humanitarian.info

I promised myself that I’d blog every single day while I was working in Georgia. It should be fairly obvious that I didn’t. I can’t say that I was super productive while I was in Tbilisi – for a variety of reasons, including particularly dysfunctional co-ordination, but also because of the basic difficulty of getting good information in conflict situations.

In a natural disaster, government agencies and international organisations are usually relatively comfortable to share information about the situation – but in a conflict, they clam up tighter than my wallet around Christmas. This is because natural disasters have fewer political implications than complex emergencies; while in a natural disaster the worst thing you can say about a government is that they’re negligent, in a conflict situation the government is usually a belligerent,

This means that timely / reliable / accurate information is hard to come by in Georgia, as Ivan points out and Ethan overviews (is that a verb?). I find it hard to get too worked up about the lack of “citizen war reporters” even though it is my fervent hope that the web is going to change the way we do business in both complex emergencies and natural disasters. My lack of work-up is simply because even if there were shedloads of citizen journalists covering these events, I would still treat them exactly the same as any other information source – which is to say, I wouldn’t trust them at all.

As an example, the single most critical humanitarian information issue in Georgia was the numbers and locations of people displaced by the conflict. This was problematic for a number of reasons:

1. Nobody had a clue how many people had been displaced by the conflict. There were multiple government agencies involved in looking after the IDPs (frequently a euphemism for “ignoring them”, of course), each with their own figures, none of which tallied with the figures that UNHCR or the Red Cross had; and of course nobody in the humanitarian community had bothered to sit down and agree on a number we could all work to. Lesson from Afghanistan, folks: your numbers are never going to be 100% accurate, and it’s better just to agree to a number and get to planning than continually be running after the latest figures – which are also going to be wrong.
2. Nobody wanted to talk about the IDPs left over from the previous round of conflict in 1992-93; a staggering 220,000 people (not 100% accurate, of course – just run with it!) have been rotting in terrible conditions for the last 16 years, and some of their stories can be found on IDP Voices. Nearly all of us who were new to Georgia found this astonishing, since it raised a rather difficult question: what the *&%$ has the government and the UN been doing for the last 16 years? It also confuses the picture because in purely humanitarian terms many of these “old caseload” IDPs were in a worse situation than the “new caseload” – and many of the “normal” citizens live in conditions as bad as either.
3. For both old and new caseloads, the main priority is ensuring their basic shelter, which comes under the Emergency Shelter cluster. Unfortunately the UN in Georgia had decided that they didn’t want to activate the cluster system (because it’s a bit of a hassle and you have to actually take responsibility for your actions) but they did want to use some of the cluster tools (particularly the ones that give you a fat sack of cash to spend). This meant that it was like stepping into a time machine to 2004 – you remember, when “co-ordination” was a competition to see who could hold as many meetings as possible with as few outcomes as possible.
4. Notwithstanding the co-ordination problem, nobody had a clue what to do with all them displaced. The government unveiled a not unreasonable resettlement plan for the new caseload at the start of September, but that plan rapidly ran aground on the harsh reality that the stock and state of public buildings in Georgia are likely not sufficient to house the IDPs according to basic humanitarian standards, even on a short-term basis. (Some interesting discussion on this at the Social Science in the Caucasus blog.) The question is whether that government plan can be reshaped into a more realistic framework that will engage the entire humanitarian community as well as being attractive to donors…

One of the things about shelter issues is that they tend to get worse the longer you leave them. Conditions deteriorate, particularly when people are housed in buildings that were never designed for residential use. In this case, many of the new caseload had been placed in schools and kindergartens around Tbilisi and other towns – which meant that we also had to deal with the fact that those institutions were needed for the start of the new school year. This was a particular tension for UNICEF, who often run a “Back To School” program – which wouldn’t look too good if there weren’t any schools to go back to. In addition winters in Georgia can get unpleasant, especially the closer you get to mountains, and thus another constraint on resettlement.

