humanitarian.info

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story - I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?

Texas in Africa:

Here’s one of the great mysteries of our age: why, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on peacekeeping, peace deal negotiations, democracy promotion, humanitarian aid, development assistance, and celebrity awareness-raising, is the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo still an anarchic war zone?

TiA goes on to cite research by Severine Autesserre¹ that suggests the answer lies in the false assumptions that dominate the international efforts to bring peace to the Congo, and the way that those assumptions shape their actions. There’s some truth to that, obviously, but such research runs into three problems:

1. This research is almost entirely counterfactual, which means that while we can definitively say that what was tried did not work, we can’t with any authority say that what was not tried would have worked any better. Possibly the research (and book, apparently) goes beyond that, but it’s paywalled, so no comment is possible.
2. Conflicts are complex, while almost all of our interventions are linear. Not only will linear interventions frequently fail in complex situations, but they will also a) generate unintended consequences which will increase complexity, and b) work against other linear interventions being attempted  in other geographic and sectoral areas.
3. Finally and most importantly, the question of why all those activities failed to bring peace might have a much simpler (if unpalatable) answer. Perhaps those activities don’t work very well, if they work at all, and perhaps we don’t have anything close to a good enough understanding of those activities to make them work well even if they do work.

Assumptions abound on all sides:one commenter says “At least the elections have reaffirmed Congolese territorial integrity, which seems to me a major step forward”, which of course is true only if you think reaffirming Congolese territorial integrity is a good thing in the first place. Some parts of the research make good points but for the wrong reason:

Autesserre discusses the ridiculous overemphasis on holding elections that permeated the international community’s response to the conflict. This, she argues, resulted from post-Cold War norms. Elections were the “obvious” or “natural” choice for statebuilding and the way to guarantee international peace.

I agree that elections are ridiculously overemphasised by the international community - the only people who’d disagree with that statement are people already working in the booming elections industry. The growth of that industry tells us all we need to know about why elections are so popular - not because they result from post-Cold War norms, but because they are a linear process which is easier to manage than the complex process that is democracy.

While the elections went mostly smoothly… the advent of so-called democracy has done little to improve the lives of anyone in the east. In fact, the situation has gotten worse since 2006, leading to much disillusionment with the idea of democracy.

Assumptions again: democracy in general improves specific peoples’ lives. This is false, and it’s no wonder that people become disillusioned with democracy when that’s the message that we send them. Elections are a useful signifier- highly visible, which is very appealling to the donors and the media - but they’re mainly a technical exercise. However “elections = democracy = a better life” is a nice simple equation that can be messaged to death, so that’s what we do.

Autesserre makes a convincing argument that “a transition process carefully planned over ten years to build a lasting peace at all levels, reconstruct the administrative and economic capacity of the country, minimize visible international interference, develop the preconditions for free and fair elections, and explain the advantages of this strategy to the population would probably have been received well” by the Congolese. It also might have worked.

Well, it might have worked, but it might not - that sauce isn’t strong enough to add much flavour to my dinner. A “transition process carefully planned over ten years to build a lasting peace at all levels” and so forth - this would be a great thing, but in the actual world in which we live it’s never going to happen. We need to do two things: first, demolish and restructure the industries that have grown up around democracy promotion, development assistance, etc; second, work with what we’ve got rather than what we wish we had.

1. Didn’t I work with Severine in Kosovo? Answers on a postcard please. [↩]

Amanda asks 5 questions about the wisdom of humanitarian intervention, and I am pleased to say that I have the answers to all of them, which leads to this, yet another blog post that doesn’t feature information management at all. Roll on!

1. Is it ever appropriate for foreign citizens, governments, or international institutions to intervene in crises overseas?

Yes.

2. If the answer to #1 is “yes,” then when is it appropriate?

Depends on the situation.

3. Do we know to do it? That is, do we understand the technological means that will allow us to accomplish our stated goals?

No, we have almost no idea how to accomplish our stated goals. Somebody pointed to the thesis in Paul Collier’s new book that (broadly) peacekeeping operations have been successful in preventing a slide back to bloody all-out civil war in many situations. I look forward to reading the book, with three caveats to his thesis: first, that’s some complex causality right there, second, that’s some low expectatations right there, and three, look out for Black Swans.

4. If so, are those means available to us?

Yes, we have various means at our disposal, but no idea how to use them effectively, no sound understanding of how those means interact, and an unwillingness to face the law of unintended consequences.

5. If they are, are we willing to expend the resources necessary to use those means?

No.

A lot depends on what sort of intervention we’re talking about, of course. Humanitarian interventions are frequently attempts to mitigate the huge amounts of damage done by people who think that military interventions will resolve matters. In the comments to the post,  Conor Foley suggests that there are no simple answers to these  questions, which is why humanitarian action is frustrating; but it seems like a lot of the complexity has been added post facto, in the legal and bureaucratic layers which have been added since the end of the Second World War. Perhaps there are simple answers to these questions and we just don’t like them?

