As we reach the end of May 2025, the humanitarian information management community faces a significant transition. The Data Entry and Exploration Platform (DEEP), which has served over 7,500 users across the humanitarian and development sectors for nearly a decade, is concluding its operations. While this marks the end of an era, it also represents the beginning of something transformative for Data Friendly Space and the humanitarian community we serve.
DEEP's story began in the rubble and resilience of the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Born from crisis, it emerged as a platform for collaborative analysis and coordinated humanitarian response. What started as an urgent need to strengthen collective analysis capabilities became a platform that fundamentally changed how humanitarians approach needs assessments and situation analysis.
The numbers tell part of the story: 7,500 users, countless analyses, and support for major humanitarian responses across the globe. But DEEP's true impact goes far beyond metrics. It pioneered an intelligent, web-based approach to collaborative tools tailored specifically for qualitative secondary data review, setting new standards for transparency and coordination in humanitarian analysis with organizations such as the Danish Refugee Council, IFRC, OCHA steering the strategy and vision, and Data Friendly Space and Togglecorp implementing this vision. Organizations, such as UNHCR, UNICEF, and Impact Initiatives, didn't just use DEEP; they relied on it. The platform became a cornerstone of humanitarian collaboration, proving that open-source, free tools could deliver enterprise-level impact when designed with deep sector understanding.
DEEP's influence can be seen in major humanitarian responses over the past decade. During the Turkey-Syria earthquakes in February 2023, when two devastating quakes of 7.8 and 7.7 magnitude struck near the Syrian border, DEEP's Remote Analysis Support Team became the backbone of information coordination, with critical situation reports during those initial, chaotic days when every hour mattered. When Hurricane Daniel devastated Libya in September 2023, collapsing two dams in Derna city and leaving 4,345 dead and 43,421 displaced, DEEP again stepped forward. The platform provided a structured repository of secondary and qualitative data, enabling rapid surge response capabilities when traditional systems were overwhelmed. The Morocco earthquake of September 2023 further demonstrated DEEP's vital role, providing the humanitarian community with faster, more transparent access to evidence as the response scaled to support 450,000 affected individuals.
DEEP wasn't just Data Friendly Space's first major initiative, it was our proving ground. Over nearly a decade of supporting humanitarian responses, we've learned invaluable lessons about the real needs in information management. We've witnessed firsthand how technology must adapt to the urgent, complex, and often chaotic nature of humanitarian work.
This experience has been our greatest teacher, giving us insight into what works, what doesn't, and what the sector truly needs to move forward. The end of DEEP doesn't represent a step backward, it represents the evolution of everything we've learned into something more powerful, more agile, and more responsive to humanitarian needs.
While we honor DEEP's legacy, we're excited to see how generative AI will transform the humanitarian community, especially GANNET, our generative AI initiative that represents a leap forward in humanitarian information management capabilities.
GANNET doesn’t replace DEEP; it's a reimagining of what humanitarian analysis tools can achieve. Built on years of sector expertise and cutting-edge AI technology, GANNET offers three integrated tools designed specifically for humanitarian organizations: GANNET Virtual Assistant, GANNET SituationHub, and, coming soon, the GANNET Workspace. We've successfully deployed GANNET tools during critical situations in the Caribbean countries after Hurricane Beryl, Lebanon, Sudan, and following the Myanmar earthquake. These real-world applications have validated not just GANNET's technical capabilities, but its practical value in high-stakes humanitarian contexts. The feedback has been consistently positive: GANNET is faster than traditional approaches, features an easier learning curve than complex legacy systems, and is specifically tailored to humanitarian needs rather than adapted from generic business tools.
The innovation from DEEP to GANNET represents more than technological advancement, it demonstrates Data Friendly Space's commitment to agility and innovation in service of humanitarian goals. We've learned that the sector doesn't need incrementally better versions of existing tools; it needs fundamentally new approaches that match the pace and complexity of modern crises.
As we bid farewell to DEEP, we're not just closing a chapter, we're opening an entirely new book. The platform that began in response to the Nepal earthquake has evolved into lessons and teachings that have informed and transformed our work into something that can respond to the full spectrum of humanitarian challenges we face today and tomorrow.
GANNET represents our commitment to that transformation. Powered by the lessons we've learned from DEEP and designed for the challenges ahead, it's ready to support the humanitarian community in ways we could only dream of when we first began this journey in the aftermath of an earthquake in Nepal. The future of humanitarian analysis is here, and it's more capable, more accessible, and more powerful than anything we've seen before.
