SameSide is a web-based system designed to promote information sharing, trust building, and cultural awareness among host nations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations (IOs), military personnel, and other humanitarian agencies who are charged with planning for and responding to complex health sector emergencies. It was funded as a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project by the Army Research Institute and Joint Forces Command. The project's goal is to create a web-enabled set of tools and training aids that promote the formation of information sharing skills so that individuals from diverse organizations can achieve shared understanding of each others' requirements and needs.

Throughout the past decade and a half, the US military has been increasingly called upon to support non-combat operations that involve humanitarian crises whose complexities and sheer magnitudes overwhelm the resources of the host nation (HN) and civilian relief organizations. Whereas previous low-intensity conflicts involved peacekeeping as their core, a primary military focus now entails building self-sustaining capacity in the region of interest. This, in turn, has given rise to the Peace Support Operations mission, and its associated activities of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) and humanitarian assistance (HA). Regardless of the mission type or the naming convention, improving the health sector capacity of the HN in crisis is absolutely vital for stability and security. In each case, a key impediment to success is information sharing between the local HN resources and external aid from military, NGOs, IOs, and USG agencies.

To illustrate, the 2006 Winter Games at the US Naval Postgraduate School highlighted the need for improvements in the area of information sharing. The participants, who included medical and health experts from NGOs, IOs, USG agencies, and the US military, concluded that barriers to information sharing, while formidable, can be overcome through the development of commonly accessible databases, exchange forums, and familiarization documents that, collectively, can help foster the acquisition of essential information sharing competencies. SameSide is intended to be one of these capabilities.

The SameSide project's principal focus is on West Africa scenarios, where its toolset and training capabilities will be used to support a JFCOM/ARI effort to promote inter-group cooperation for building health sector capacity and improving humanitarian planning and response efforts. In particular, the project is supporting the Healthy Africa Scenario Exercise (HASE) workshop series that is being held in various ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) countries. This NGO-led forum brings together noted African leaders in the areas of health care and economics to discuss core issues, problems, and solutions in which military and civilian organizations can work together to build capacity and increase preparedness. The first workshop, held in Accra, Ghana, resulted in the development of a powerful model of capital formation, in which seven types of capital were defined and articulated (political, infrastructure, economic, natural, cultural, social, and human). Subsequent workshops will be held to instantiate the model, termed Capital Analysis & Performance Strategy (CAPS), using seven capital-form data from a specific country. This will then be used to serve as a model for country-wide planning that can be used throughout the region. SameSide will focus explicitly on promoting information sharing in order to ensure development of cultural, social, and human capital.

The conceptual foundation of SameSide is represented in the graphic model (above) of information sharing (IS) that was developed as a result of data collection during HASE Workshop 1. Starting on the left, we represent IS as a sequence of information collection, analysis, and reporting. These events are essentially internal to a given organization, where the output of IS is dissemination of information into the wider community outside the originating organization, resulting in the higher order processes of knowledge management (KM) and shared understanding (SU). Within the intra-organization rectangle, each component is a point where IS can break down, causing problems within the health sector delivery system. There is also a feedback loop from the inter-organization processes to the intra-organization processes leading to opportunities for improvement.

As information is output, dissemination comes into play. This is a major component of IS since it involves both the technology of distributing information and the very human aspect of being willing and motivated to share information with others. As shown in the figure, there are obstacles to information sharing, making dissemination difficult. During Workshop 1, we identified eight distinct obstacles (e.g., media, technology, terminology), along with some suggested ways to overcome them. These will be a key aspect of SameSide content. As information becomes disseminated and shared, a higher order process is achieved, what we call KM. At its most basic level, we can define KM as getting the right information in the right form to the right people at the right time. During interview sessions in Workshop 1, we identified some major challenges to KM, which have historically plagued heath sector efforts in West Africa. These include poverty and malnutrition, leadership, building trust, and resource constraints, among others. As with IS obstacles, overcoming these KM challenges will be a primary focus of the training offered by SameSide.

