humanitarian.info

In Science News, Julie Rehmeyer writes a short piece on Humanitarian Statistics, with a focus on the “controversial” Iraq war studies carried in the Lancet. I haven’t posted about the Lancet studies before; I recognise that the Lancet studies have an important role to play in tallying the cost of the Iraq war, but anything I could add to the debate would be largely redundant, since it’s been driven by political rather than humanitarian interests.
Although Deltoid characterises the article as being “about the Lancet studies” – and fair enough, that is his particular interest – it is thankfully wider than that, noting the increase in the use of statistics in the human rights (and to a lesser extent, humanitarian) sector while also being aware of the limitations:

But humanitarian crises pose huge challenges. Little information may be available—even from before a crisis—about how many people live where. Even if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated. Areas within continuing war zones can be unsafe for survey workers.

Examples from Sierra Leone and East Timor are referenced in the article. The latter case is particularly interesting because it wasn’t just based on a straight survey – which is what we generally think of when we think of statistics – but on pulling together separate and incomplete datasets to build a bigger picture, which is the norm in humanitarian crises, particularly in developing countries.

In the comments section at Deltoid, commenter Jeff Harvey laments

I can only shake my head in disbelief. Who will do the survey? The US and British governments, who are responsible for an illegal invasion that has turned Iraq into a country of wreck and ruin? This is the bitter irony. Aggressing nations do not tally the numbers of their victims. Ian Gould summed it up in the thread below this: because the real death toll of civilians conflicts with the well-cultivated myth of US benevolence, western crimes are not a part of history because they are never allowed to become a part of history. They thus get sent straight down the memory hole.

Jeff misses the point that (I think) Julie was trying to make. Although he gives many examples of past victims of war who have been lost to history, we don’t live there any more. There are more people working on these issues than ever before, and we have a better idea of how to approach these problems. However it’s this attitude – that information gathering and analysis should be a political project – that is likely to prove the biggest obstacle to moving forward.

The only way to do justice to the victims and to persuade belligerent parties to accept the results is to treat these issues as impartially as possible – and to do so with the perspective that our work is at the service of the beneficiaries, rather than of our own political interests.

Apparently they both suffer from really rubbish web apps.

Our pals at the NGO Security Blog link to a fascinating article about how US intelligence agencies are using technology that was really cool back in 1983, but hasn’t really moved forward since then. (Frighteningly it sounds a lot like one of my all-time favourite films, War Games.) In particular, the information sharing database Intelink sounds particularly scary, and by scary I mean absolutely useless – I’m glad it’s not my tax dollars at work.

The blog suggests a number of possibilities that the new technology has created for security management in the aid industry:

Picture a wiki where anyone could post up-to-date security information organized by country and city, or an informal global network of security practitioners who could brainstorm evacuation plans through instant messaging, or just-in-time training that could be delivered over the Net to specific offices during an Avian Flu outbreak.

Absolutely. And NGO Security has an idea about why it is that NGOs (and the UN, to be fair) aren’t taking advantage of these possibilities:

I think much of the resistance to using these types of tools comes from a lack of understanding of their potential as well as a fear of relinquishing control – from both IT departments and management.

It’s a short piece, but it’s worth reading the whole article.

Did you know that in the 1950s Sweden had the fourth-largest air force in the world? That was just one of the nuggets that I picked up last week in Sando, where the Swedish Rescue Services Agency has their training facility. I spent most of the day with a small group from NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme – they were on a training course for Information Management in Emergency Operations, and I was telling them about how things work at the international level.

We covered quite a lot of ground, and it was interesting to hear their stories, their experiences – some from places like Bosnia or Afghanistan, but more from their home countries. They were all from a military or government background, so very much from the command and control model, and I tried to get everybody talking about how to build more flexibility into those systems. What they really wanted was practical ways they could improve information management in their organisations, which is difficult to do when you don’t really know their organisations…

In the end, I decided to focus on resilient networks as the best approach they could develop, creating multiple linkages within their organisation on the basis of trust relationships. This approach has proven itself time and again, and is probably the only reason that the international community manages to do anything – the same people keep showing up in different places, bringing new people into their networks each time. Our problem is really that we don’t institutionalise these networks – for example, in the form of communities of practice – but for me there’s always the question of whether institutionalisation would actually hinder those processes.

