For the last six months I’ve been working with the ECB Project, carrying out an assessment of ICT and information requirements in emergencies. It’s been fascinating, taking me to the headquarters of all the member agencies, as well as the field visits to Pakistan and Sudan, and into the heart of the way these organisations do business. The assessment is almost finished now, all the research is done, and now I’m just writing the final report package. On 24 and 25 April, we’ll have a workshop hosted by the University of Washington (thanks to Mark Haselkorn and his team). For a sneak preview, the Pakistan report is already out, albeit with very basic formatting.

The workshop is just the starting point, however, because then the agencies participating in ECB4 will have to actually implement their recommendations. Some of the things we’re going to suggest are fairly simple (such as strategic planning for security communications); but some of them aren’t so simple (such as pursuing a standardised inter-agency assessment format). Most of them require some amount of organisational change, which inevitably will be painful, and will test our commitment to truly building capacity.

I’ve been a bit sneaky with the assessment; I’ve tried as much as possible to make the reports accessible and relevant to a wider audience than just the 7 participating agencies. Since one of the ECB Project’s aims is to identify good practice for the entire NGO community, I feel fairly comfortable with that. The reason is that there are a lot of other players out there - other international and national NGOs, the UN and other international organisations, the private sector, academic and research institutions - who might want to pick up on some of these issues.

Hopefully the reports - which as far as I know are the first to really look at these issues from an international NGO perspective - will be useful for anybody who wants to understand the real constraints in building information systems that will really support our emergency response.

Well, I can dream.