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I promised myself that I’d blog every single day while I was working in Georgia. It should be fairly obvious that I didn’t. I can’t say that I was super productive while I was in Tbilisi - for a variety of reasons, including particularly dysfunctional co-ordination, but also because of the basic difficulty of getting [...]...

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on [...]...

The ConnectivIT lab at the University of Colorado has done some fascinating research in the last couple of years, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but never quite got round to. Such are the workings of the web that these things always come around if you wait long enough. So I’ll preface this blog [...]...

An email from CEO Eric Rasmussen tells me that INSTEDD is finally flying in radar (and apparently I’m mixing metaphors, unsure of whether INSTEDD is a whale or a plane). In his words, InSTEDD has been invisible, a rumor and a ghost, for the few past months, but we surfaced today in a media call with Google.org in the launch of their first-ever Initiatives. I’ve known Eric virtually for a couple of years, although we’ve never managed to actually meet in person. He’s a very solid choice for CEO - his thinking on civil-military affairs was always more lateral than I expected for somebody in his position, and I think that it reflected his willingness to listen and learn from others. That open attitude will be the single most important tool in INSTEDD’s box, at...

In the last few days of my mission to Bangladesh, I chaired a meeting of the Information Management Working Group in Dhaka, at which something curious and exciting happened. The Group is comprised of representatives from each of the clusters, the CDMP (a government body) and usually a couple of others (today, CARE - it’s really just a place to reach agreement on basic issues like geocodes. But in the meeting we actually agreed that all the clusters would pursue a policy of open data - that all data collected during assessments would be shared in its raw form as soon as the collecting organisation had published its own report, through the offices of the Disaster Management Information Centre (DMIC).  This will make it possible for other agencies to incorporate that data into their...

The single most important co-ordination tool that you will find in any humanitarian response is the Who’s doing What Where, better known as the W3 or 3W. This is the basic tracking that shows which organisations (who) are doing which activities (what) in which locations (where). It comes in a limited range of flavours, and it’s usually a spreadsheet with a simple matrix by location. For some reason, here they’ve decided to add an extra W - When. I have no idea why they decided to do this, since we’ve never been able to successfully get the first 3Ws; the decision was taken before I arrived, and I would have fought tooth and claw to stop it. To be fair, I’ve been asked for a chronological component in other places, because it’s really useful to know...