Uh-oh … events overtake blogging. After writing the previous post about how Jestina Mukoko’s bail had been revoked, the following happened:

Zimbabwean rights activist Jestina Mukoko and 14 other people were ordered freed on bail Wednesday after the president and the prime minister forced a judge to reverse the previous day’s decision that had sparked outrage.

I guess this sort of rapid turnaround is what the otherwise wholly wretched Twitter was invented to report. Anyhow, this is far far better news, although the political intervention clearly shows the Zimbabwe legal process for the sham it is.

As feared, the Zimbabwean state continues to press its shonky case against my colleague Jestina Mukoko, National Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, and 14 other Zimbabwean political and civil society activists. From Violet Gonda at SW Radio Africa:

The courthouse was packed Tuesday with journalists, members of civil society and the diplomatic community, who were left shocked after the Magistrate remanded the accused persons in custody. Eyewitnesses said Mukoko looked pale and dejected when she heard the news. The accused persons were all abducted and tortured between the months of October and December last year.

It’s  going to be little comfort to Jestina as she is taken back to prison, but the authorities have only managed to delay, not stop the work of ZPP and others in monitoring what is going on in Zimbabwe’s hinterland. Just in is the meaty February report from ZPP:

Since January 2009, a total record of 2410 cases of politically motivated human rights abuse have been recorded: 1125 in January and 1285 in February showing  an upsurge by 160 cases. Although there were no reported cases of murder since 2009, cases of harassments, assaults, looting, displacement and unlawful detentions continue to maintain a stubborn presence.

It’s pretty clear to me that Zimbabwe’s resilient communities are making for resilient organisations too. This numerical analysis doesn’t really mean anything, but the datatrail and the paper beneath it - combined with the quiet work of many others in country writing down and photographing what is going on - is there for an eventual reckoning.

• Citizen Journalism and the War on Gaza - an article describing the recent Ushahidi deployment in the context of social media in the recent war. Good coverage of good projects.
• Documenting Darfur and south Sudan - an old article from Tom Adami, then-Chief of Records Management & Archives Unit for the UN Mission in Sudan. This is an area that continually gets overlooked, and I hope to write more in the future.
• If you’re looking for a Video Introduction to Crisis Mapping, Patrick has just what you need. This is a clear and comprehensive briefing on his line of work and research, including an overview of actors in that field.
• Sahana gets blogged at Gartner blogs. These are interesting times for the Sahana project, as it’s now becoming a project independent from its original host, the Lanka Software Foundation. Look for big developments by end of year…
• Rob Crilly confesses that he doesn’t know how many people have died in Darfur - don’t worry, he has a good rationale. Lesson for the month: don’t imagine that the UN has any more of a clue than anybody else about big numbers…

I don’t have much to add to the swine flu situation. It might be a pandemic, it might not, but the best strategy is to a) keep an eye out for more news and b) take reasonable precautions if it becomes necessary. I’m a colossal pessimist, which is great in situations like this, because unless the virus wipes out the entire human race, I’ll be able to say, “Hey, that wasn’t as bad as I was expecting!” Incidentally, can we start calling this “swinfluenza” soon? I’ve got some t-shirts already prepared. They’re the old “henfluenza” t-shirts with tippex over the logo.

First: some useful resources

• WHO Swine influenza briefing
• WHO Pandemic influenza preparedness and response guidance
• The ever-rocking Flu Wiki
• CDC Swine flu information page
• A few comments on pandemic influenza by Terry Jones

You can expect traffic to all these sites to be massive for the duration of this outbreak (or until civilisation collapses, taking the internet with it), so be patient with slow loading pages.

Second: a brief discourse on tracking epidemics

There’s been some discussion about how web and mobile technology can be used to track outbreaks like this - something that’s been floating around for a while, and was of course the starting point for the creation of INSTEDD.

• Evgeny discusses Twitter’s power to misinform
• Erik at WhiteAfrican urges caution but points out that an online ecosystem is emerging
• Mark Honigsberg is less optimistic and thinks a different approach is needed
• Kragen Javier Sitaker explains how false rumors can cost lives

These discussions are relevant, valid, interesting, etc., but I’d like to add two really simple rules of thumb regarding any web-enabled tracking initiatives, both of which are widely appreciated but often forgotten:

1. Garbage in, garbage out.
2. Ground truth everything.

Nearly all of the chatter on social media is garbage, so you do the math.¹ And ground truthing sounds like it should be easy, but it actually isn’t. See? That’s the pessimist in me talking again. Ignore him. Anyway, keep reading other blogs for more swine flu info - I’m going to blog about something else.