You might have noticed that there wasn’t much talk about information in this blog post. That’s because there wasn’t much information, as I explained previously. We got hold of the complete set of school locations from the MInistry of Education (shape files ahoy!) but nobody seemed that interested. We tried to persuade the different actors – Red Cross, UNHCR, Ministries various – to consolidate the figures for collective centres and the IDPs therein, but with little luck. Paolo Palmero from OCHA had gathered a lot of data during his 2005 visit, but none of it seemed to be circulating in the agencies.

Summary version: this response showed yet again the importance of investing in information resources before an emergency hits. That doesn’t just mean getting loads of satellite images (although UNOSAT did some impressive work on damage levels) but investing in relationships with government, relationships that can be leveraged quickly to mutual benefit. It means having a basic picture already in place – locations of schools, for example – that you can then overlay new data on top of – such as the estimated IDP numbers in those schools. 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.

At least that would avoid me feeling like a numpty, turning up at meetings with my tiny spreadsheet of schools that might need some watsan rehabilitation…

My response to Patrick’s response to my original post got a bit out of hand, so I decided to make it a new blog post. What does Patrick have to say?

Citizen media, investigative journalism, the use of Web 2.0 tools to document instances of human rights violations, government corruption, etc. are ways to expose extremist actions. Oversight is an important element of any democracy. See DigiActive.org, for example. This is just a first step, ie, empowering political activists using digital technology to increase their impact vis-a-vis pro-democracy initiatives.

Patrick, I think your bias is showing. Your use of the word “extremist” looks dangerously close to being a euphemism for “things that I disagree with”; corruption, for example, is not an “extremist” action. Now I agree that corruption is a serious governance issue, and that the information revolution may encourage more transparency in this area – but I think you’re eliding these types of concerns with your more specific concerns around conflict.

the issue of legal actions was a point that repeatedly came up during the Global Voices summit.

I’d love to hear more about that, because I think it forms the crux of the concerns that Tom and I have – but that’s the angle that we come from, our own bias. (I also think that this starts to define the borderlands between conflict prevention and human rights work.)

Actually, one of my key arguments is that even if early warning systems such as FAST were linked to policy and operational response, there would still be no early response. Since they were at the front lines, I would recommend touching base with Daudi, Ory and Juliana on exactly how they used blogging to share information and respond *locally* in an informal and decentralized manner. Of course, this is not going to make the headlines; not going to be published in a peer reviewed journal, and so we all too often assume that this type of informal responses do not exist.

But what is the response? I’m still not seeing it – not in the sense that it doesn’t appear in a peer-reviewed journals (I don’t actually read peer-reviewed journals…), but in the sense that I can’t see what the response could be. Let me be clear: blogging is a response, data visualisation is a response, but not the type of response that I think you’re talking about.

I could be wrong, however. I get the sense that you believe that this activity is worthwhile simply for its own sake – as part of the democratic process – and I’d tend to agree. However what I read here – and in the other discussions around the summit – goes beyond simply blogging because it’s worthwhile. It has a programmatic element, a directional element – but that means that the bar is higher.

One reason FAST was not sustainable was because of the expenses incurred by having to pay for 60+ informants to code events. Which is why I’m suggesting that making use of freely available trusted citizen media blogs as a source for local information makes sense. Particularly as these networks are likely to report using pictures, YouTube videos, etc. Unlike FAST’s field monitors, GV bloggers also have a vibrant and pro-active network they can tap into. Hence the possibility of Ushahidi.

Again, your bias is showing – who decides which blogs are to be “trusted”, and what does “trusted” mean in this context? How do you know that GV bloggers have a “vibrant and pro-active network”? And what about the voices on the other side – the “extremist” side, who may be “extremist” precisely because they lack a voice? These are deeper questions which I am sure were discussed at the Summit and elsewhere, but their existence should make you wary of proclaiming their superiority without at least some qualifications.

Rebecca MacKinnon notes this in her blog post

Perhaps the biggest unresolved problem on Global Voices is how to be truly fair to everybody – to minorities as well as majorities, while not appearing to take sides in various people’s independence struggles.

The notion of “fairness” interests me in this context, but that’s for another (more philosophical) conversation.

