humanitarian.info

I’m Tom Longley, and for the next few months I’ll be guest blogging here at humanitarian.info. My own background is in law, and I have been working in the human rights sector since 1999. After NGO field work investigating crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and then managing Aidworkers.Net for a while, I’m presently consulting for a neat NGO called HURIDOCS.

A key theme of this blog is how international and governmental humanitarian agencies develop and incorporate ICT into their field work. Through his writing, Paul has tracked how they try to balance techno-optimism and the huge potential of new tech tools, with the reality of organisational cultures and relentless working environments. After listening to me rant and rave talk about very similar issues I was facing in my work with a group monitoring human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, he bravely handed me the keys to his blog to start a conversation about how they were handling these challenges.

In smaller human rights organisations, information workers usually do a bit of everything. They manage a clutch of processes including fact-finding, documentation of the results of investigations and production of public materials, management of the organisational email account, and more. In this context information management spans a wide range of disciplines: legal, library science, political communications, statistics, technology. As a result, doing this job better means we have to beg, borrow and steal knowledge from anywhere we can, and mash it together in practical, creative ways. Given the critical importance of this work to effective human rights advocacy, it’s clearly something worth writing about.

So, through a series of posts about information management and human rights – and with your comments – I hope to bring a little clarity to the resources available to organisations which investigate, document and analyse human rights violations.