1. The more expert you are in the area that somebody else is talking about, the more likely they are to be wrong.
2. The more expert you are in the area that somebody else is talking about, the less likely you are to recognise when you’re wrong.
3. When somebody else talks about how technology is going to change everything, start with the assumption that they’re wrong and go from there.

My reason for posting these will become clear in the next post, probably.

Those crazy jokers at the UN Joint Logistics Centre have just released version 2.0 of the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure for Transport database schema, based on feedback received since last September’s release and developed with WFP and Ithaca (good to see that partnership being productive). This version covers an XML schema, the schema documentation, template databases and emergency assessment forms. The main main changes in version 2.0 include:

1. “Light” and “Comprehensive” UNSDIT packages. The most significant change has been the packaging of a “Light” subset of the Comprehensive UNSDIT package to better match information requirements in sudden-onset emergencies.

Now this is a very smart idea indeed. When you’re doing the emergency response end, the last thing you want is to wade through a massive amount of barely-relevant data or fill out a single field in a 400-field db. A light version makes a lot of sense - I’d be interested to know what the process was for deciding what what was included and what wasn’t.

2. “Light” UNSDIT Assessment forms. The same concern guided the choice to release an assessment package narrowed to the minimal set of information requirements of a sudden onset emergency response.

An even smarter idea. This is something that should be adopted by all the clusters, not just logistics.

3. ESRI Personal Geodatabase and Shapefile template databases. UNSDIT template databases aligned to version 2.0 of the UNSDIT schema are made available through this release as ESRI Personal Geodatabase and Shapefile to better serve for partners operating within an open source environment.

And it gets smarter still!

Some additional news worth reporting: UNJLC is planning to offer a Web Mapping/Reporting and a data download service at some point, which will be a considerable step forward (and hopefully be more useful than GeoNetwork is currently - jpeg maps of goat distribution, anybody?).

Short notice, but the Humanitarian Futures Programme will be hosting a seminar on Wednesday 25 June at King’s College, London. Focus is on satellite imagery and its future uses by the humanitarian community in monitoring natural hazards, climate change and health. If you’re around London, it should be interesting - plus, free lunch! Come on, everybody likes a free lunch, especially in London.

Speaker:Professor Bhupendra Jasani, King’s College London
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Time: 12.30-14.00
Venue: King’s College, London, main Strand Campus
Cost: Free, Lunch provided

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 Kate Stohr in 1999, he replied with a long e-mail message that began, “You’ve stumbled upon the question of the century for those working in the built environment,” and ended with a signature line that listed his title as “Eternal Optimist.” A lot of people I spoke to afterward agreed with the first sentiment; almost no one with the second. The world is short a billion homes. Now all we need are a few million architects to help build them.

I’m not optimistic either, but nor do I agree that we need a few million architects. What we need is to help the people who need a billion homes to become their own architects - to develop simple, workable construction forms that can be disseminated easily and virally. There’s a role in that first part for architects, urban planners and shelter experts, sure - but the second part can only be achieved if we take a different approach to the actual construction process.

We can’t can’t rely on central planning to take into account the massive and growing improvised urban areas - at best they’ll be able to provide basic services, but not even that is guaranteed - so poor communities already build their own dwellings, which is where shanty towns come from in the first place. The poor are already their own architects, so the only solution is to help them become better architects who build better dwellings - better in the sense of being more robust, more environmentally friendly, more durable and more liveable.

So we come back around to the role of ICT, which for the first time offers a way of disseminating this information on a large scale at relatively low cost. The question is, what’s the best vector for that dissemination, how do we ensure access to the information, and what forms do we need to use to make the information relevant to the end users?

Answers on a postcard to the Shelter Centre, I guess….

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 Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights (UPR), a diplomatic speed-dating process for states to assess each other’s overall record on human rights. The UPR’s novelties are the “interactive dialogue” between states, and the direct, mandated involvement of civil society organisations in the review process of individual states.

So, with all this novelty going around, might we see some innovative thinking about how to communicate the proceedings in a modern, web-savvy way? Hardly. Staffers have resorted to the double-sin of scanning in the draft statements of delegations and dumping them onto the portal as a PDF. Here’s a clip from the statement of the Bangladesh delegation in Brazil’s first review session:

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Perhaps a graphologist can help us read between the lines here, giving us unprecedented access into the minds of diplomats.

I feel duty-bound to direct you towards two exciting articles which are also quite brief, so they won’t take up too much of your day. I realise that you’re busy.

First up, it’s Sahana getting a mention in the Wall Street Journal, in an article with the snappy title of (sigh) Managing Disaster. Actually it’s just a puff piece written by the Business Roundtable, but it’s nice to see IBM and Sahana getting mentioned for the Chengdu earthquake deployment.

