The GSC Annual Meeting 2020 Open Space session on the Shelter IEC compendium was led by Boshra Khoshnevis and Joseph Ashmore. 

Key take aways

• Whilst there is a wealth of experience, messages and tools developed for shelter, settlements and non-food items operations, it is common for interagency discussions to agree on common messages taking weeks or months.  This process is hampered by the time it takes to collate existing relevant documents and messages, sift through them to identify the most relevant ones, and to understand what their purpose, strengths and weaknesses are. In many cases, existing messaging could be used whilst consensus is developed on more contextualized tools.
• In dealing with the specific theme of Shelter and Settlements, it makes sense not to reinvent the wheel, when we can choose from pre-existing materials. Shelter Compendium is an open-source project under the Promoting Safer Building Working Group of the Global Shelter Cluster to compile and assess existing IECs related to Shelter and Settlements responses. The Shelter Compendium will improve the dissemination of accurate messages and will facilitate the rapid development of new messaging in emergency responses. 
• IEC materials are not consistently evaluated and tested. One of the biggest threats to the accuracy of all IEC materials is the large amount of material being circulated without proper evaluation, often times materials can be created/modified based on field observations -but these changes are not always documented.
• The knowledge gap should be monitored during the response. As the situation evolves, the IEC resources developed may not be fulfilling the original purpose they were intended for. New resources should be developed as necessary, existing resources modified, and the dialogue should be continued.
• The Shelter Compendium's web interface is under development and will be accessible in the upcoming months at IEC.sheltercluster.org, and an overview publication of the project's progress and preliminary findings will be published soon.  To contribute and receive updates, please get in touch with us at iec@sheltercluster.org

Materials:

• Explanatory video
• Participants list