humanitarian.info

That’s right, a two month break doesn’t faze me. There’s been so much happening this year, it’s scary.

To get started, congratulations to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (the hosts for BrightEarth) on launching the Crisis in Darfur collaboration with Google Earth. This is a fascinating project that’s been building for a while now, and I’ve been very pleased to be a part of it. The real credit goes to Michael Graham, who’s really been the driving force behind this.

The best news is that it’s been all over the media. Ogle Earth has a round-up of the coverage, but also makes a very relevant point: “What’s interesting is that there is no consensus among news editors as to where such a story belongs.” Is it a current affairs story, a business story or a technology story? As Ogler concludes, “putting the story in the technology section relegates it to a spot not followed by the people that the technology is most aiming to reach,” which raises questions about how to best bring this type of project to the public.

My colleague Conor Foley, writing in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free space, says that “some questions do need to be asked about the politics of this activism… The problem with reducing conflicts to the type of bite-sized items that can hold people’s attention is that this suggests equally simplistic solutions.”

Now you might believe (as Conor clearly does) that the political narrative which frames this project is not the right one. Not everybody believes that the situation in Darfur constitutes genocide (I personally am not convinced), but everybody can agree that there is widespread and systematic abuse of human rights there.

Conor goes on to say that we need political engagement, and that’s where this project comes in; it’s a means of generating more political engagement on this issue. Although there is always a risk of undermining the concept of genocide through overuse, the risk of inaction to the people of Darfur is far greater.

Some of the coverage of the project comes at it from the perspective of citizen journalism, but I don’t think that’s very useful. You can see this project as a natural extension of human rights monitoring, simply using new technology to make the results both more accessible and more meaningful to a wider audience - so the real question is, who is that wider audience?

Satellite and other remote sensing imagery has been used in relief efforts for a while now; every deployment of the UN Humanitarian Information Centres has used remote sensing images. However there are serious problems in using GIS and remote sensing in relief efforts, particularly in complex political emergencies like Darfur, and we haven’t yet realised its full potential. However this isn’t necessarily a tool for operational UN agencies or NGOs working on the ground (although individuals might use it), as they have a different set of concerns and constraints to human rights organisations.

We clearly intended this to reach a human rights audience, with the possibility of analysts and researchers making use of the tool as well. In that regard, it’s also possible to argue that these tools might just be distractions. Sanjana at ICT4Peace writes “Although this technology through eye-candy (disturbing as it may be) tries to galvanise global political and policy to act urgently against a further deterioration of conditions in Darfur, it’s unclear how earlier attempts at using technology have succeeded in raising and sustaining the level of awareness and compassion necessary to address such crises.”

He’s right - just because data is available doesn’t mean anyone will use it. Much of the data behind this project was available previously, but that kind of data is difficult to handle and interpret for a general audience. The project takes the data and presents it as a call to action, but the target audience is not necessarily going to “use” the visualised data for anything other than the cause they are already engaged in - raising awareness of the situation in Darfur and calling for policy changes to relieve the suffering there.

The reason I was happy to be involved is because I think this is a really significant step in human rights advocacy in the information revolution. Only time will tell whether we’ll see more of these types of initiative, whether they’ll make a significant impact in our political dialogue, and whether that will contribute to a more peaceful world.