That’s a question for another day. I hope I’ll get the chance to work with SRSA again on this course, but even if I don’t, one of the participants gave me a Kalpak to wear on the flight home. Super!

That’s a trick question. I know quite a lot about peace keeping – working in UNMIK (Kosovo), UNAMA (Afghanistan) and UNMIL (Liberia) will do that for you – although I wouldn’t call myself an expert, more of an engaged observer. So it was interesting yesterday to meet with the information management team at the Best Practices Unit in DPKO, and find out that they’ve got exactly the same problems as the humanitarian organisations that we usually work with.

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Anybody who reads this site (that means you, James) will have read my previous posts on Strong Angel 3. Notwithstanding my reservations about the exercise, I think that there’s a huge amount of potential in this type of simulation – a “working laboratory”, as they called it.

I’m not sure why they’re not hosting it on their site, but Strong Angel released their Final Report just recently. Eric Rasmussen, the key organiser, assures me that there will be more outputs from the exercise, but this is an excellent overview of many of the main activities and discussions that took place.

You can download the PDF file from this link.

Yet another thing that reached my desk about a month late: a publication from the Post-Conflict Reconstruction program of the CSIS. Rebecca Linder (who I met last year at the National Defense University (don’t ask) has pulled together a variety of material to try and marry the world of social networking with that of post-conflict, civil-military type knowledge management. I’m not entirely convinced – I think the social and organisational obstacles are a much larger problem than the paper makes out – but I need to read it again when I’m not in Hong Kong airport to comment properly.

However this report is important because it builds on a few important ideas (particularly those described by Anne Holohan in her excellent book Networks of Democracy) and comes from a well-regarded think tank in the US. You can download the pdf of Wikis, Webs and Networks directly, and visit the blog post announcing the publication.

What a marathon.  Although we actually released the report at the time of the Seattle workshop earlier this year, it was always the plan that we would launch a nicely-formatted final package – it just took a bit longer than planned – and you can now download the complete five-part Report at the ECB website Publications page.

I won’t go into detail about the contents, but as far as I know, this is the first in-depth examination of the information and technology requirements of international NGOs in emergency response.  It’s comprehensive but not exhaustive, and I hope that people will pick up the threads from this report to address specific areas such as security and staff capacity.

We’re now developing projects based on the findings of the report, all of which will be well underway (and some nearly finished) by the end of the year.  Although the projects begin with the ECB member agencies, we hope to have an impact on the entire sector.  So let’s begin!

It’s not exactly a fair contest, but there’s an interesting comparison between the coverage in the New York Times and the coverage on Brainstorms. Innovative inter-agency simulation or military-industrial complex in full swing – you decide. For what it’s worth Brian, I’d like to see Bruce Sterling writing on it as well…

It seems like only yesterday that I was expressing my hope that the participants at Strong Angel 3 would share some of their experiences in near real-time. Luckily pal Sanjana is filling in the gaps, blogging consistently on some of the key issues there. I swear there must be at least two of him, he writes so much…

Strong Angel 3 started without me this Sunday. Despite some last minute discussions, nothing could prise me away from the comforts of Berlin. Actually it’s my own damn fault – I was previously on the Executive Committee, but I dropped out because I couldn’t really justify my involvement. I didn’t feel that the technology being tested, and the way it was being tested, would really be relevant to the work that I’m doing right now. The down side of that decision is that I don’t get to play with some really cool toys in San Diego.

However there will probably be some interesting outcomes from the exercise, particularly in the realms of SSE (intangible) and the Pony Express (tangible). I do find SSE interesting (see Ray Ozzie’s initial thoughts here) but I just don’t get the Pony Express concept. Driving around a wifi-enabled truck in a hazardous environment to provide a few hours of patchy connectivity always struck me as a not-very-effective way of delivering internet access in the field.

Despite my misgivings, Strong Angel continues to be an interesting exercise with potential lessons for humanitarian organisations. I’m hoping that they release the results live, through blogs and wikis, so we can all get a view on events in San Diego this week.