I’m weary of institution-based action (an oxymoron?), which is precisely why GV appeals to me–a decentralized network of activists who seek (often at their own personal risk) to get information out to the rest of the world based on their own values, which, by the way are democratic values.

I hear you about the weariness, but I just have difficulty making the leap of faith. Especially in the field of human rights, and particularly for the purposes of legal action, organisations are important and will remain important. I’m not arguing that there’s no role for individuals or these new “indistutions” (wow, that’s a really bad neologism) – there is a role for them, but there always was (for example in the community-based approaches to conflict resolution which predate the internet).

GV is far more representative than FAST’s field monitors ever were.

Representative of who? I ask you because while I was reading David Sasaki’s excellent post on the GV summit, I was struck by the following passage:

As incredibly diverse as the global blogosphere is, the ‘blogger demographic’ tends to very homogenous. From Tanzania to Tasmania, most bloggers live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban centers, most are well educated, and most belong to the majority groups of their countries.

which is something which I would have guessed in more general terms. I don’t know what the profile of FASTs field monitors was, but I’m guessing it wasn’t that much different to the current GV profile? It sounds as if Rising Voices is beginning to gain some purchase in expanding the constituency – which interestingly takes GV out of the territory it began on and into what might be fairly considered the usual NGO territory.

In my opinion, GV is accountable. You have taken issue with some of my arguments and have had the freedom to respond accordingly… The issue of accountability is certainly important, but not just for GV. How many NGOs in our field are really accountable? (Just trying to add perspective).

I agree that NGOs are not as accountable as they should be, but that doesn’t make GV any more accountable. What you’ve outlined isn’t accountability in any strong sense – all of the actions that you describe here are certainly part of a dialogue, but I’m not sure they’re accountability mechanisms. I may be being unfair in my accusation here – it’s hard to know what I want GV to be accountable for – but you can be certain that this will be an issue which it will face in future.

What are GV’s values? GV’s mission? I included this in my blog post by copying and pasting directly from the GV website:

I wholeheartedly support GV’s mission, and I hope that I haven’t given the impression otherwise. There are two worries I have about this, one minor and one major. The minor one is that the reason you pay people is to get them to do things that need doing, rather than things they already want to do. As per David’s post,

No matter how many bloggers around the world are sentenced to jail, most internet users still spend their online hours surfing entertainment sites. Several commenters in the audience argued that activism needs to be made fun or it won’t attract popular attention and support.

Activism frequently isn’t fun; early warning usually isn’t interesting. A distributed network of volunteers is fine – up to a point, which means that you can’t make it the primary track for these projects without exposing yourself to a high level of risk. The major issue is that talking about the role of bloggers in activism – and particularly about explicitly expanding that role beyond observation to action – means moving to a different type of discourse, and probably a different type of structure.

I wasn’t at the GV Summit, and I haven’t had the discussions you’ve had with people like Ushaidi, so I am not as well-placed as you to talk about their status and plans. However my complaint is that I’m not seeing the evidence that these projects are having the impact that they (you?) claim, and I just want to be persuaded of that impact before I make any claims about them.

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on technology. At least it’s relatively non-controversial, except that it isn’t, because Myanmar is one of those places where internet access is a non-starter, where satellite telephones are essentially illegal and where the technology infrastructure (e.g. suppliers and maintenance) is close to zero. What that means is that we’re going to be extremely limited in what we can do on the ground. So what is happening?

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps. UPDATE: MapAction have also deployed in support of OCHA and have maps available on their website.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet). Microsoft are focused on supporting the HIC, and are ready to respond to other requests from the humanitarian community.
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that – with regards to early warning – IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

I’m nowhere near being deployed for this one (particularly as the government apparently is still refusing entry to foreign aid workers), but all of this makes me feel that we’re headed in the right direction. However until the government lets agencies start doing their jobs with less restrictions on movement and communications, we’re not going to see the benefits – another example of how the technology can be rendered much less useful when the political environment isn’t supportive. I leave you with the words of Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in his speech last Thursday:

In spite of the technology that we have, in spite of the power that we have, in spite of the network that we have, we still lose lives needlessly… So it is more than just the power of technology, it is more than just the transformation of society through technology, it is certainly a shift in paradigm here in the minds of our people and particularly our leaders. Because if you don’t have that shift, millions and billions of dollars worth of technology cannot deliver effective, timely relief to people when they need it most, because we have reservations about opening up our borders for cooperation, because we have hesitation about cooperating with the outside world, because we have mistrust of the outside world.

