Development Blogs.com

MapAction and BrightEarth both feature in an article in the Independent entitled “Mapping the disaster zones” - how they think up the intensely creative titles for these articles, I just don’t know. Interesting enough, but these articles always leave me with a sense that the writer just doesn’t get it - apparently “Within 48 hours: [...]...

Now that I’ve got my snark out of the way regarding Twitter’s role in breaking the news about the earthquake in China, it’s time for some more positive. One of the projects going on behind the Burma cyclone is the development of Geochat - basically a spatially-enabled Twitter - as a disaster response tool. Given [...]...

So, cyclone in Burma followed a week later by earthquake in China. Business as usual, I’m afraid - we live in a world of accidents waiting to happen. When an accident does happen, though, how do we know about it? There’s been a blizzard of coverage in the blogosphere about how Twitter beat the US Geological [...]...

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 [...]...

Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about...

Well, not yet, but they will [pdf]. Janet Ginsburg explains the development of the idea of the Humanitarian Technology Review, while Bruno Giussani covers the recent TED breakfast, where Eric Rasmussen gave an update on InSTEDD. Initially the idea of a Humanitarian Technology Review sounds like a good idea - if it’s done right. The first two questions - remember the first two questions, everybody! - are: who is the target audience, and what do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? The briefing paper I linked to above says The Review’s readers, like the Review itself, span many niches: medical researchers, software developers, policy-makers, funders, doctors, veterinarians, communities trying to prepare for or reeling from disasters - even other media....

Earlier this week, Paul noted that computer network attacks could have an impact on future relief efforts. In the early days of NATO’s Kosovo air war in 1999, I remember chirpy NATO spokesman Jamie Shea saying that the NATO website was under attack by Serbian hackers. Who knows whether it was true, or just a ruse of some sort, but was it the first government-acknowledged mention of cyber-warfare? There are a few more interesting things to note about that story: the BBC still had an “Internet Correspondent”, reporting on events in that far-off planet of “cyber-space”, and it was filed on 1 April 1999. Hmm … Anyhow, back to the important business of digital security.  I prefer the blander term information assurance because the work we’re discussing has so many angles to...

I promise that this is going to be my last post in what has turned into “Digital Security Week” here at humanitarian.info. A lot of my thoughts on this have been brewing since the the cyber-assault on Estonia last year, which at least had the positive effect of bringing the issue to a much wider audience than ever before. This is the flip-side of e-governance - increased government reliance on the internet creates more opportunities for abuse. However Estonia has learnt from its experiences, with the result that it’s now a far more difficult target for cyber-attacks, as well as successfully prosecuting at least one of the perpetrators. Although the attack has not been tied to any specific institutions, suspicions that the Russian government may have been involved have...

Cisco have done a lot of good in our sector through their support to NetHope and similar initiatives, no doubt about that. However the promo video on their Telepresence site manages to showcase the least useful way we could possibly use their technology, as well as putting the stereotypical “young white middle class aid worker” in the centre of the frame - instead of the people that we’re supposed to be helping. UPDATE: Okay, so I got hit by the grumpy stick this morning.  On the other hand, the first draft of this post was far more vitriolic… UPDATE 2: Also, did you catch the obscure Western reference?  This blog is in danger of becoming too much like my personal blog…...

Sequence of events: Benazir Bhutto assassinated. Pakistan goes postal. Telecoms/internet disrupted. Although Masud’s post isn’t clear about what specifically brought the internet went down, or how they brought it back up again, he does have a good point about why these things happen, and what urban planners / architects / anybody who’s listening might do about it: PTCL Telephone exchanges stand out among buildings. Banks, Telephone Exchanges, Shops and the like are the first target of an unruly mob. TWA1 or other small operators are not that evident. No one knows the whereabout of their landing stations,Points-of-Presence etc. So, during rioting, they do not make identifiable targets. So a) small is beautiful as far as internet providers are concerned, and b) make sure...

The November issue of Scientific American carries an article by Sheri Fink entitled “The Science of Doing Good” [purchase required, unfortunately]. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the article. Initially I wasn’t convinced that this was going to be much good (sorry, Sheri!) but I was wrong. It moves between different areas - refugee registration, GIS, human rights, and so on - quite smoothly, while communicating the main obstacles that we face without making excuses. As an overview, it hits most of the initiatives in the sector that are accessible to general readers, so it should engage a wide audience and give them a pointer towards the area that might interest them the most. This is A Good Thing. “Mapping for Better Accountability in Service...

Last year, the first Mobile Response International Symposium on Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response was held - they’ve published the proceedings in a proper book and everything (why aren’t we doing that at ISCRAM again?). Mobile Response is much more along the “emergency management” axis than the “humanitarian response” axis (you know, critical infrastructure, rescue operations and so on), but obviously there’s a lot of crossover (although at some point I’m going to have to write about the distinction and what it means for ICT issues in particular). So the Call for Papers for Mobile Response 2008 has just been issued. To give you an idea of the topics that they’re interested in, take a look at this list: Mobile and...

