add this time sector name and I'm going to choose the health sector. Again, I have a new set of points and I'm going to change this to a health icon. These icons come from OCHA by the way; this is a really great collection of icons. I'm just going to use this clinic icon here and maybe make it red. Now again, this is a key property of a thematic map: we have a combination of two different layers and each layer is distinguished by having different symbols and colors on the map. This way the people that you're sharing this data with can rapidly see it.

00:15:45 Q&A: 3W maps

Before we move on to mapping quantitative indicators, I'm going to break now for questions. Bernadette has asked how is the data being mapped: ISO admin names, coordinates, or other? That's a good question. What I've done here for this example database is we're using reference fields. In this reference data folder, I have this Admin 2 level which covers all of the second-level administrative levels in Myanmar with their coordinates. In the reporting here, I'm not actually asking partners for the lat/long of the point. We're using a reference field so that they can select from that reference list the second-level admin and that's how ActivityInfo knows where to plot the points.

Ali asks can you export this map to PDF? No, these maps are interactive maps. These are maps that basically reveal data as you zoom out and inspect. I believe you can take a screenshot of this if you wanted, but putting this interactive map in a static context is different. We will be showing later in the presentation how you can share this with other people. We'll be doing a webinar later this year on doing static thematic maps for reports or documents, but the focus here is on interactive maps.

Maroon asks about changing the size of the icon. No, we don't have that feature here yet but that's a good suggestion. Bo asks how can we import an Excel file and make sure geotagging fields are functional. That's a great question, Bo. That's a little bit beyond the scope of this presentation but you can use ActivityInfo's importer to take a spreadsheet with a list of coordinates and just copy and paste that into the importer.

Alia asks is there a reference for all the regions you recommend. Actually, that's something that we include with ActivityInfo. We maintain a geodatabase of all the countries in the world. So when you're designing your forms, you just go in here to 'Form settings', add a reference field and then you'll see the geodatabase here and you can choose for example Afghanistan district or province.

00:21:30 Mapping quantitative indicators

We're going to turn now to an example of mapping quantitative indicators. I'm going to go back to the IDP response template. You can also find this under support templates: IDP site assessment and response. This is based on some data collected and published by IOM, adapted for training purposes. This is a set of site assessments. Compared to the last example, here the geographic data is collected with a mobile device using ActivityInfo's mobile data collection tool where the geographic coordinates are entered directly.

We have assessments planning followed up by a distribution. For the distributions that are completed, we collect a number of indicators about this activity. For example, the number of families that received an NFI kit, the number of women that received an NFI kit, as well as photos from the distribution. We can quickly review this on the map so we can see where these activities are, but if we want to show a specific kind of information—in this case, the number of beneficiaries—we need to use the analyze feature.

I'm going to click on 'Add map'. This time I'm just going to drag and drop some of my quantitative indicators. I'm going to drag and drop the number of families that received an NFI kit. You can see that this is plotted using proportional circles. The circle represents 1,000 families and it goes down to the smallest. We can see where we are working and how many people we've helped. You can see that it's concentrated around these urban centers.

You have some options here. For example, we can choose the color of the circle and you can additionally choose how to combine multiple points. If we zoom in you'll see that there are actually several sites here in Bangui but this clustering says that we want to see the sum of all of these indicators together so that as we zoom out all of those beneficiaries get added together. If you were looking at an indicator like water quality, then it might be more appropriate to use the average.

It can be noted you can also combine the proportional circles with an icon. For example, we might want to see all of the sites. Let's just plot all of the sites as an icon so that we can see where the sites are compared to where we've provided assistance. Here you can see that there are some areas where we've done assessments and identified an IDP settlement, but we haven't done a distribution. That can be useful information to have.

00:26:00 Supporting needs assessments with maps

Just to stay with this example of the IDP sites, I want to highlight another use case for working with maps, and that's for helping with site assessment. Here we're trying to look at the big picture to communicate with donors and other actors. But maps can be also very powerful for providing a detailed view, especially in areas where you might have assessments coming in from the field but you might not be able to get to all of the sites due to security problems or accessibility.

I'm going to come back to my list here of IDP sites and click on the 'Map view'. I want to highlight some of the tools that are here. For example, we can change the base map that we're using. We can choose from a satellite base map that gives us an overview of where these sites are located and what environment they might be in. If we're looking at these sites in Bangui, you can actually zoom in and look to see that this is a site in a fairly densely populated urban area, near existing shelters and homes, and close to a main road. That's a site that might be pretty accessible.

The other thing that we have here are these population density maps. These are maps that are based on statistical analysis done by the WorldPop project. They combine census data with remote sensing and household accounts to basically have a 100 meter by 100 meter grid to show you how densely populated the area is based on the best available information. You can see that for Bangui there's a real drop off here on the outskirts and we can use this information to assess remote sites as well.

