David Sasaki joins the conversation, which is great - it was starting to feel a little bit like a mens singles tennis match between me and Patrick. Now it’s mens doubles, or something. David starts with a strong serve, although his accusation that
Both men seem to have the academic tendency to speak in aphorisms
seems a [...]...
Strictly speaking, shelter is outside the remit of this blog. However the article The Exigent City in the New York Times was an excellent piece of reporting, and I urge everybody to read it. (HT: Simmy Ross) The article closes with the following lines:
When I first contacted Cameron Sinclair, who started Architecture for Humanity with [...]...
The ingenuity of Julian’s undemocracy.com, which slices-up debates in the UN General Assembly and Security Council into a usable form, is making it ever harder to put up with some of the UN’s websites.
One particular offender is this portal set up by the Human Rights Commissioner to provide information about the sessions of the Human [...]...
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: [...]...
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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 [...]...
Short note: WorldWideHelp have got the NargisHelp Wiki up and running, packed with information goodness....
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 [...]...
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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 [...]...
What’s interesting about the ReliefWeb Client Outreach statistics?
Quite a lot. ReliefWeb is the single most information portal for the humanitarian community, so it’s worth paying attention to how that community uses online services, what sorts of information it values, and so on. It’s also interesting because ReliefWeb went through a huge overhaul a couple of [...]...
Stuff I should have blogged at the time:
What if? - New York emergency housing competition results: Last September, New York City launched “What if? “, an open competition to find innovative designs for high-density emergency provisional housing for 38,000 households in the aftermath of a hurricane and flood disaster in afictional, one [...]...
So UNHCR releases a Google Earth layer to great fanfare:
Unveiling a new UNHCR layer in Google Earth before invited guests at UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters, Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone hailed the project as means to educate people worldwide on the plight of refugees and on the humanitarians who help them.
“Google Earth is [...]...
As well as the recent problems with public transport schemes, there’s been no small concern about whether biometrics are as secure as our governments tell us. Now The Register tells us that a hacker group in Germany has published the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister, and promises that this could be used to [...]...
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....
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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...
No sooner had I written yesterday’s post about digital security than the New York Times has a piece by Nicholas Kristol on how the Save Darfur campaign website has been under attack recently - from Chinese IP addresses.
As the coalition’s China advocacy campaign has intensified, officials have noticed increasingly sophisticated and subversive attempts to intercept emails and infect computers with malicious programs.
Kristol relies mainly on innuendo to suggest that the Chinese government might be behind the attacks, with very little evidence to support the accusation. From a technology point of view, though, it’s irrelevant who’s responsible - this is a cautionary tale for NGOs and other organisations. We can enjoy the benefits that technology brings - but we also need...
The White African faces a quandary:
Global tools that have real time read/write access are extremely powerful. Depending on ones motives, your impact can be good or bad. Even if your motives are good, your tool can be used for bad. How’s that for a quandry?
It’s certainly a quandary, but not a new one. It’s the same question that’s been asked about humanitarian aid since at least the 1970s, and has been one of the motors behind the humanitarian reform process. What’s more interesting is the assumption behind that question, an assumption that he describes quite clearly:
Just decades ago those who were not in close enough proximity to an event were unable to do much, if anything about it. Today, we can successfully effect change through digital tools and be...
Because Paul’s claiming to be too confused to write up some lessons learned from Ushahidi, I’ll have a go:
What’s cool?
It’s timely: the number of people who actually get these kind of things off the ground, as opposed to jibber-jabber about them, is very small. Getting preliminary, lead information as close as possible to the time the incident happened is extremely valuable in every possible scenario and not just the “document now, prosecute later” one.
It challenges the conventional view by providing an opportunity for people to read first hand accounts un-editorialised by the MSM, who seem intent on warping the events into the template of Generic Violence in Africa.
It’s quite easy to use: the system focussed on getting raw information in the...
Ushaidi goes from strength to strength, it seems, while Mashada closes down, which is an interesting trend path. As a Web2.0 social mash-up affair takes off, an old-school bulletin board project collapses - and for exactly the same reasons, the increase in violence in Kenya. The need for security-related information sharing has increased, leading to more support for something like Ushaida; but as the social divisions within Kenya increase discussions on the bulletin boards became more fractious and unmanageable.
What does this tell us? The virtual world isn’t resistant to real-world pressures, and it doesn’t necessarily overcome social divisions - hence the problems with the bulletin board. These pressures can be managed, but it’s no easy thing - but would Ushaidi be...
Following the collapse of the political process in Kenya, bloggers White African and Kenyan Pundit - both of whom are worth reading, by the way - have developed a Google Maps mash-up which deals with electoral violence in the country. Called Ushaidi (’witness’ in Swahili, I think?), it enables people to report events either online or via SMS. It’s not the first time something like this has been tried, but this an interesting organic attempt to pin down exactly what’s happening in the country. As anybody working in human rights knows, gathering this sort of information is extremely difficult - particularly later on when it might be needed. More explanation from White African in this blog post, coverage at Global Voices (with an interesting article on cyber...