Second, it’s another insightful article by me for ICT Update magazine, entitled Communicating Peace. In it, you’ll find words of wisdom like ” What is important is not the technology itself, but how people use it.” It will only take 5 minutes of your time to read it - but a lifetime of enlightenment will follow.

The Humanitarian Futures Programme is one of the most interesting initiatives out there, taking a longer-term view of the sector than most other policy and research groups. Originally I thought that they were going to be developing the humanitarian equivalent of the Singularity, but it’s more about building dialogue with key partners and getting people to think.

The Programme is looking for a part-time consultant to work to research the future of humanitarian collaboration.  The work is part of a two-person team, initially home-based but with some travel in the last quarter of 2008 and into 2009. Desktop review, interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, simulations - you know the score.

What’s interesting is that they are looking for someone interested in bringing non-traditional perspectives and new ways of thinking about collaboration into the humanitarian community (networks, social media and so on). This sounds a lot like the sort of thing that Aid Workers Network was supposed to promote and that ECB has been doing work on, so I’m all for it.

If you’re interested, send a half-page application letter with CV to Rosie Oglesby [rosie dot oglesby at kcl dot ac dot uk] by COB Thursday 12th June. There is a TORs available, if you ask really, really nicely.

Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron spoke at Where2.0 on Disaster Technology. Streaming video is a bit of a non-starter on my shonky internet connection, but both of these guys have an interesting take on the sector. They’re both technology evangelists, but minus the utopianism that makes my fists itch. A platform like Where2.0 is fantastic for getting the word out and (hopefully) engaging more people in the process of development for humanitarian action.

Here comes the requisite word of warning: for many people the politics of humanitarian assistance (both international and organisational) don’t appear on their radar. If we want useful tools to come out of this sort of forum, we have to communicate the political realities that technology will bump up against. Myanmar is a case in point; there’s a lot of activity (as per my earlier post) but the dots just aren’t joined up, and this needs to stop.

I used to think that this was just a phase that we were going through; then I thought that it was a naturally occurring state that we had to work around; then I realised that the endemic problems of co-ordination that we have were emergent properties of the system; but now I’m not sure what I think. Maybe I should leave the thinking to other people for a while.

Anyway, watch the video. You’ll enjoy it. They’re American, you know.

Rich Treves blogs on Google Earth design, and his ideas are solid (I particularly like his post on 2005 - 2015: the Lost Decade of Neo-Geography?). A recent interest in humanitarian applications, and some discussions with people like Nigel Woof of MapAction, have lead him to develop TMapper, a thematic mapping tool for Google Earth. Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for in Bangladesh (and would doubtless be useful for Myanmar, ahem).

Now, I haven’t been able to play with this yet, because my shonky mobile internet connection means that the download is too large and difficult. However from the description this looks like a first step in making Google Earth more versatile, which can only be a good thing. I’m slightly worried by the .NET dependency, and I worry that perhaps this might end up falling between two stools - too complicated for non-GIS folk to easily use, and too lightweight for GIS folk to feel comfortable with.

Nobody’s perfect, however, and at least this is something we can test. Thanks to Rich for giving this some thought and putting in the time - he’s looking for feedback, so if you want to play around with TMapper, let him know.

From Katrin Verclas at MobileActive.org:

SANGONeT and MobileActive.org invite you to contribute your expertise to MobileActive08 to take place from 13-15 October 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

• Do you have expertise in the field of mobile technologies for social development?
• Are you a researcher working on mobile technology for social impact?
• Are you a mobile service provider with specific products to exhibit that benefit the social market?

If so, we invite you to submit your ideas to be part of MobileActive08, the largest event to date focused on mobile technology for social development. This global gathering brings together practitioners, researchers, technologists, and donors interested in the use and application of mobile technology for social impact. At MobileActive08 participants will explore how mobile phones are effectively used to advance civil society work, assess the current state of knowledge in the use of mobile technology to advance social development, and investigate trends, needs and investment opportunities.

We invite you to submit proposals for:

• Workshops and Skill-share Sessions (for 90 minutes) for in-depth exploration of a topic about unlocking the potential of mobile technology for social impact.
• Short (15-min) Rotating Mini-Talks for research and project overviews.
• A space in the SIMplace to showcase your product.
• A space in the SIMlab where participants can test-drive your mobile application and explore it in depth.

If you have an idea, please review the detailed Call for Expertise and then submit. We look forward to your expertise, enthusiasm, and creativity! The deadline for submissions is 30 June 2008. More information is at MobileActive08.