SameSide is organized around six tools that, collectively, provide the user with an interactive learning experience designed to promote the acquisition of a number of "core competencies" essential to sharing information in a complex, multi-organizational environment. Competencies include taking a systems perspective, staying in synch with others, understanding second and third order consequences of actions, and using terminology appropriate for the target audience, to name a few. The tools are: a Knowledge Manager (dynamic repository of principles and best practices); Discussion Forum (asynchronous, organized discussions); Scenario Tool (structured, personalized experiences in health sector multi-group interactions); Organization Locator (interactive map with locations of capital entities throughout West Africa); Annotated Documents tool (hyperlinked analyses of key lessons learned documents); and Survey Tool (online survey and data analysis).

While the tools are designed to give the user the ability to view, organize, and manipulate information in flexible ways, SameSide has two modes of operation to provide training in the core competencies. The default mode is free exploration, or what we call "freeform mode," where the user has unfettered access to site tools and topics. A second mode, "training mode," contains structured exercises in the context of three training topics: information sharing, trust building, and cultural awareness. Each training topic is organized as a series of "tasks" the user is asked to complete, where each task is followed by a short quiz.

SameSide has been designed for use by both civilian and military personnel who have responsibilities for working in health sector and humanitarian assistance areas, and who must share information with those in other organizations to be effective. On the civilian side, HN representatives from all the relevant ministries (of health, interior, education, defense) can use SameSide as could medical researchers at hospitals and other health-related facilities. Other civilian users would include staffs of NGOs, IOs, and USG agencies that may be tasked to work with or coordinate efforts with the US military for purposes of planning for and responding to complex health sector crises.

For the military, candidate users would include members of a civil military operations cell (CMOC), civil affairs (CA) unit, or any other subgroup of a joint task force who will be sharing information with a civilian organization. As well, staff of the newly formed AFRICOM will find SameSide useful, as would members of the various detachments ("dets") throughout the region and Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs).

We also anticipate that SameSide use will benefit the panel members, advisors, observers, and other participants in the HASE workshop series. In addition, we hope that interaction with SameSide tools will prove informative for DOD researchers and laboratory scientists interested in information sharing with HNs and capacity building.

The freeform mode is SameSide's default mode of operation. In this mode you are free to move about the website exploring the information and tools that are available. This is in contrast to the Training Mode which provides a very structured environment meant to accomplish specific learning objectives. Each of the SameSide tools (see below) presents information that is useful in its own right—independent of any specific training objectives that it might have. The freeform mode is intended to allow users to explore and access this information in a manner that best fits their own requirements.

Knowledge Manager. This tool is a dynamic repository of materials of various sorts, including links to other sites, reference documents, available open source videos, plus succinct descriptions of best practices, lessons learned, and underlying principles of information sharing, trust building, and cultural awareness. A key focus is on ways to facilitate interactions between civilian and military organizations charged with planning for and responding to health sector crises. It is built on a wiki (Dokuwiki©) foundation, which allows users to post comments associated with particular topics. When in the (default) free form mode, users may browse and search the KM's contents like a library. User posted comments in the KM are monitored and maintained by website staff.

Discussion Forums. This tool allows asynchronous, organized discussions from all SameSide registrants on a set of topics relevant to health sector crises and civil-military interactions. Hierarchically organized, the superordinate topics are established by the SameSide managers, though these can be modified based on the density of postings that come in from users on a given topic. The subordinate topics are defined by the users. Discussion topics can vary in focus and scope, from single-issue topics (e.g., how to get a visa application in Ghana), to broader topics (e.g., what are good ways to build trust with a new organization). The tool is built on the forum software offered by Simple Machines©, LLC.

Organization Locator. This tool uses the Google Maps™ web-service to depict the location of various organizations and facilities, where the user can select the region and the category of information to be viewed. Entities have been selected to support the seven-forms-of capital model (CAPS) that is the capacity-building framework of the HASE workshop. Using the Google Maps API, the map can be zoomed and panned to show different areas at different levels of detail. Because so many regions and facilities are now geo-coded, it is possible to structure map-based information to convey topics of information using a geo-referenced perspective.

Scenario Tool. This tool is designed to solicit users' experiences in sharing information with organizations while responding to a health sector crisis, natural disaster, or armed conflict. The information from these vignettes is put into a library that can form the basis for instructional scenarios to support the learning of core information sharing competencies. Vignettes are organized around a framework to give a standardized account, such as a narrative description, initiating event, the role the user played in the example, as well as the various individuals they interacted with. It is possible to solicit experiences of the same event from users representing different organizations to identify coordination and perspective issues that will be especially useful for inclusion in a training scenario.