Marla Petal at RiskRED emailed me following my recent post on PreventionWeb. RiskRed is concerned with promoting education about disaster risk reduction, but its most interesting project from my perspective is the DRRlibrary, a DRR resource site with a social bookmarking approach, using tags to classify useful websites and documents.
When you visit the DRRlibrary, what you see looks almost identical to del.icio.us, the mother of all social bookmarking sites, with a few extra functions. Searching through the tags is quite simple - as well as being able to sort by date, title or URL of each link, there’s also a tag cloud on the main page and a browser (which works fine but is a little confusing). It’s great to see this approach being used, and I assume that Ian...
It’s fair to say that Craig Duncan was largely responsible for ReliefWeb, the site which has become the primary hub for the humanitarian community on the web. It’s not perfect, but there’s a number of good reasons for that, particularly the problem of addressing legacy systems in the age of Web2.0. He’s now moved from OCHA to UNISDR, and is the Senior Co-ordinator of PreventionWeb, a new website which hopefully will become similarly indispensible for the disaster prevention / risk reduction / preparedness community.
This demo gives you a good idea of what PreventionWeb is about, and it looks like Craig and his team at UNISDR have taken the opportunities presented in building a website from scratch. The layout is clean and the site is easy to navigate, and things...
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...
There’s a new addition to the current crop of educational games from UNHCR (see below), so I thought that I’d provide a quick catalogue of the games that I’m familiar with. Please feel free to add any others in the comments section, and I’ll update the list.
Against All Odds. The game that lets you experience what it is like to be a refugee from UNHCR.
Stop Disasters. A disaster simulation game from the UN/ISDR.
WFP Food Force (download). It’s up to you to save and rebuild the island of Sheylan with WFP.
3rd World Farmer. Puts you in the shoes of a family of farmers in one of the poorest areas of the world.
Darfur is Dying. Players must keep their refugee camp functioning in the face of possible attack by Janjaweed militias.
Ayiti: the Cost of Life. Your...
About the time of Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people getting excited about the power of the web to respond to disasters (some of which were loosely grouped under the title Recovery2.0). The idea was that the power of the web could be harnessed to improve the speed and coverage of disaster response, creating a multiplier effect with all of those people in the world that wanted to help but didn’t know how.
Needless to say, I wasn’t one of them (grouch, grouch, grouch). That wasn’t because I didn’t think the web had the potential to transform disaster response practices - I think it does have that potential and it’s already transforming our work.
(We had an interesting idea-tumble earlier this year between Jesse Robbins, Mikel Maron myself on a very specific...
In response to an enquiry by Kevin Toomer about how to integrate GeoRSS into security reporting as a means of producing more accessible security maps for the humanitarian community, I sent a request to a few colleagues for advice. The result was a very rich email discussion, which I am now transferring onto the blog for anybody else to contribute to or benefit from. The people contributing to the discussion have an amazing range of experience (interestingly, almost all of that experience is outside the world of “classical” GIS) and my thanks go to everybody who’s contributed. Kevin’s original question is quoted here in the post, and the discussion continues in the comments below:
I’ve been trying to figure out how to easily get news items from an RSS...
I’ve corresponded with Mikel Maron for a while now, interested particularly by the work that he’s been involved with introducing Wikis into the UN. However his first love is geospatial and his favourite project is OpenStreetMap, which is a free editable map of the whole world that can be viewed, edited and used in a collaborative way from by anybody, anywhere.
Mikel has been thinking about how this type of approach might be used in disaster response, and he recently gave a presentation at the State of the Map event in Manchester in which he outlined his thoughts so far - you can hear a podcast of his talk, view the slides that accompanied it and read the notes from it. Mikel acknowledges that he’s not an expert, and while there’s a lot of things that I agree...
I did promise a couple of people that I would blog about Mikel’s talk about OpenStreetMap and Disaster Response at State of the Map, but it’s taken me a bit longer than planned. However there was a follow up on “people to people aid” that I wanted to post on following some comments from Louiqa in my previous post.
There’s been a lot of talk about how this might work, specifically in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Hurricane Katrina Debacle, with a couple of projects starting to work on the specifics. The principle of P2P Aid is to connect donors directly with beneficiaries, using the power of the web to cut out the middleman - person to person, without the need for all that cumbersome bureaucracy.
There are already huge remittance flows which...
Quite a long time ago, I posted the story of a starving tribesman who emailed a bunch of people to try and get assistance. The Economist has finally caught up, as it opens this article on technology in humanitarian relief with a similar story.
“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”
A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet café at the north Kenyan camp.
The rest of the article then...
The UN says many things, although unfortunately not many of them are comprehensible. Sam Smith has taken it upon himself to rectify this. Brave man.
Brave, but not stupid. Sam has form, particularly through his involvement with MySociety. Applying the lessons that MySociety has learnt through its projects, Sam has come up with two gems.
First, The UN Says is an “Unofficial blog of briefings by the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General”, i.e. steal the feed and make it easy to read. Great idea - makes it possible to see what the “official” line of the UN is on critical issues.
Second, UNdemocracy is perhaps the more useful (and disruptive) of the two. It has documents from the last 13 years of UN meetings, all organised and laid out in an...