"Don’t Overcomplicate It" – An Interview with NRC’s Nadine Levin on Building a CKAN Data Catalog That Works

The struggle is not just against crisis. It is against indifference.

You cannot respond to what you cannot see.

You cannot fight for justice if the facts are buried.

And in a world where data decides who gets help and who is forgotten, access to that data isn’t just about efficiency—it’s an act of power.

Humanitarian data is supposed to illuminate suffering, to make suffering more legible, and more manageable. It is supposed to guide decisions and bring clarity. But too often, it does the opposite. It disappears into bureaucratic labyrinths, like smoke in a broken machine—there, but inaccessible, unusable, ungraspable.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) faced this paradox. They had data, but it was nowhere. Fragmented across spreadsheets, locked in forgotten reports, tangled in systems that assumed order in a world defined by crisis. They needed a way to see it all, to use it, without pretending it was a static thing, frozen in time.

That’s why they turned to CKAN.

Not to “store” data, but to make it usable.

To remove the friction, the gatekeeping. And to cut through the opacity that so often turns information into an obstacle instead of a tool.

A few weeks ago, I sat down (virtually) with Nadine Levin, Data Product Manager at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) to talk about what it means to build a system where data informs action, not just archives history. She previously shared NRC’s journey during CKAN Monthly Live—you can watch her presentation here: Norwegian Refugee Council: CKAN in a Humanitarian Context. Or, read our recap blog post: How NRC is Using CKAN to Improve Humanitarian Data Management

“Why CKAN?” I asked Nadine.

She didn’t talk about infrastructure. She didn’t mention buzzwords.

Instead, she gave me a philosophy:

“We chose CKAN because of the open-source community,” she said.

Not the software. The people.

A global network of developers, organizations, and users meant that NRC didn’t have to build everything from scratch. They could stand on the shoulders of others.

“We could build a technical product fast by using a “shared brain” meaning we could leverage collective expertise, best practices, and existing solutions from the community,” Nadine explained.

That meant faster development, fewer mistakes, and the ability to customize what actually needed customization.

Check out the full interview below.

What made CKAN the right choice for NRC? Were there specific features that stood out?

We chose CKAN as our data catalog technical framework primarily due to the open-source community which allowed us to build a technical product fast by using a “shared brain” meaning we could leverage collective expertise, best practices, and existing solutions from the community. The ability to heavily customize the information architecture and metadata schema allowed us to add the contextual information that is greatly needed in complex humanitarian data and ultimately made data centralization easier

Your CKAN instance is mostly built using “out-of-the-box” features. How much customization did you need, and which CKAN extensions have been the most useful? Name 2-3. 

With help from OKF, we were able to get a vanilla instance of CKAN up and running ASAP so we could experiment with what features are already included. CKAN already has so much! From there, we could understand what was already functioning without additional development. From further interviews with users at our organization, we decided which features we wanted to develop, which were minimal. I’d say roughly 20% of our instance is custom. Some of the most useful extensions we’ve used are:

✅ ckanext-announcements which helped us communicate updates directly within the CKAN front-end
✅ ckanext-pdfview which made document-based datasets more accessible by allowing inline previews.

How has CKAN changed the way NRC staff access and use data? Do you have an example where it made a real difference in decision-making or efficiency?

Our CKAN instance is part of a broader effort to create a data-driven culture at NRC. One key initiative was to create a PostgreSQL to automate datasets updates into CKAN through the rich API. One of the datasets, Country Office Fact Sheets, provides a historical view of activities per country like number of staff and types of projects. Previously this data was held in various locations and required days of manual Excel work. Now it’s automated, visualized, and directly used by senior leadership for country visits and strategic planning through CKAN!

Were there any unexpected benefits—something that turned out to be super useful but wasn’t part of the original plan?

We custom-developed the ability to embed Power BI dashboard iFrames at the dataset level. Since NRC heavily relies on PowerBI, this feature has been very powerful for us and enables colleagues to interact with data dynamically and gain insights without reviewing raw files. Some of our datasets are even simply embedded Power BI dashboards without a resource attached because it allows us to still leverage the powerful CKAN metadata schema.

If you could add any dream feature to CKAN—no limits—what would it be?

We are already in the process of developing an in-house visualization tool using a CKAN dataset as the backend data source. Custom visualizations would be a great feature for CKAN! Since we use CKAN for our curated and finalized “source of truth” datasets, we would like to create visualizations on this clean data. We use data visualizations in many aspects of our work like donor reporting so having an easy-to-use data visualization builder at the resource level would allow non-technical colleagues to have a ready-made visual using the validated CKAN data.

If another humanitarian organization wanted to build an internal CKAN catalog, what’s the most important thing they should get right?

Don’t overcomplicate your implementation. CKAN’s vanilla features often solve 80-90% of your needs. Custom development can be costly and challenging to maintain. CKAN and the community may have already solved the problem you are trying to tackle. Try reaching out to others and ask!