Dennis McDonald recently joined the humanitarian-ict mailing list that I manage (with Chamindra de Silva), and has raised some interesting points about social media in disaster response, drawing on his experience as a consultant and project manager. He’s also been blogging about disaster management from this perspective, and his most recent blog post sums up what he’s learning about applying social media to disaster response. What I agreed with. Official adoption is slow… public adoption is fast. We see this time and again, as new opportunities created by technology spread more quickly through the general public (largely via the web) than through the cumbersome bureaucracies that serve the public. Every time a natural disaster occurs we see and hear reports of...

… for one very good reason, and that’s because I’m not at the Global Sympsium +5 in Geneva. However it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, since it’s a pretty big deal. I’m also not liveblogging the NetHope Bi-Annual Summit in Panama, and that’s because I’m not there either. I’m sure that there are good explanations for my otherwise inexplicable absences, but that’s not important right now. The Symposium +5 is being held five years after the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange (hence the +5 title - do keep up). That first symposium was a very mixed bag - it was the first time that the various actors in the sector had come together, so it was a very big deal. Because it was the first time,...

I’ve written about the role that mobile telephony can play in humanitarian assistance quite a few times now, without really talking about it directly. The one line I have consistently taken is that cellphone coverage is not reliable or secure enough to be used as the primary means of communication in an insecure environment. Putting that to one side for a moment, however, it’s clear that mobile telephony really is the key communications technology for the poor - and that means it should be the key communications technology for the humanitarian community. Now, via the NGO Security Blog, I read that UNHCR and WFP have been using SMS to notify Iraqi refugees in Syria about upcoming food distributions. A total of10,000 SMS have been sent out, which should be enough to reach...

One of the projects I’m involved with (as a Board member and general layabout) is HumanLink, the brainchild of Jonathan Thompson. Jonathan decided that not enough is being done to develop technology solutions for the field, and decided to use his expertise and connections to set up an organisation to do just that. That new HLink website is now up and running (and looks good - well done, guys!) and we recently had a link in from the smart fellows at Ogle Earth, with a few links on to some new imagery in Tagzania. Good news all round, and hopefully the momentum behind HumanLink will build from here to expand the service delivery. (Jonathan and Jeff Allen have also been playing around with Clark Connect, a Linux server gateway which I didn’t know much about previously, but...

When I started doing aid work (about ten years ago now), ‘the field’ really was ‘the field’. People were often very isolated, and communications were limited, whether to head office or home. I remember being very impressed by UNHCR’s satellite telephone in Ngara, although I was more impressed by the fact that their satellite comms could also be used to watch the football on Saturday afternoon. One of the interesting things about this assessment in Sudan is seeing how many people are using Skype - often against the wishes of agency IT departments, who don’t like Skype’s tendency to gobble bandwidth and breach firewalls. Keith Doyle of UNJLC commented to me yesterday that he was adding a new contact every day as more and more people were coming...

The Disaster Resource Network at the World Economic Forum is an initiative that aims to network the private sector in support of disaster response activities. Generally speaking I’m strongly in favour of this kind of engagement, as long as everybody’s agenda is kept on the table, and it seems like there’s been a proliferation of private-public initiatives of this sort in the last few years. Only time will tell which ones really deliver - in the meantime, it can get distracting. DRN has just released the report (.doc, 350k) from an interesting survey on the use of ICT in emergencies, based on a desk review, survey and interviews. (Disclosure: I was one of the interviewees.) There’s no revelations in the actual findings, so you might want to skip to the bottom...

Interesting news from Gregg Swanson of Humaninet, who recently attended a simulation exercise held by ADRA in Indonesia. (Incidentally, the ADRA Indonesia home page is funny as hell for all the wrong reasons, mainly due to the font.) Gregg has written a series of blog posts about the experience on the Humaninet blog, as well as an accompanying article at their ICT Features page. It sounds as if the exercise went really well, so congratulations to all involved! On another page Gregg has written 12 reasons why relief organisations should conduct simulations. There’s some useful ICT-related findings on that page, but I was more interested in those 12 reasons, because we’re discussing a similar project for the ECB agencies - to do an inter-agency simulation either at HQ or...

Interesting news from the big beast that is Microsoft, particularly interesting in light of the ECB / NetHope plans to develop a global ICT training delivery mechanism for staff working in the field. This project was recently approved and we’re moving forward now with ECB funding for NetHope management. One of the critical problems that we identified in the ECB4 Assessment was the general lack of good IT skills in the field. This was true across the board, from senior IT staff (who lacked specialised skills in areas such as VSAT installation) to junior project staff (who are often recruited in an emergency with few computer skills). The question is, how to introduce that training to them. There are three possibilities: Remote learning. Increased connectivity in the field mean...