humanitarian.info

Earlier this year, the NGO Security Blog closed its doors (wrong metaphorical device, I know), but its mysterious creator JM left an interesting note that provides an insight into the rationale and methodology of the site:

Thirteen months ago the blog started out as an experiment in providing information about humanitarian safety and security incidents from public and open sources. The methodology was to consult a number of different online news sources each day, select articles of interest, and then summarize them including a link to the original source. The information would be made available in a public Internet forum that anyone with an interest in humanitarian security issues could access.

I personally consider the experiment a success. Around 100 people a day currently read the blog (sometimes a little more, other times a little less) with repeated visits from UN and government agencies, large and small NGOs, educational institutions and news organizations. There’s also been a considerable amount of positive feedback from readers on how the blog helps them stay current on what’s happening in the world and exposes them to concepts and tools outside the traditional NGO security box.

I hope that since the concept has been proven, similar projects will spring up elsewhere. Using Google’s Blogger or other blogging tools is extremely simple and I’d encourage humanitarian organizations to consider using this technology to internally publicize safety and security incidents and provide information (either on their intranets or with non-public Internet blogs that can only be viewed by selected people).

I believe that humanitarian organizations as a whole generally don’t do a good job of sharing security information with each other (especially at the field level) and it would be nice to one day see InterAction or a collective of large NGOs get together and host something like the NGO Security Blog for their members to contribute to and use. The technology is available, the readers are out there, and from running this blog I think the benefit is apparent.

A couple of points. First, this was definitely a worthwhile experiment – before JM started it, nobody had tried to use blogging as a security tool. This was largely due to lack of imagination, I think, as well as unfamiliarity with the technology. Blogging is now officially mainstream, and every week at AWN we get notices of new aid blogs, a number of which are official or semi-official organisation blogs.

Second, that experiment was a success within its own parameters. JM pointed out the positive feedback the blog had received, but I don’t think that will convince other security officers or organisations of its utility. Measuring success is always tricky, but much easier to do internally, when you can identify who is reading your material and where they are. If you’re writing a security blog for Afghanistan and most of your readers are in the New York office, it’s probably not working that well.

Third, JM makes the point that this would probably be done best by a group of organisations, rather than a single organisation, and I agree completely. If blogs are about sharing information, then it makes sense to maximise the network. Even if it starts out as a way for security officers to share information with each other more effectively, that should be a strong enough argument to give it a try.

Fourth, the concept needs to be extended to make it really “sticky“. The possibilities of GeoRSS open up a security blog to the interesting possibility of automated map sharing for security information, in a secure format if necessary. It’s not just a high-tech glamour – it could be the factor that makes security blogging really come to life for both the contributors and users. Simple and effective.

The NGO Security blog is now defunct (and we’ve removed it from AWN Aidblogs) but there are still related resources on the NGO Security Page. Thanks to JM and others for their hard work – let’s hope we see more in the future.