1. In fairness, both INSTEDD and Swift River are in fact doing the math. [↩]

IRIN reports on how the financial crisis is affecting the NGO community while Michael rounds up the details (and will be keeping a running tally, no doubt):

“Clearly the impact of the financial downturn on charities is widening and deepening,” said Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Charity Commission, the independent regulator for charitable activity in England and Wales. “Some charities still face that double whammy of a drop in income as well as an increased demand for services.”

When I was last in the UK, those I spoke to in the NGO sector all had the same story to tell - budgets predicted to fall and programmes scaling back. It’s likely that the programs that will be affected are long-term development rather than emergency response, since money tends to come through for the disasters no matter what, and it’s going to be core staff that disappear while consultants take up the slack.¹ My main recommendation for the NGO community would be this: if you’re going to be receiving less money, and you’re going to be doing more work, then you need to work smarter, not harder.

The NGO community is quite smart at the tactical level - in the field, where resources are constrained, as we discussed in the series on humanitarian innovation. It’s not so smart at the strategic level - at headquarters, global or regional, where those resources are allocated and where the big picture thinking usually gets done. It’s not because there aren’t smart people thinking about key issues in the NGO community - you only need to read Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog to realise that there’s a very high level of analytical capacity out there. However much of that thought is directed towards the issues that the NGOs deal with, rather than the effective functioning of the NGOs themselves.

There’s been a big push in recent years towards redressing the balance - the ECB Project being the most notable example - but there are certain institutional constraints built in. One of them is that we’ve had it drummed into us for decades that spending money on the organisation is a Bad Thing. You must spend as little money as possible on the organisation, the reasoning goes, because then you’ll be spending more on the communities that you work with. The basis for this is public perception as much as anything - imagine what the average private donor would feel if they knew you were spending 50 cents in the Euro on your running costs. Those running costs have to be paid for somehow, though, which has lead to all sort of budgetary trickery to hide the fact that - gasp! - we actually pay staff. I’d argue that this is a communications failure, that it’s an inevitable byproduct of the way that we treat private donors in general², but that’s (yet again) a discussion for another time.

Since this is supposed to be a blog primarily about humanitarian information management (although that feels increasingly tangential these days…), I suppose I should point out that investing in technology can offer ways of leveraging scarce resources. Although I tend to agree that the productivity revolution promised by technology hasn’t actually arrived yet, there are a range of smaller impacts that are blindingly obvious. For example: if you haven’t moved most of your main office communication  to VOIP now, then why not go into the carpark with a big pile of dollar bills and set fire to them? The NGO community shouldn’t be exempt from the evolutionary algorithms that drive organisational developments. There’s a good chance that some organisations will collapse if funding streams dry up to the extent that some people fear they will - but there’s also a  good chance that some organisations will find this is the opportunity to radically change the way they do business, and they’ll come  out of that process working smarter  than they did before.

That’s the theory, anyway.

1. I could be particularly provocative and say that I’m looking forward to seeing whether the withdrawal of NGO support makes a significant difference to the lives of affected communities, but I’ll save that for later. [↩]
2. Briefly: as idiots. [↩]

Previously. Now: there’s a new mailing list [http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ps: register at talk-ps@openstreetmap.org] for people who want to get involved in mapping in Gaza and the West Bank. They’re still looking for people with direct knowledge of Gaza to join in the editing process. A particular note for me:

In the process, agencies like UNOSAT and EC JRC have started selective release of their data sets .. a great start to open geodata exchange. The OpenStreetMap Wiki has an extensive (perhaps the greatest) collection of Palestinian geodata on the internet, all collected rapidly through crowdsourcing. [My emphasis.]

See? Crowdsourcing can work.¹ More can be found on Mikel’s blog at http://brainoff.com/weblog/index.php?s=gaza+openstreetmap.

1. Sometimes. [↩]

Now this is ninja. Erik has set up African Signals, a wiki to gather information about mobile networks in Africa. This is a great idea that will definitely benefit from a crowdsourced approach, and I hope that it builds into a vital resource for everybody working in Africa, private and public sector alike. It’s one of those ideas that seems so simple, but it’s unlikely any single person could put it together - but drawing on the expertise of people working around the continentcan achieve it fairly quickly and keep it updated more effectively. So what can we all do, Erik?

Your Job:

Find your country and enter whatever you know about your local costs, speeds and service levels for mobile phone operators and internet service providers (ISPs).

Take 5 minutes and jump see if you can add anything new, or if the info is correct. Then, tell your tech friends from that country too, share this. It’s a resource, something for you to give to and to take from. It is strengthened by your information, and I hope that you in turn will benefit from it too one day.

In similar vein, Steve Song has a table of SMS costs in Africa in 2008, drawn from the ITU Measuring the Information Society report - also worth checking out.