In Science News, Julie Rehmeyer writes a short piece on Humanitarian Statistics, with a focus on the “controversial” Iraq war studies carried in the Lancet. I haven’t posted about the Lancet studies before; I recognise that the Lancet studies have an important role to play in tallying the cost of the Iraq war, but anything I could add to the debate would be largely redundant, since it’s been driven by political rather than humanitarian interests.
Although Deltoid characterises the article as being “about the Lancet studies” - and fair enough, that is his particular interest - it is thankfully wider than that, noting the increase in the use of statistics in the human rights (and to a lesser extent, humanitarian) sector while also being aware of the...
Apparently they both suffer from really rubbish web apps.
Our pals at the NGO Security Blog link to a fascinating article about how US intelligence agencies are using technology that was really cool back in 1983, but hasn’t really moved forward since then. (Frighteningly it sounds a lot like one of my all-time favourite films, War Games.) In particular, the information sharing database Intelink sounds particularly scary, and by scary I mean absolutely useless - I’m glad it’s not my tax dollars at work.
The blog suggests a number of possibilities that the new technology has created for security management in the aid industry:
Picture a wiki where anyone could post up-to-date security information organized by country and city, or an informal global network of security...
Did you know that in the 1950s Sweden had the fourth-largest air force in the world? That was just one of the nuggets that I picked up last week in Sando, where the Swedish Rescue Services Agency has their training facility. I spent most of the day with a small group from NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme - they were on a training course for Information Management in Emergency Operations, and I was telling them about how things work at the international level.
We covered quite a lot of ground, and it was interesting to hear their stories, their experiences - some from places like Bosnia or Afghanistan, but more from their home countries. They were all from a military or government background, so very much from the command and control model, and I tried to get everybody...
That’s a trick question. I know quite a lot about peace keeping - working in UNMIK (Kosovo), UNAMA (Afghanistan) and UNMIL (Liberia) will do that for you - although I wouldn’t call myself an expert, more of an engaged observer. So it was interesting yesterday to meet with the information management team at the Best Practices Unit in DPKO, and find out that they’ve got exactly the same problems as the humanitarian organisations that we usually work with.
As well as the challenges of multilingual, multicultural personnel working in distributed and remote locations, they have the additional layer of a command-and-control structure. While command-and-control structures simplify decision-making processes, they actually obstruct knowledge-sharing between staff. The one...