humanitarian.info

I’ve been staring at the ECB project for too long – it’s like staring at the sun. So bright! So beautiful!

I’m clearly biased, so I’ll cite Adriaan Ferf, the consultant who has just finished the ECB Mid Term Review. His findings have given us a lot to chew on as the project moves into the second year, and he made specific comments about each of the four initatives. So how fares ECB4, the Information and Communications Technology Initiative?

• The Assessment of Information and Technology use by humanitarian NGOs is complete, and the Pakistan and Darfur Reports (links go directly to Word documents) are available at the ECB Project website. Adriaan characterised the findings of the reports as “profound” – I now have a big head.
• The Workshop at the University of Washington in Seattle took place last week, with around 50 participants from the humanitarian agencies working on ECB and external organisations. Almost all the participants paid for their own travel and accommodation, and almost all found the workshop a positive experience.
• Coming out of the workshop, we have two solid project ideas – on ICT training and Humanitarian Information Centre development – and something of a consensus on how the initiative should develop in the coming months, a future that will clearly involve NetHope. All of the ECB agencies are members of NetHope (which builds relationships with the private sector to leverage resources for emergency telecommunications), which helped us since there were already working relationships between the agencies.

So it’s generally positive as far as I’m concerned. There are a lot of issues with the wider project – one thing I’ve noticed in the past two weeks is that we’re a force multiplier, not a creator of change. Where agencies are already working on capacity building, we can support that interest and accelerate the process of change. Where there is little interest, we can do much less – which should probably have been obvious to us from the start, but hindsight is always 20/20 vision…