humanitarian.info

I’m in Guatemala, of course, looking at the opportunities for developing an information-sharing platform for organisations here responding to hurricanes and assorted other disasters. My favourite part so far has been when we got held up at gunpoint and Juan Manuel had his laptop stolen. That pretty much sealed my decision to get out of Guatemala City and go to La Antigua this weekend – a much nicer city altogether, and I can see why so many people visit Guatemala.

Back to the information system stuff. As well as meeting with the member agencies of the ECB, we had an excellent meeting with CONRED, the government office responsible for coordinating disaster reduction measures. They’ve already established a beta system for disaster data management – you know the sort of thing, demographics, epidemiology, shelter management and so on – and I’m going to see if I can get them the funds they need to finish it.

Unfortunately ECB funding doesn’t extend to governments, but all the members (and the UN, and the donors, and probably my mother as well) agree that whatever we set up needs to support governments efforts. The NGOs have a variety of needs that go beyond data management, and resolving some (if not all) of those will need a lot of changes in organisational thinking. The good news is that everybody we’ve spoken to is committed to doing exactly that.

Oxfam-GB has offered to be the host agency, and their information department back in Oxford has developed an open source platform that they’d like to test in the field. For the rest of my trip I’ll be talking to the agencies as a group to see if that platform will meet their requirements, and meeting with a few donors to see what other funds are available for capacity building in Guatemala.

Some interesting links can be found at my Del.icio.us feed; photos, as ever, can be found in my Flickr account.