We can analyze this and save this if we want to create a map that we want to share with other people. We're going to add a map and again we're going to use the number of families present and then we're going to change the base map here to population density. Here we can see the density compared with the size of the displacement. This gives you a richer view of the situation that we're facing.

00:29:30 Q&A: Indicators and assessments

Let's pause here for some questions. Muhammad asked, "I understand ActivityInfo just to review the activity and location not to report it or publish it statically right?" If you just want to have an image of this map you can make a screenshot and then you can have that screenshot used as a static map. My colleague has a good point, if you do want to export this map to PDF you can actually convert to a notebook and print this to PDF if you need to.

Ibrahim asks "how to add polygons". We don't have that feature yet. What I do a lot is I'll go into ArcGIS and QGIS and calculate the centroids of polygons and then import those. Richer support for geometry is something on our roadmap but we're not there yet.

Maroon has a feature request: a layer selection to be able to turn off on all layers. That's a good idea. At this point, you can only delete a layer, you can't really hide it which might be useful.

Ted asks "How do you save?" You can save a report which is always going to be based on the latest data. You just click on the save button and then that will appear in your list of reports.

Kouame asks "can we define the range in the quantitative map?" That's a good question. We've tried to do that automatically. We try to pick automatically a scale that fits all zoom levels so that the scale stays the same as you zoom in and out so that you can compare sites. So there's no manual control there.

Lady asks "In offline mode the fieldwork coordinate is captured or the coordinate where its loaded online?" If you're in offline mode this will be stored offline and then as soon as you have an internet connection it will be synchronized. You don't have to manually synchronize.

00:34:45 Crowdsourcing and sharing geographic data

In the time that's remaining, let's look at crowdsourcing and sharing geographic data. For this, I'm going to use a third template that's on our website: the damage reports database. This is based on a scenario where immediately after a disaster or crisis you may need to crowdsource information about where there is damage or where there are problems either from partners or from the community.

For that, we're using a feature of ActivityInfo called Collection Links. The Collection Links allow you to design a form and grab a link. As long as the Collection Link is open you can share this link anywhere, so you can share it quickly with partners so that they can just start providing data without having to worry about logging in. Or with the public, so you can put this link just on a Twitter feed and anybody who has that link can enter data.

This dummy data I've actually taken from a real disaster but from 50 years ago when The Netherlands suffered its worst humanitarian crisis. What we're going to take a look at is how to map this and then share that. Because we've crowdsourced the data, now we want to make this map available to a broad public. I'm going to go ahead and use my analyze feature to create a map that shows where schools have been damaged. I'm going to use my formula editor here and I'm going to choose those that have a school that's been damaged.

00:37:30 Publishing interactive maps

Now what we can do is we can actually save this as "Damaged schools" and I'm going to publish this map. From the 'sharing and publishing' menu, you can share this with other people in your database. You can make this public by publishing it. By publishing it, it means that you'll get a link that you can give to anybody or you can publish on your website and then anybody can zoom in and get details about these schools here. This link you can share with anybody; they don't need to be logged in to ActivityInfo.

I can also embed this in a website. This is going to give me a link that I can use in an iframe. Depending on what kind of website you're using, you're able to just paste this in. For example, we use Google Sites. I can click on the 'Embed' here and I'm going to just paste this embed code here and that's going to give me the embedded map right here on my webpage. That's an easy way to integrate reports from ActivityInfo directly in a website that you might have. If you talk to your website administrator, they'll probably have a way for you to embed these links as well.

00:40:00 Final Q&A and conclusion

Peter asks "is the geotag location reference added automatically in ActivityInfo, where it has to be defined by each project account?" You have two options, Peter. If I go back to my databases here and if I wanted to add a new data collection form, you can either add a geographic point where you would have to actually capture a GPS coordinate, but you can also use a reference field to reference geography. You can import your own reference data if you have data already that you prefer to use, but anybody can use just simply our geodatabase which has a pretty complete list.

Mustafa asked "the published report by URL link will just appear to stakeholders who have access to ActivityInfo?" No, that's not quite right. If you publish a report, it's actually accessible to everybody, not just the people that have an ActivityInfo login.

I do want to highlight that we have a couple of new webinars coming up. If you go to Support and Webinars, we have our next one on Notebooks, which is another reporting and data analysis tool that is very useful in ActivityInfo. We have some general webinars coming up at the end of October on Agile methodology and Best practices for data visualization. If you're interested in ActivityInfo and want to start from the ground up, I really would recommend our self-paced course that's free of charge and you can learn from A to Z how to use ActivityInfo.

That's it! Thank you all for joining and I hope to see you next time. We'll follow up with links to the recording and to the step-by-step guide. Thank you everyone, take care, bye!