Well, not yet, but they will [pdf]. Janet Ginsburg explains the development of the idea of the Humanitarian Technology Review, while Bruno Giussani covers the recent TED breakfast, where Eric Rasmussen gave an update on InSTEDD.

Initially the idea of a Humanitarian Technology Review sounds like a good idea – if it’s done right. The first two questions – remember the first two questions, everybody! – are: who is the target audience, and what do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? The briefing paper I linked to above says

The Review’s readers, like the Review itself, span many niches: medical researchers, software developers, policy-makers, funders, doctors, veterinarians, communities trying to prepare for or reeling from disasters – even other media.

The one group that is noticeable by its absence is – well, me. People like me, anyway, who seem to fall under the catch-all term “practitioner”. I see doctors and veterinarians in there, but which doctors and veterinarians, exactly? I think it’s likely that I’ve misunderstood – the briefing is explicit that this is about building connections between disciplines, and it’s clearly aiming at a wider audience than the humanitarian community.

If we look at the disciplines that they’re talking about, it’s a wide selection, so it’s probably easier for me to focus on the technology examples given in the review:

• lightweight fabric + satellite technology = a cheaper portable satellite dish
• software + cell phones = real-time surveillance for bird flu
• GIS + interactive mapping = real time tracking of fires and floods
• solar panels + refrigerator = reliable field transport for vaccines
• filter + straw = a mobile water purification device
• open source water tech + microfinance = funding for small water projects
• genetic sampling + fast data analysis = identifying a pathogen in hours

I’m going to think about those examples over the next few days, but I’m struggling to see how a publication can cover all of these and still appeal to a coherent audience. That’s why communities of practice exist around epidemiology, water and sanitation, and the like – because they’re focused enough to hold peoples’ attention.

The success or failure of the HTR will be in the delivery, and on that front I’m very positive about their proposal to combine different delivery streams. At the very least, InSTEDD’s deep pockets will enable them to experiment and see what works, although I’d warn them not to expect collaboration to magically appear – two years on ECB teaches you that for nothing.

(NOTE: Full disclosure – I thought about a similar idea a few years ago, but gave it up because I didn’t think it was viable. Two attempts have been made to develop this sort of thing previously – ReliefWeb’s HIN and CMI’s PeaceIT [pdf] – but the InSTEDD concept is much wider.)

• Following the collapse of the political process in Kenya, bloggers White African and Kenyan Pundit – both of whom are worth reading, by the way – have developed a Google Maps mash-up which deals with electoral violence in the country.  Called Ushaidi (’witness’ in Swahili, I think?), it enables people to report events either online or via SMS.  It’s not the first time something like this has been tried, but this an interesting organic attempt to pin down exactly what’s happening in the country.  As anybody working in human rights knows, gathering this sort of information is extremely difficult – particularly later on when it might be needed.  More explanation from White African in this blog post, coverage at Global Voices (with an interesting article on cyber activism in Africa) and the BBC.

• There’s been a fair amount of discussion about how the media and responders can work more effectively together in the last couple of years, and of course a whole heap of blogs and similar about how the new technology is going to change the face of disaster response, etc, etc.  So far, not much has happened, but TVE Asia and the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok have just published a free resource called Communicating Disasters.  It’s an interesting but disjointed read – I’m not exactly sure who it’s targeted at, to be honest…

• There was a brief flurry of blogging around Nathan Eagle’s article, The Mobile Web is NOT helping the Developing World – and what we can do about it, mainly because it burst the bubble of optimism around bringing the internet to the poorest through the Miracle of Mobile Telephony (TM).  Of course, Nathan’s position is not that it isn’t possible, just that we’re not doing it right at the moment.  Personally, I’m still waiting for some hard evidence that these efforts benefit the poor rather than the relatively well-off – but that might just be splitting hairs.