Annotated Documents. This tool takes select reports, guidelines, and publications, and gives the user a structured, hierarchical hyperlinked experience to expose key principles of information sharing, trust building, cultural awareness, and shared understanding. The tool will be used to help instruct users become familiar with health sector areas that are new to them, giving them opportunities to probe "beneath the surface" and critically think about best practices by thinking through issues, problems, and alternative solutions.

Survey Tool. This tool is designed to support administration of on-line surveys in the areas of information sharing and trust building, and cultural awareness. It uses the web-based service, SurveyMonkey©, to customize surveys for collection of both rating and comment data. This service stores the data on its server and provides the results in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. As a knowledge acquisition capability, it is a natural fit to the other tools that are incorporated into SameSide.

The training mode can be used in SameSide when the user wants to accomplish training in a knowledge/skill area important for effective inter-organization coordination. SameSide has already-developed content for three such K/S areas: information sharing, trust building, and cultural awareness. Within each topic, users are guided by SameSide to perform a sequence of learning tasks that expose them to concepts, principles, best practices, and lessons learned pertinent to the topic of interest. Short quizzes are provided at the end of each learning task to ensure comprehension. The learning tasks within each topic are framed around a multi-media orientation and the SameSide toolset to ensure that the user receives an interesting, interactive learning experience.

Three training topics, described below, provide a solid content foundation on which the user may elect to build new topics—such as communication, forming relationships, maintaining a "system" view, staying in synch, adopting consistent roles—or add learning tasks and exercises to the existing topics.

Information Sharing. This topic exposes the user to concepts vital to information sharing, such as framing a message, evaluating the understandability of a message, ensuring shared understanding with a dissimilar audience, and synchronizing activities between heterogeneous teams. Also, this training topic covers issues associated with military and NGOs working together as well as understanding distinctions between extracting information from messages using inference versus factual evidence. The learning tasks within this topic utilize embedded multi-media (audio/video) clips that take the user through a series of guided steps to achieve one or more learning objectives.

Building Trust. This topic is organized around six principles essential for building trust. These are: finding a task on which to cooperate, increasing one’s understanding of the other actors, increasing accountability and transparency of feedback processes, directly representing one’s interests to the other party, capitalizing on earned trust, and choosing messages wisely while conveying them widely. These principles are instantiated through a series of structured learning exercises in which the user is taught how to distinguish between low trust and distrust, manage expectations, keep promises, establish positive contact, use explicit agreements to promote trust, and "correct " for predictable mistrust of military entities dispensing emergency aid. These lessons are delivered using embedded audio/video clips where lessons learned from recent East Africa events are presented.

Cultural Awareness. This topic is intended to provide training so that users can acquire “cultural competence” when interacting with actors from a dissimilar organization. For this topic, culture can be loosely defined as the "values, beliefs, norms, and institutions that transmit patterns of meaning, modes of living, and customs within a given society" (Strader, 2006). As part of acquiring cultural competence, the user receives training in understanding one’s own culture as well as an appreciation of other cultures. The instruction is organized around a comprehensive model of cultural competence, in which the developmental influences on building a mental "schema" of culture are described. These schemas, in turn, underlie the acquisition of eight competencies that, collectively, promote a cultural relativism meta-competency. The structured learning exercises, which also include embedded audio/video clips, are organized and sequenced to ensure that all eight competencies are covered. These include: keys of cultural friction, cultural preparation, critical thinking and self-reflection, communication, interpersonal relationships, ability to deal with stress, flexibility/adaptability, and comparing perspectives.

Information that we request during registration and why.

Username. This is your primary ID on the SAMESIDE web site. Email address. We will use your email address for two purposes. To send you a forgotten password or messages during an exercise. Real Name. Your first and last name. We will use this to identify comments you make in the SAMESIDE Knowledge Manager. Affiliation (civilian or military). This will allow us to tailor exercises in which you participate. Password. When combined with your username, this establishes your permission to access SAMESIDE.

New User

Registration for those users who have never logged in to SAMESIDE before.

Returning User

Log in if you've registered and have a SAMESIDE username and password. Log out if you're ready to leave.

Manage Your Login

Change your password. Obtain a forgotten password by email.

If you need assistance or to update your registration:

Send email to the SAMESIDE Administrator.