July 29, 2005
Baseline Magazine in May
This is fairly old news, but Baseline magazine went tsunami-crazy in May, with three articles on how ICT was used in the tsunami response. I particularly liked the inappropriate “Tidal Wave of Problems” title - sensitivity obviously not the strong point of their editorial team.
It’s difficult to land planes when there’s cows on the runway. No, really?
World Food Programme: Wave of Support
I’m not entirely sure that WFP’s roll-out was quite as fast as this article makes it out to be:
They managed to get a very long article out of how the latest technology tested by the military wasn’t actually used at all in the tsunami response.
Notwithstanding my criticisms, it’s good to see this kind of work getting coverage, even if a lot of articles out there are just rewrites of agency press releases. Baseline did a good job covering some of the less visible aspects of the response, and hopefully we’ll see more of the same in future.
Incidentally, if anybody has any other stories on these sorts of issues, send them my way.
Filed under Tsunami by Paul Currion
Posts
Comments on Baseline Magazine in May »
In the trenches @ 1:33 am
You’re spot-on regarding a lot of issues — good job on the ecb sud and pak assessments. The humanitarian response process needs to be modelled as an enterprise architecture and information silos bridged.
BTW INS was a really key challenge - the programme was addressing one sudden onsets at multiple locations at the same time. Things will get better, but slowly.
Paul Currion @ 8:56 am
Thanks for the feedback on the assessments - the full and final set of assessments should be available soon on the ECB website - I’ll blog it as soon as it happens.
We are making progress, but slowly. We make the same mistakes again and again, but the last year has seen a shift in how we approach those mistakes. For the first time in my working life, “reform” actually seems to mean reform, rather than just a few quick fixes.
If you want some interesting reading, I recommend the document Ambiguity and Change (pdf file). It was the starting point for the ECB project, and has some interesting projections.