humanitarian.info

Rik Panganiban posted some interesting thoughts about our ICT4Peace report – worth reading if you can’t be bothered to go through the entire report. His final point is particularly relevant:

“I hope that this important area of ICT4Peace doesn’t get left by the wayside. But without a specific policy arena for those issue areas to be addressed, that seems to be a likely future.”

We discussed this a lot while I was editing the report. It was clear that, although there was a lot of interest in the subject, there wasn’t anybody jumping at the opportunity to pick up the baton. We’re now looking at how to take the findings of the report forward, but that’s going to be difficult without a specific forum for those discussions.

The knowledgeable Nancy White takes a different tack, from a Web 2.0 perspective:

“For those of you who are big Web2.0 thinkers, how do you imagine the changing web tools and environments might help? How do our grand ideas jive with the electricity, phone and bandwidth scarcity not just in disaster areas, but in 2/3rds world where this is the norm?”

It’s clear that these discussions shouldn’t just be happening at the policy level, but at our level as well – and at the level of affected communities, where possible. In the former case, we can start those discussions right here; in the latter case, we need more imagination if we’re going to reach those affected by disaster. The revolution starts here…