humanitarian.info

I previously wrote about Imogen Wall’s post-tsunami report The Right To Know: The Challenge of Public Information and Accountability in Aceh and Sri Lanka, which laid out the case that there is a right to information in the same way as there is a right to shelter. The Red Cross World Disasters Report 2005, picked up on this theme and extended it to the technology, demonstrating that “Information and communications technology must be recognised as a form of aid in itself.” Both of these reports were entirely correct, yet the humanitarian community has largely failed to address their conclusions. No surprises there.

Wall has now published (via BBC World Service Trust) a policy briefing that recapitulates and updates her original points, entitled Left in the dark: The unmet need for information in emergency response (PDF) and an accompanying article entitled After Disaster: Information for Life. While I might disagree with some of the solutions she proposes (if you think I ever agree 100% with anybody, you obviously haven’t been reading this blog long enough…), these reports should be on the shelf not just in every communications and public information unit, but all programme units as well – a reminder that our work is not just about providing food, water, shelter, but about enabling beneficiaries to regain control over their own lives.

Marla Petal at RiskRED emailed me following my recent post on PreventionWeb. RiskRed is concerned with promoting education about disaster risk reduction, but its most interesting project from my perspective is the DRRlibrary, a DRR resource site with a social bookmarking approach, using tags to classify useful websites and documents.

When you visit the DRRlibrary, what you see looks almost identical to del.icio.us, the mother of all social bookmarking sites, with a few extra functions. Searching through the tags is quite simple – as well as being able to sort by date, title or URL of each link, there’s also a tag cloud on the main page and a browser (which works fine but is a little confusing). It’s great to see this approach being used, and I assume that Ian O’Donnell at ProVention had something to do with it – I’ve had too many discussions with him about just this approach for it to be a coincidence!

Any downsides? Well, tagging can get very unwieldy very quickly, and tags like “seismic-resistant construction” are a little too specific to make for simple searches. (I blow hot and cold on this – when I look at my own del.icio.us links, I have problems understanding my own tags, which is a bad sign.) However this isn’t a show-stopper, and it’s the sort of thing that will sort itself out as the project grows. From a technical point of view, the only potential spanner in the works is that the DRRlibrary is based on Scuttle (open source, hooray!). Scuttle is only at release 0.72, and the lead developer has announced that although the project isn’t dead, it is dead slow.

The big questions aren’t about the site itself, but about how it relates to other sites. How, for example, can we ensure that the DRRlibrary is interoperable with PreventionWeb, particularly if the latter starts to offer more social networking features? At the moment there’s no tagging on PreventionWeb, but it’s the sort of thing that could appear; and even if it doesn’t, there’s a danger of duplicating resources and creating confusion amongst users.

It’s early days, though, and there’s plenty of time to address these issues. DRRlibrary is a welcome addition to the range of resources out there – not just for DRR, but for anybody who’s interested in how the web can be used more creatively to share knowledge in this sector.