Irony in humanitarian information
The Final Report of the Global Symposium +5 on Information for Humanitarian Action refers to the need for timely information no less than 14 times. The report was of course released last week – a full 6 months after the symposium itself.
You should probably read it in any case.
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I hope that the endorsed principles, lessons learned, and best practices are used in training, planning, operations, and polcy development and I hope that at least some of the recommendations are acted upon by memebers of the community.
Dennis King
US Department of State
Dennis King
6 May 08 at 10:57
I couldn’t agree more (and also I hope that casual readers realise that this post was meant to be a friendly poke, rather than a deep criticism of the process).
However it is fairly clear that many of the points raised at the conference echoed the same points we were making at the first symposium – and that most of those points were not followed up seriously.
Let’s work on making sure the same isn’t true in 5 years’ time!
Paul Currion
6 May 08 at 11:03
Paul,
Missed you at ISCRAM, keep us informed about info activities on Myanmar (what the US State Department calls Burma).
Keep on poking..that is one of your roles in the community. Those of us who work for the bureaucracies – government or UN (and I have worked for both) have been able to make some progress, but have also lowered our expectations…we have to go through laborious red tape and clearances. So keep on blogging, you are saying things we can’t, and I (we) shouldn’t take it personally…
Dennis King
US Department of State
Dennis King
11 May 08 at 21:41