Category Archives: Capacity Building

Instedd surfaces!

Posted on January 18, 2008 by | Leave a comment

An email from CEO Eric Rasmussen tells me that INSTEDD is finally flying in radar (and apparently I’m mixing metaphors, unsure of whether INSTEDD is a whale or a plane). In his words,

InSTEDD has been invisible, a rumor and a ghost, for the few past months, but we surfaced today in a media call with Google.org in the launch of their first-ever Initiatives.

I’ve known Eric virtually for a couple of years, although we’ve never managed to actually meet in person. He’s a very solid choice for CEO – his thinking on civil-military affairs was always more lateral than I expected for somebody in his position, and I think that it reflected his willingness to listen and learn from others. That open attitude will be the single most important tool in INSTEDD’s box, at least in its early days, and in fact that’s why they are only launching now – for the last few months, the team has been travelling around meeting with various actors and hearing out what their needs might be.

If you don’t know anything about INSTEDD, I recommend that you visit the website, as it gives you the right flavour. It’s moved away from Larry Brilliant’s 2006 talk at TED and morphed into something that’s somehow broader yet less ambitious (a good combination if you can manage it). Yet I still harbour doubts about how successful it will be, doubts which don’t have anything to do with the goodwill or competence of the staff (or the fact that they’ve got a ton of funding behind them, not least from Google.Org).

Where do my doubts come from?  I’ll freely admit that part of my concern is rooted in my essential antipathy towards advice from experts (yes, including myself – it keeps me on my toes); part of it is based on my lack of faith in the power of technology to save us from ourselves; and part of it is linked to my sense that the entire system of disaster response has been built with a fundamental flaw at its foundation, and trying to make it more effective may simply be throwing good money after bad.

Having said that, INSTEDD’s philosophy is healthy.  It’s not proposing overarching systems that will solve the whole set of problems in one go, but a piece-by-piece approach that addresses key problems in the field as they arise.  So I welcome their launch, and I definitely welcome their presence on the scene – it’s definitely healthy for the sector to have more non-traditional actors bringing some new perspective.

And new tools, of course!  INSTEDD will be releasing any tech tools it develops, and it looks like on an open source basis (more specifically, the MIT license).  First out of the gate is a GeoSMS system, which is built on a bunch of existing Google tools and some GeoRSS.  And yes, we hope to discuss how Sahana might fit into these developments…

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Posted in Avian Flu, Capacity Building, Co-ordination, Humanitarian, Open Source

OpenStreetMap and the next disaster, Part 1

Posted on August 12, 2007 by | 6 Comments

I’ve corresponded with Mikel Maron for a while now, interested particularly by the work that he’s been involved with introducing Wikis into the UN. However his first love is geospatial and his favourite project is OpenStreetMap, which is a free editable map of the whole world that can be viewed, edited and used in a collaborative way from by anybody, anywhere.

Mikel has been thinking about how this type of approach might be used in disaster response, and he recently gave a presentation at the State of the Map event in Manchester in which he outlined his thoughts so far – you can hear a podcast of his talk, view the slides that accompanied it and read the notes from it. Mikel acknowledges that he’s not an expert, and while there’s a lot of things that I agree with him about, there’s also a lot of assumptions built into his talk.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Capacity Building, GIS, Humanitarian, Tsunami, Web

Simulating Disasters with ADRA

Posted on November 24, 2006 by | 1 Comment

Interesting news from Gregg Swanson of Humaninet, who recently attended a simulation exercise held by ADRA in Indonesia. (Incidentally, the ADRA Indonesia home page is funny as hell for all the wrong reasons, mainly due to the font.) Gregg has written a series of blog posts about the experience on the Humaninet blog, as well as an accompanying article at their ICT Features page. It sounds as if the exercise went really well, so congratulations to all involved!

On another page Gregg has written 12 reasons why relief organisations should conduct simulations. There’s some useful ICT-related findings on that page, but I was more interested in those 12 reasons, because we’re discussing a similar project for the ECB agencies – to do an inter-agency simulation either at HQ or field levels. I’m going to quote all 12 reasons here, and not just to pad out this blog post either – they’re genuinely useful:

Continue reading →

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Posted in Capacity Building, Emergency Telecommunications, Indonesia, NGO

Microsoft To Open Computer Training Centers For Ex-Combatants In Colombia

Posted on November 7, 2006 by | Leave a comment

Interesting news from the big beast that is Microsoft, particularly interesting in light of the ECB / NetHope plans to develop a global ICT training delivery mechanism for staff working in the field. This project was recently approved and we’re moving forward now with ECB funding for NetHope management.

One of the critical problems that we identified in the ECB4 Assessment was the general lack of good IT skills in the field. This was true across the board, from senior IT staff (who lacked specialised skills in areas such as VSAT installation) to junior project staff (who are often recruited in an emergency with few computer skills). The question is, how to introduce that training to them.

There are three possibilities:

  1. Remote learning. Increased connectivity in the field mean that staff can access e-learning in a way that wasn’t possible a few years ago. The disadvantage here is that this method relies on staff taking the initiative in identifying and participating in training – something which doesn’t always apply in developing countries, where the education norm is rote learning, rather than personal experiment.
  2. Leverage economies of scale to deliver training to groups of staff in the field. While it’s not cost-efficient to train a single staff member from a single agency in MS Word, it is possible to run 30 staff from different agencies through a course at a relatively low cost.
  3. Leverage training networks to improve access to existing training in the private sector. Cisco, for example, have an international network of training academies, which could be engaged to provide low- to no-cost courses to NGOs participating in the scheme. (You can also try to use these networks to develop local capacity, training up local providers to a level adequate for our needs.)

I’ve no idea which of these is likely to yield the best results – which is why we’re designing a training mechanism which combines all three. It’s ridiculously ambitious, but entirely feasible.

(Cross posted on the ECB Team Blog.)

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Posted in Capacity Building, Digital Divide, Emergency Telecommunications

Information just wants to be free!

Posted on November 8, 2005 by | 4 Comments

It’s embarrassing, but in my youth I could often be heard telling people “Information just wants to be free!” I can’t even remember what I meant now. I was probably crazed with power at the time. But I was on a phone conference with Microsoft earlier today, and at one point somebody started to talk about how we would have to discuss how to deal with proprietary data collected during a humanitarian response. Suddenly, the years rolled back and information just wanted to be free again…

One of the problems that I’ve faced repeatedly is that UN or NGOs in the field just aren’t very good at sharing their information, either with their peers or with the beneficiaries. Most often, the objection is raised that, if we share information (particularly from assessments), our “competitors” might take that information, use it to develop a project proposal, and take all the cash from our donors’ pockets.

Please. Donors don’t give us money because our assessments are amazing, or because our project proposals are dazzling. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of assessments and proposals in my time, and generally they’re crap (especially in a sudden-onset emergency, when everybody’s losing their marbles). The donors give us money because we already have a contract with them, or we know them from that bar in Kabul, or because we happened to drive past their office and they desperately need to spend a $500,000 budget by lunchtime.

If we’re talking about a public entity (a non-governmental organisation) using public funds (either from a government or from the general public) to carry out public service (providing relief to communities) in a foreign country where the government has a clear stake in responding to and recovering from a disaster?

All the data collected by that NGO should be made freely available as quickly as possible, with the only possible exceptions made for privacy or security issues.

Discuss.

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Posted in Capacity Building, M&E, NGO, Open Source, Security, United Nations