As the organisation with the mandate to coordinate information in humanitarian response, OCHA might be expected to show a capacity for organising and presenting information through their web site. As a large, very disparate and complex organisation, which employing many tens of information managers, they should be the best in the UN. But a comparison with organisations of similar sizes / budgets, is not favourable.

• UN/OCHA uses asp, but I don't see signs of real content management going on.
• Oxfam built a major module for Plone, multisite, to allow their subsidiaries the right amount of support, and independence.
• Care International gave a lot of thought to the user's perspective.
• World Vision have a large site, complex and strategic.
• IFRC have retained coherence without a Content Management System (CMS) for too long.
• UNHCR have a done a lot of work revamping their site and reorganising the content.
• UNICEF site looks like a news room.

Signs of under investment in OCHA's web site

• numerous broken links and out of date pages
• the print button does nothing (at least on Firefox and IE 5)
• no tags, RSS, or comments. High latency
• Navigating up the breadcrumb trail from here, you can see that the same navigation panel is used for levels 3-6 in the info tree. This is stretching the usable limits of a three level visual hierarchy.
• no detailed search
• only html pages are indexed by the search engine. Would be ok if some of the best information wasn't in pdf only
• search results are slow, sometimes fail, do not show context or relevence
• the search button depends on javascript so if you press the 'Enter' key after your search term the page just reloads
• logo over compressed

Signs of lack of coherence within OCHA

• site map is not comprehensive. Does not include areas like rolac
• content seems to be spread over three OCHA servers
  http://ochaonline.un.org/
  http://ochaonline2.un.org/
  http://ochaonline3.un.org/
• The site structure seems somewhat arbitrary
• this search result shows the same press release found in two places
• A search for 'information management' brings up 31 documents before the expression is included in the title of the document. Try searching for 'symposium'
• The expression 'humanitarian reform' brings up three times more results than 'clusters'
• History of OCHA stretches to one page, half of which is about the Emergency Relief Coordinator. It doesn't mention HICS, IRIN, ReliefWeb, the end of UNDRO, achievements, development. It has a single link in the text. Does a fuller history of OCHA exist?
• There is little no connection to all the other web sites that OCHA manages, some of them on the same domain name, like the Humanitarian Information Network, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Humanitarian Reform, Geonetwork, and many others. Nor are these things in the organigram
• Compare OCHA geographic page with geonetwork.unocha.org. Notice that half the top level links on the latter are broken.
• What is the ERC coordinators address doing under the 'geographic' section?

The latter section indicates that a lot of work needs to be done internally before considering any technical aspects. Modelling the organisation, understanding the users etc. Until these skills can be demonstrated, can the cluster leads be blamed for declining coordination from OCHA? And until then, it remains an opaque and unaccountable organisation.

This is not the only example of a humanitarian information management organisation revealing incoherence through their web site. But most organisations are accountable to their donors. The UN is accountable to you and I.

It's beyond repair and reformatting. Lets instead raise a glass to OCHA's inaugural content management system, hoping it's in the pipeline, and hoping all these issues will be addressed!