When the UN needed a way to assess progress towards the Millenium Development goals, they turned to UNICEF, who were already running a longitudinal survey on child conditions called Childinfo.

This is how DevInfo was born. DevInfo is the surveying and reporting tool for the Millenium development goals. It is free to download for local hosting or can run through a browser. It uses standard data formats and is strong at importing and exporting. Presumably there is a way for data to be fed into a central repository to contribute to global analysis.

The humanitarians may be able to learn something from this. Humanitarian operations are currently much criticised for duplicating efforts on assessments. When every NGO and UN actor has its own emergency assessment form, some think it is OCHA's role to coordinate and stop bothering the afflicted.

DevInfo has different modules for different circumstances, which makes it adaptable and efficient. How hard is it to envisage a disaster response where OCHA has the survey forms ready before the actors have arrived, and actors will invest in that survey when they land because of the value of the coordination it offers.