For the World Summit on the Information Society, I worked on a report that was eventually published by the UN ICT Task Force: Information and Communication Technologies for Peace: the Role of ICT in preventing, responding to and recovering from conflict. I didn’t have great expectations - I just wanted to see if we could provide an overview of the wide range of technology-related activities that have been happening in the humanitarian / human rights / peace-building / peace operations / post-conflict reconstruction space.

Did we succeed? Yes, I think we did - but of course it was out of date as soon as it was published! Nonetheless, I think it was a worthwhile project and I’ve had plenty of feedback that people have found it a useful primer. After WSIS, my involvement with ICT4Peace petered out, but Daniel Stauffacher kept the discussions going and has since launched the ICT4Peace Foundation, focusing on the high-level discussions that are needed to effect policy change. This is a relatively long post that has some criticism of their direction - but I should emphasise that I support 100% what ICT4Peace are trying to do, and any criticism should be seen as part of the dialogue, rather than an attempt to shut dialogue down. Read on!

One of the reasons I stepped away from the project is because I felt my strengths are more in the middle and lower levels of organisations - and possibly because that’s where I think the greatest potential for change is. The other reason was that I was never entirely convinced by the concept; “ICT4Peace” is both too vague and too specific. It’s a handy catch-all, but anybody who thinks there’s much common ground between the five categories I mentioned above is living in a fantasy world. Some people would even argue that there shouldn’t be common ground between them, although that depends on your perspective - effective human rights advocacy might actually preclude you from providing effective humanitarian relief, for example. CNN Money magazine has an article based on an interview with Daniel that Sanjana (who’s an advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation) pointed me towards, and that article highlights exactly what I mean.

Daniel is entirely correct that technology isn’t being used as effectively as it could be in our work, and correct that the issue isn’t the technology itself. He believes the problem is one of leadership - I believe that the problem is one of management, but I’m willing to believe that we’re talking about roughly the same thing. Then we get into an area where Daniel’s quoted words and the journalist’s text become difficult to separate, so bear with me.

The bigger challenge is making relief and peace groups want to use them to better collaborate in the field.

You can’t make people want to use technology, or make them want to collaborate. People will use technology if they find it useful (e.g. if it makes their work easier) and they’ll collaborate if they get value from it (e.g. if it makes their work easier). The trick is to make the technology useful and the collaboration valuable - the “if you build it, they will come” principle (which has its limits, but is a good starting point). However then the article goes into areas which I really, really disagree with.

“The IT person has been telling the head of an operation what they could and couldn’t know: ‘We don’t have that information,’ or, ‘There are no standards for sharing information.’ But that’s baloney!” [Stauffacher] pronounced during a recent breakfast in New York. “This is a question of leadership - of the leader of a relief group determining what they need to know in a crisis situation. What are the human needs and who has what resources?”

The part I disagree with here is that it’s not the IT people who are telling their directors what information they have or don’t have, since IT people in general have no involvement with the information that goes through their systems. It’s the programmes and operations people who are responsible for this, and also for determining what they need to know. The thing is, we already know what we need to know - it’s just that we’re not very good at a) getting it and b) sharing it.

In a crisis the UN, NGOs, and often military and business groups need to be able to communicate quickly about needs and how best to collaborate. Chaos typically reigns after a disaster or in a war zone. Relief often goes to the wrong places, and groups resist sharing information. Turf battles are common.

It bothers me slightly that governments aren’t mentioned here, but again I’m willing to assume that it’s just an oversight on the part of the journalist. I’m not sure that relief “often” goes to the wrong places, it’s just that when it does go wrong, it’s more visible. I’m not sure that groups “resist” sharing information, because that suggests that they’re actively hoarding it - and my experience is that they’re usually quite happy to share it, but they’re a) busy responding to a disaster and b) the mechanisms aren’t in place to share.

In the Web 2.0 age it’s easy to imagine new ways for recipients and aid groups to better communicate, using cellphones, wikis, social networks, and other simple free tools. “Maybe you can have a feedback system for the recipients,” says Stauffacher. “A kid in Darfur with a cellphone camera can go into a hospital and show that the supplies have not arrived, or that they sent outdated yogurt. And the old lady in the village who was supposed to get food or shelter should be able to say if what she got was valuable or useless.”

The problem isn’t the lack of communication, it’s the power relationships behind that communication. I’m all for creating feedback mechanisms for the beneficiaries using technology, but this is the real issue behind our accountability crisis rather than a technology concern. How will we persuade agencies to adopt these tools if it’s just going to create more headaches for them?

And the problem isn’t the lack of tools, it’s how you integrate these informal tools into the formal response. Where you can’t rely on internet access or cell networks, you can’t make these tools the backbone of the response, so they remain supplementary (or at best complementary) technologies. You also run the risk of creating a digital divide - as Kouchner said (possibly), “where there is no camera, there is no humanitarian intervention” and if you’re led by where the mobile phone cameras are, then those without mobile phones are going to lose out.

If I had to sum up how I feel about this article and about ICT4Peace - I’m glad that Daniel is raising the visibility at the diplomatic level, but I’m not convinced that those levels are where the change will take place. After a couple of years where my focus has been more at the headquarters level, I feel like I achieved more in Bangladesh in 3 weeks in terms of just getting things done and demonstrating the value of information management in practice. That’s partly because I was in the field, where it’s easier to see progress, but it’s also because those discussions at headquarters do take a long, long time to get anywhere….