Category Archives: Blogs

Britt Bravo of NetSquared recently blogged about Aid Workers Network (I know, there are too many hyperlinks in this sentence). It’s nice to get some publicity following our recent relaunch – go and check out the site, it looks dandy!

Britt also mentioned this very blog – she called it “great looking”! I assume that she was referring to the blog, rather than me. It’s only fair to point out the credit for this design should go to the designer of the Semiologic theme, Denis de Bernandy of Mesoconcepts. Thanks, Denis!

I was planning to set up my blogroll to cover as many aidbloggers as I could find, but in the interests of not duplicating existing efforts (ah, that classic humanitarian error), I thought I’d point to somebody else who’s already done it. If you want to read more from aid workers around the world, visit Dans le meilleur des mondes possibles, who has an extensive blogroll of aid workers, simply titled “Optimists?”

Well, not exactly famine… but a lot of people in Tajikistan are probably quite hungry, considering how poor the country is. I’ve talked about how NGOs should be blogging more here; now from Steve Buckley at Christian Aid:

“We recently tried a public weblog during a recent trip to Central Asia. The idea was to get away from official accounts of life in the region and try to bring back real time, emotionally charged, stories from the field – mainly for staff but also for supporters, friends and family. The blog turned out to be an unprecedented success for us achieving 6,000 readers from a standing start at the beginning of the year… and also making the site the most visited web site by Christian Aid staff.

“We’re pretty pleased with this first public effort and hope to continue the concept for some other (but not all) staff trips. You can read the blog here – http://nightingalesangatwcc.typepad.com – and note that entries will continue to be posted for a few days more.

“We’re also using web logs as a way to stay in touch with staff who are out on secondment to other organisations, or even those who have left Christian Aid for pastures new. All part of an emerging ‘Orphans’ scheme that tries to keep staff involved with Christian Aid after they have left paid employment with us.

“Most exciting of all we’re also starting to use weblogs internally for team reporting, replacing more traditional after-the-event reports. Early days at the moment as we’re still rolling out our SharePoint system but the signs are encouraging.”

More NGOs are starting to blog from the field, which is great – even though this is more from a development organisation, these perspectives are vital. The next step… I’d like to see Christian Aid use these blogs to give national staff in their country programmes a platform to communicate with Christian Aid’s supporters – and to represent their work within their own country as well.

In other blogging news: I took part in an IRC chat on Tuesday with some of the big names in the blogging / digital divide / online disaster response – names such as Rebecca McKinnon, Dina Mehta, Andy Carvin, etc. The chat also included staff from Alertnet, the Reuter Foundation online news service for humanitarian organisations, and was a discussion about how blogging, wikis, and other services can be organised more effectively to support disaster response. It will be interesting to see where the discussion goes; I’ll update on it as the Wiki gets going.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to write something about blogging in the aid world. I never got round to it, partly because there isn’t much of it about.

Mark Snelling of the Red Cross, whose online journal for the BBC recently covered his work in Niger, is one of the few people who has tried this out. When I met him recently, Mark said that it was one of the most satisfying things that he’d done as a journalist, and that he’d received more positive feedback from it than he’d ever expected. We both agreed that blogs have tremendous potential, specifically for giving the general public a better picture of what the situation is like on the ground, and how the aid industry actually works.

This seems vital to me for two reasons. First, the public provide us with financial resources to do our work, and as such we have an obligation to tell them how their money is being spent. Second, the public are one of our key audiences for advocacy work; we need to engage them in order to bring about wider change in the system. Blogs work very well in both these areas, and in addition can provide an excellent forum for discussion through comment threads.

There have been quite a few blogs by private individuals during disasters such as the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and blogs such as Passion of the Present do an excellent job of advocacy around complex emergencies such as that in Sudan. So the question is, why don’t more aid organisations make use of blogging as a tool in their work? The International Rescue Committee has set up a blog for the Pakistan Earthquake, and it will be interesting to see what sort of issues it might cover.

But IRC are in a minority right now, and that’s a wasted opportunity. Blogs are increasingly vital tools in journalism and politics, not just in the west, but in the developing world (check Global Voices if you don’t believe me). Blogs are connectors, and one thing the humanitarian community needs right now – in a year when our resources are being stretched beyond breaking point – is more connection with the societies that support us.

This month’s Wired magazine carries an interesting article on a subject that I blogged about in a previous life – US soldiers blogging from Iraq. I actually used some of these blogs as research material for a short story called “Trial by Fire”, and I wondered at the time why there weren’t more aid workers blogging.

You can find the article in Wired 13.08: The Blogs of War. But enough milbloggers – I’ll be blogging about aidbloggers later today….

… or possibly I won’t.