The U.S. Department of State dropped its second Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, or QDDR, last week (here). Modeled on the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the QDDR lays out the department’s big-picture concerns and objectives so that—in theory—they can guide planning and shape day-to-day decision-making.

The new QDDR establishes four main goals, one of which is to “strengthen our ability to prevent and respond to internal conflict, atrocities, and fragility.” To help do that, the State Department plans to “increase [its] use of early warning analysis to drive early action on fragility and conflict.” Specifically, State says it will:

1. Improve our use of tools for analyzing, tracking, and forecasting fragility and conflict, leveraging improvements in analytical capabilities;
2. Provide more timely and accurate assessments to chiefs of mission and senior decision-makers;
3. Increase use of early warning data and conflict and fragility assessments in our strategic planning and programming;
4. Ensure that significant early warning shifts trigger senior-level review of the mission’s strategy and, if necessary, adjustments; and
5. Train and deploy conflict-specific diplomatic expertise to support countries at risk of conflict or atrocities, including conflict negotiation and mediation expertise for use at posts.

Unsurprisingly, that plan sounds great to me. We can’t now and never will be able to predict precisely where and when violent conflict and atrocities will occur, but we can assess risks with enough accuracy and lead time to enable better strategic planning and programming. These forecasts don’t have to be perfect to be earlier, clearer, and more reliable than the traditional practices of deferring to individual country or regional analysts or just reacting to the news.

Of course, quite a bit of well-designed conflict forecasting is already happening, much of it paid for by the U.S. government. To name a few of the relevant efforts: The Political Instability Task Force (PITF) and the Worldwide Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (W-ICEWS) routinely update forecasts of various forms of political crisis for U.S. government customers. IARPA’s Open Source Indicators (OSI) and Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) programs are simultaneously producing forecasts now and discovering ways to make future forecasts even better. Meanwhile, outside the U.S. government, the European Union has recently developed its own Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI), and the Early Warning Project now assesses risks of mass atrocities in countries worldwide.

That so much thoughtful risk assessment is being done now doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to start new projects. If there are any iron laws of forecasting hard-to-predict processes like political violence, one of them is that combinations of forecasts from numerous sources should be more accurate than forecasts from a single model or person or framework. Some of the existing projects already do this kind of combining themselves, but combinations of combinations will often be even better.

Still, if I had to channel the intention expressed in this part of the QDDR into a single activity, it would not be the construction of new models, at least not initially. Instead, it would be data-making. Social science is not Newtonian physics, but it’s not astrology, either. Smart people have been studying politics for a long time, and collectively they have developed a fair number of useful ideas about what causes or precedes violent conflict. But, if you can’t track the things those theorists tell you to track, then your forecasts are going to suffer. To improve significantly on the predictive models of political violence we have now, I think we need better inputs most of all.

When I say “better” inputs, I have a few things in mind. In some cases, we need to build data sets from scratch. When I was updating my coup forecasts earlier this year, a number of people wondered why I didn’t include measures of civil-military relations, which are obviously relevant to this particular risk. The answer was simple: because global data on that topic don’t exist. If we aren’t measuring it, we can’t use it in our forecasts, and the list of relevant features that falls into this set is surprisingly long.

In other cases, we need to revive them. Social scientists often build “boutique” data sets for specific research projects, run the tests they want to run on them, and then move on to the next project. Sometimes, the tests they or others run suggest that some features captured in those data sets would make useful predictors. Those discoveries are great in principle, but if those data sets aren’t being updated, then applied forecasters can’t use that knowledge. To get better forecasts, we need to invest in picking up where those boutique data sets left off so we can incorporate their insights into our applications.

Finally and in almost all cases, we need to observe things more frequently. Most of the data available now to most conflict forecasters is only updated once each year, often on a several-month delay and sometimes as much as two years later (e.g., data describing 2014 becomes available in 2016). That schedule is fine for basic research, but it is crummy for applied forecasting. If we want to be able to give assessments and warnings that as current as possible to those “chiefs of mission and senior decision-makers” mentioned in the QDDR, then we need to build models with data that are updated as frequently as possible. Daily or weekly are ideal, but monthly updates would suffice in many cases and would mark a huge improvement over the status quo.

As I said at the start, we’re never going to get models that reliably tell us far in advance exactly where and when violent conflicts and mass atrocities will erupt. I am confident, however, that we can assess these risks even more accurately than we do now, but only if we start making more, and better versions, of the data our theories tell us we need.

I’ll end with a final plea to any public servants who might be reading this: if you do invest in developing better inputs, please make the results freely available to the public. When you share your data, you give the crowd a chance to help you spot and fix your mistakes, to experiment with various techniques, and to think about what else you might consider, all at no additional cost to you. What’s not to like about that?