In this context I wonder – the learning would only be as good as the weakest part of the group, so is it possible to build collective learning solutions prior to individual ones?

On this:
”This really needs a collective approach – one agency alone isn’t sufficient to achieve success, although you need a focal point for the effort – but it continues to make me wonder if we should be thinking about setting up an organisation that collects and disseminates operational data like this.”

Perhaps you mean that the UN, and the like, meaning other stakeholders who are in the picture, are not a learning organisation/learning organisations. ?

Senge’s view of a learning organisation has five pillars:
personal mastery
shared vision
mental models
learning in groups and teams
systems thinking (dynamic systems)

Perhaps these five should be fundamental to individual performance evaluation systems, designed and rigorously implemented. These five should also be part of project and programme evaluation, as well as a basis for donor participation in the initiatives donors fund.

I think if the above were to be true, what you tell us about in your post would be different.

My general position is that in a crisis, “good” information is always going to be hard to come by. What worries me about some of the web 2.0 discussion is that there’s an assumption not just that web = better but that more = better, which simply isn’t the case. For me, more = more confusing… and the “bits and pieces” model that you mention is going to remain the norm, just with more sources available. So the question remains the same – how do we parse and prioritise those sources to get the most out of them?

On the shelter question: to be fair, there are practical constraints on shelter if it involves a) resettling people, b) improving existing stock and c) developing new stock. There are political and legal questions around resettlement (as well as the obvious social issues), and there are blank physical constraints on construction that can’t be beaten no matter how much money you throw at it. My prediction: a lot of the new caseload will be joining the old caseload in semi-permanent collective centres. But I hope I’m wrong.

Agree on your warcitjourno thoughts – and add that not only professional journalists but a lot of humanitarians and government people had poor information sources as well. This isn’t surprising to me either. I’m more interested in resetting expectations for what cit media, or regular media for that matter, can do in such circumstances.

I wish I could say that the fact of functioning, redundant info networks + citizen media and sousveillance + humanitarians and activists + good mainstream media = panopticon of conflict, but that’s going to remain a theory for a long time. Practice will be that we get pieces and bits from new sources that make it a little bit easier to understand what’s happening, assuming that we’re attuned to it and also coming up with projects that can do something useful with that information.

I know for instance that the government of Georgia was sending out mass SMS messages to tell people where to go and what to do. They might not have always been timely though, and their effects might not have always been desired – because not many people in Georgia really trust their government. Imagine you get a text from Saakashvili saying – the Russians are patrolling the exurbs of Tbilisi but are not coming into the city, and the bombing is only hitting the outskirts, don’t flee. What would you do? I’d start packing my bags.

As far as refugees goes – I first visited Georgia in 1996 as a photographer. I was working on a series about IDP and refugee populations displaced by various Caucasus wars: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Prigorodniy district of North Ossetia/Ingushetia, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh and so forth. The pictures were mediocre but the lesson I took away was that IDP populations were essentially being held captive by authorities as political pawns. They weren’t resettled, reintegrated, or given new residency and work permits. Instead they were isolated and put in limbo. As far as I know, that’s still the case. The humanitarians I met at the time knew it, and probably, still know it. But you won’t catch governments talking about them in those terms.

Last comment – whether it’s 7000 or 10,000 families of IDPs, there’s a weird disconnect between the size of the give to the government of Georgia (let’s call them GoG) and the overall number. $ 1 billion from the USG plus EU money plus the World Bank offer is much more than reconstruction and rehabilitation; it’s economic stabilization and a whole lot more. Given that, it’s downright startling that the shelter problems seem so drawn out and difficult. Yes, it’s a temperate zone, and yes, a lot of housing stock is shoddy, but you’d think with so much cash on offer we’d see some creative solutions for resettlement that get people in semi-permanent shelter faster than the end of 2009. The real question is: will this latest batch of IDPs be allowed and encouraged to resettle and start new lives, or will they, too be in limbo for the next 20 years?