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UNICEF is seeking a New Data Specialist for a 9-month assignment, where the candidate would be outposted to the UN Secretariat’s Global Pulse team. The Global Pulse is organized around three primary strategies: First, to develop an analytical framework for the monitoring system; second, to develop a free and open source software platform which can integrate disparate existing sources of data from within and outside the UN and support team-based analysis and decision-making; and finally, to set up "Pulse Labs" in developing countries as innovation centers.

The New Data Specialist will work with the Global Pulse Team and its network of partners to acquire, analyze, visualize and blog regularly about diverse data from a variety of sources in order to
- help the global community to understand emerging vulnerabilities of populations to future external shocks and
- detect and highlight patterns that could indicate that these populations are already coping with the early impacts of a crisis related to food, water, health, climate, or economic hardship.

The New Data Specialist will play a role in applying the Global Pulse Analytical Framework to statistical data sets, assist the team in developing new approaches to detecting events and trends within information sources such as online media, social networks, and geospatial data, advise the Engineering team on data analysis features of the Global Pulse Platform, interact with the global community through a variety of media, and engage in other activities as required.

Apply today to be part of the Global Pulse team!

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The UN Global Pulse project is seeking an Innovation Officer to assist in the initial planning, documentation, fundraising and skeleton-defining of an innovation "Pulse Lab" in Uganda.

Pulse Labs are national facilities established to support the work of government by developing analytical and technological capacity for evidence-based decision making and sustainable innovation in crisis resilience. Central to the Pulse Labs mission is the development of sustainable “dual-use” systems that simultaneously provide value directly to vulnerable communities while also generating streams of actionable real-time information to help leaders understand quickly how populations are being affected, respond rapidly with high-value, targeted policy interventions, and generate evidence for advocacy at the global level.

In preparation for global deployment, Global Pulse will stand up an initial network of three Pulse Lab “prototypes” over a three-year period to develop and refine the model. The basic modality of a Pulse Lab is to support the lab team, through both curriculum-based training and ad hoc, on-the-job peer mentoring, as they work to support government in improving crisis resilience.

The primary work of the lab team consists of identifying critical information gaps and needs, selecting vulnerable communities to participate as Global Pulse sentinel sites, and working with public and private-sector partners to create technology solutions that strengthen national capacity for evidence-based decision making and rapid response.

This lab set-up exercise should also be an exercise in open source collaboration. There are many lab efforts already ongoing in Uganda. The Pulse Lab should not replace or supplant existing efforts but rather build on them and serve as the connective tissue that can bind them together.

The scope of work for this consultation is to map out the existing landscape of labs / innovation in Uganda and to work closely with UNICEF Uganda's Innovation team to generate the plans necessary for starting a full Pulse Lab in January 2011.

Interested? Read more about the Pulse lab Consultancy