http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=8B7AF3D4-E7F2-99DF-3E22EDA23F8C509D

or Scientfic American homepage http://www.sciam.com/

Dennis again

The OCHA +5 Symposium doesn’t need a fallout shelter…it wasn’t meant to be the definitive event or the ultimate get together on the subject of humanitarian information management. It is another positive step, along with many others, to promote and address the issues of better information management for humanitarian action. It should not be seen as a competitive or a exclusive one-track UN effort, but something that is linked and complimentary with other initiatives….ICT4Peace, ECB, Strong Angel, ISCRAM, etc. Each effort has its strengths and weaknesses, no single initiative can solve all of the many problems/issues…only working together and respecting each effort’s unique role will the larger issue be addressed.

If you haven’t seen it already, check on the November issue of Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/issue.cfm, article by Sheri Fink entitled “The Science of Doing Good.” One has to subscribe/pay to get the digital, on-line version, but Scientific America should be at international magazine stores and in libraries (where I got it)…There is even an endnote reference to somebody named Paul Currion…

Dennis

My apologies, the links on what I’ve written on Second Life are in addition to what’s there in the last post, the following:

http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/online-dispute-resolution-and-second-life/
http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2006/08/26/second-life-for-humanitarian-aid-and-peacebuilding/

Sanjana

Thanks for an entire post based on my own! Three points demand a response.

“I think that Sanjana misses one key point that I often forget myself; most practitioners in this sector spend most of their day fighting fires, either metaphorically within their own organisation or literally in disaster responses. Most of them don’t have the time to follow what’s happening in Second Life and we shouldn’t be condemning them for that.”

While it may be true of others, my life, my work and that of InfoShare in Sri Lanka has NEVER happened at a time of peace when there weren’t fires, and bloody ones at that, burning. My entire life has been spent in violent conflict and most of my work and writing that articulates avenues for peace and facilitates alternative perspectives to the status quo has ironically, and particularly in the past 2 years, decreased my own security and that of my family. I am acutely aware of the pressures of the field – but this to me is no excuse to hold hostage one’s imagination to what’s only possible here and now. Systems I have contributed to the design of in the field of peacebuilding, human rights, citizen journalism and peace negotiations in particular have pushed the envelop of design and ICT in fields that have often had little or no significant real world case studies (as opposed to academic tomes) on how technology can be used, WITHIN cycles of violence, to support effective conflict resolution mechanisms. My point is that it is because I do and have followed innovation on the Internet and web that I have been able to spark similar innovations in the field using technologies often developed for other purposes. An example is our use of Groove Virtual Office, way back in 2004, for a mediation process called One Text that brought many stakeholders in the conflict together to thrash out core issues related to the conflict in a virtual environment (http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/one-text-negotiations-and-collaboration-platform-in-sri-lanka/).

“There are tendencies within most organisations, public and private, to choose proprietary, closed platforms rather than go for the open option. In some of the work I’ve done with IFRC recently, one of the big debates is whether to allow non-IFRC staff onto their intranet/extranet, since a lot of their partners need to be involved in ongoing discussion. This is an area where we do need to be careful, but only on grounds of confidentiality and security, particularly for beneficiaries.”

Agree, as you do with me. This is a rather vexing issue in that it is almost impossible to come up with a one size fits all solution. I’ve been involved in discussions on information security in fields ranging from SSTR to human rights systems to humanitarian aid collaboration systems and it’s a mine field. Encourage you to read my post here – http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/complex-political-emergencies-and-humanitarian-aid-systems-design/ – which also points to a conversation I had with Nigel Snoad from MHS on this very point.

Finally, regarding Second Life, you say:

“More frankly, Second Life simply isn’t that relevant. I agree that there are definitely opportunities to use online simulations for training purposes, but even those opportunities cannot and should not replace real-life training. There are ways in which humanitarian organisations can use Second Life and similar services, but given the resource constraints within the sector – the perpetually low training budgets, for example – it’s hard to justify spending a huge amount of time on them.”

What is relevant or not I feel cannot be determined by you or I. What I attempted to suggest was that at the UN OCHA conference, many saw Second Life for the first time, when some of us had used it over a number of years and had no illusions whatsoever as to how, when and where it could be useful or not. I wasn’t promoting Second Life as a panacea or as a replacement for real world training. However, Craig’s assertion of a “mature reluctance” I believe is being rather charitable – innovation is about imagination tethered to realities which may not be our own. To constantly run down technologies because they do not fit our own interests, frame of reference or experience is foolish as it blinkers one’s vision to a very limited and limiting range of experience to draw lessons from. Craig’s assertion is also, I humbly submit, essentially dishonest – I don’t think many in the room would have recognised Second Life had they seen it. It was in this light nothing to do with mature deliberation trumping juvenile ideas, it was simply to do with an ignorance of real technologies that are maturing apace for real people. Two posts of mine explore the potential and (severe) limitations of Second Life:

http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/avatars-and-politics-using-second-life-for-political-activism/
http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/avatars-and-politics-using-second-life-for-political-activism/

Stay well,

Sanjana

Having been involved with all of the Symposia, my main reflection on this last meeting is that over the last five years the humanitarian sector has developed a large body of undifferentiated knowledge and expertise in the area of humanitarian information management. There is really some excellent professional work going on out there.

However, there are still some serious impediments to progress includng the bureaucratic sludge that we all have to wade through in the UN system, as well as the fact that Paul rightly pointed out “most practitioners in this sector spend most of their day fighting fires, either metaphorically within their own organisation or literally in disaster responses”

My main personal observation is that I think humanitarian IM suffers from an inward looking perspective, and does not benefit or learn enough from the progress made in the “easier” worlds of private industry or the academic sector.

This progress I refer to sometimes is as simple as the evolution of terminology and language that helps us express and differentiate our knowledge.

Terms like ‘social design’ ‘visualisation’ or ‘interaction design’ were not used, even when people were talking about these concepts, and I feel that that is a symptom that the humanitarian IM community is not yet plugged into the growing networks of people who have developed significant transferable expertise in these areas.

For example, we still talk about rapid assessment without plugging into the professional expertise of either pollsters or epidemiologists, and I think that opening up our perspectives to this outside expertise will be the key to progress.

Two last points about innovation. As Sanjana, and I were both in the same working group I think we can both take partial responsibility for the lack of innovative ideas that flowed. That being said, I feel that the prevailing mood was characterised by a mature reluctance to talk about over-hyped concepts like Second Life, as we have all been to enough conferences that just perpetuate the hype, rather than discussing real innovation for real people.

Personally, I am just trying to be part of the solution.

Craig