• Witness have launched The Hub, their online platform for human rights-related videos and media, after a long incubation period. Cutting through the bumf, it’s intended to connect individuals and organizations who are working on human rights around the world. It’s an interesting lunge at building global connectivity in a sector (human rights) that is notoriously factional, and the focus on media is potentially powerful – particularly new media forms, such as mobile phone content, which are incredibly powerful tools for mobilizing support. You can register at http://hub.witness.org/login.

This post has been brought to you by Tom Longley, a gentleman and a scholar, but not a blogger:

Q: What do the Mail on Sunday and the Government of Sudan have in common?
A: They both hate bloggers.

After blogging UN diplomat Jan Pronk was booted out of Sudan – in part for writing in his blog what he had said in public – those of us who work in the relief and development sector have been deprived of another candid and erudite link into the world of humanitarian policy and practice.

Until last week, Owen Barder, the chief of Global Aid Effectiveness at the UK Department for International Development kept a lively, informative and popular blog called Owen’s Musings. Last week, the UK’s Mail on Sunday – an influential right wing newspaper in the UK – published a piece called Hitler’s Bush, by Whitehall’s jogging blogger, written by Simon Walters.

In Walters’ list of slurs about Barder, the one that stands out has the effect (since it is *very* carefully worded) of attributing to him the words of an article to which he only *links* from his blog. The article Barder linked to was originally published in the Guardian – “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps” by Naomi Wolf, an article that was popular across the blogosphere. This innuendo has caused Barder to cease blogging and close down his website.

There is a mix of issues here, including the expectations we have of senior public servants (basically, omerta), the tendency of MSM to paint blogging as by definition both secretive and indiscreet, and the use of a person’s other interests to undermine one’s professional credibility. Perhaps the one most relevant to other bloggers, however, is how Barder was tarred by association with his links, the building block of blogging.

I include some links to others who have written more eloquently and comprehensively about this sorry episode than I can. However I doubt that this will encourage the sort of openness that we need in order to better understand how our governments spend public money, and to ensure that they are accountable for that spending.

Check it out.� Somehow my blog database has become corrupted, and I’ve lost all the comments.� Damn!� Just as people were starting to comment regularly as well.� Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, as they say.� Leaves on the track, that sort of thing.

Eldis News covers the Aidblogger Aggregator that we set up at Aidworkers Network. As they say, the beauty of blogging is that it makes the world a much smaller place, which can be very important for people working under difficult conditions, whether in remote locations or high-pressure situations.

The Eldis post also points to the recent Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents by Reports without Borders, which is highly recommended if you’re not sure what all this blogging is about and why it might be important.

As I’ve pointed out before, there’s been a boom in bloggers in the aid world – or aidbloggers, as I like to call them (never let it be said that I’m not creative).  How on earth does one keep track of them all?

Thanks to the tireless Tom Longley (and with a hat tip to Candide), I’m happy to announce that we have an answer.  Hosted on the Aid Workers Network site, our Aidblogs aggregator will collect all the blogs from the aid world we can find.

The criteria is simply that the blogs deal with life and work issues for aid workers (whether national or international), and that it’s active.  We have a good number up there now, but we’re always looking for more – so feel free to add your suggestions in the comments box on this blog.

There you go.  Aidblogs.  The wave of the future.  Somebody call Ethan Zuckerman and tell him.

Elisa Mason wrote to me yesterday with an interesting work lead, but rather than talk about me again, perhaps you should visit the Forced Migration blog which she maintains. This got me thinking about blogs which aren’t personal journals but professional resources – a similar effort is If you only read one thing this week…, which is a really interesting idea (well done Anna!). This blog is supposed to provide paths to useful resources, although it’s hard to tell if we’re on the right track.

It makes sense though – blogs are a great way of updating useful content, although the problem is that as time goes by, that content drops off the bottom of the blog and there’s a danger that people won’t find it. Social tags are much better; but best of all is the combination of blog (for the personal touch) and social tags (for the memory).