humanitarian.info

• Aldo Benini was writing about and developing humanitarian information management before I even started my professional career. I’ve always respected his work and was always saddened that we didn’t have more chances to work together. I’ve just discovered that his website makes nearly all of his research is available, including his latest work on Linking Lists of Data.
• BusinessWeek does a big section on disaster management, although it seems a little confused about it, as well. Janet Ginsburg writes about the Do-Good Imperative, Kleinberg and Kirkpatrick talkabout Disaster Tech, and there are a couple of reasonable articles on Public-Private alliances and Making Maps Work when Disaster Strikes. The latter is notable because it focuses on open approaches rather than GIS per se – presumably the personal interest of the writer rather than a shift in general perception, though….
• New Scientist tells us Web hits used to pinpoint earthquakes. The idea that web traffic provides a proxy for earthquake impacts (lots of people trying to get information about what’s going on, or possibly losing internet connectivity) is interesting, but the quote that it “could rival dedicated seismological equipment” indicates that the New Scientists have been huffing the industrial solvent again.
• It wouldn’t be a humanitarian.info post if I didn’t mention Google Earth or Google Maps, would it now? Google’s Nairobi office has launched the online Kenya map, which is a step forward in terms of improving access to geospatial data in Africa and creates a host of new opportunities for local techies. Meanwhile Rich Treves points to another interesting Google Earth tool to deal with the hidden treasure problem – go test it to death. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think either the magnifying glass or the placemark are a long-term solution to this problem – there needs to be some type of pre-subscribed filter effect built in to Google Earth itself, maybe?)
• At the end of the news, you usually get a more light-hearted item, and this is as close as I could get: Telecoms Sans Frontieres have left Burma in the white hot glare of BBC news. Was anybody really surprised? It’s Burma, guys – they’re not big fans of improving the general population’s capacity to communicate with the outside world – and now you’re never ever ever getting back in…

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.

Courtesy of Nuwan on the humanitarian-ict mailing list, I just watched “The Long Last Mile” on YouTube. Produced by Television for Education – Asia Pacific, it describes the project by LIRNEasia to evaluate Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination. Some useful points in an accessible format – redundancy in communication technologies, identification of key responders, community engagement in the process, the importance of simulation exercises for learning, and so on. Only 12 minutes long, it’s definitely worth watching. Plus, YouTube! Web2.0! Etc, etc.