humanitarian.info

The humanitarian community and the aid worker blogosphere are afire with responses to the ICC indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – which was a long time coming – and the subsequent expulsion from Sudan of at least 10 major NGOs currently working in Darfur – which was pretty much immediate. The general consensus seems to be: it was a stupid idea, and we knew it would have terrible consequences.

In some respects, this line of thinking is entirely correct. From the humanitarian perspective there are many, many arguments against indicting Bashir, and the Sudanese government’s response – coming down hard on humanitarian organisations as a way of drawing attention away from how politically impotent they are – was entirely predictable. The government will kick you out of the country at the drop of a hat, and one of the key factors in undermining organisation and staff confidence has been the uncertainty about whether your next action might see you on the next plane out of there.

The debate focuses on whether peace or justice comes first, and most people agree that peace must take priority. Not least of those people are those in Darfur themselves – the priority of most communities displaced by war is to regain some sort of security so that they can rebuilt their lives.We have conflicting reports of the response in Darfur – on the one hand Reuters gives us:

Darfur activist Hussein Abu Sharati, who says he represents residents of 158 displacement camps, said most people there were overjoyed by the ICC’s decision, but were too scared to show it.

While Rob Crilly reports that, of those in the camps,

Few have time for this debate. Few have heard of the International Criminal Court. Those that have are worried the government will come down hard on anyone celebrating Bashir’s indictment. And most seem to think that going home is more important than anything else.

These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, since IDPs are rarely a homogenous body of opinion. Frankly, however, I’m in a difficult position. I welcome the expansion of the mechanisms available for extending (and hopefully enforcing) human rights law, but at the same time I don’t want to see communities in Darfur suffer any more than they already have. Given what’s happening now, how can I reconcile those two?

The short answer is that I don’t think I can. I think I have to make a choice and come down on one side or the other. The side I choose is the side that presses for justice, no matter how ill-conceived it might be. My reasons are cloudy, even to myself, and I hope that I can clarify them over the next few weeks. The feeling that drives this is the same feeling that drove me into humanitarian work in the first place – first a desire to prevent genocide, then a desire to see justice done more generally, finally translated into the practical action of humanitarian work. It wasn’t the perfect match, but it was close enough.

I understand the Thirsty Palmetto’s frustration with those who argue that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and I have no desire to be painted as the sort of person who’s willing to gamble with people’s lives in order to prove their point. Yet it’s vital to remember one thing here: any suffering that occurs in Darfur is the responsibility of the Sudanese government. They are the ones who have failed the citizens of their country, and I’m not prepared to feel any more guilty about the situation in Sudan than I’m prepared to feel guilty about any other humanitarian crisis.

One reason not to feel guilty is that it’s exactly what the Sudanese government is banking on. Generally speaking, the government does not particularly care about its citizens, and the reason that UN and NGOs were allowed to operate in Darfur in the first place was because it suited their broader political purposes. Their calculus was that our self-imposed sense of responsibility would outweigh our sense of anger, that we would continue to work in appalling conditions to help people whose terrible lot was unlikely to get better any time soon – and more, that we wouldn’t kick up too much fuss about the role of the government in perpetuating that lot.

This is a difficult line to walk, and it’s one which the humanitarian community wrestles with continually in every complex emergency, one way or another. Yet one of the reasons that we continue to wrestle with it is because there have been no mechanisms which might really bring the justice that we want to see. The ICC might not be that mechanism, but I find it impossible to discount. At the same time, I don’t feel very comfortable standing alongside those standing outside the humanitarian situation entirely; perhaps the reason is because it feels like giving up the sense of solidarity that is vital for humanitarian work.

So I swing back to the other side: the unforeseen consequences (and the foreseen consequences, for that matter) from the indictment are potentially colossal, and not necessarily in the best interests of the people of Sudan. Some of those potential consequences I’m not that concerned about – the breakup of Sudan, for example, seems inevitable within the next 50 years (one for the prediction fans, there) – but some of them are serious enough to weigh against. Maybe I’m wrong – this isn’t the first stone in building an international order based on human rights, but a crisis in human rights that will pull the whole house of cards down. What choice do we have? These things have to start somewhere, and it’s hard to believe that the situation can get worse for the people of Darfur.

I told you I wasn’t clear, didn’t I? Oh well.

I promised myself that I’d blog every single day while I was working in Georgia. It should be fairly obvious that I didn’t. I can’t say that I was super productive while I was in Tbilisi – for a variety of reasons, including particularly dysfunctional co-ordination, but also because of the basic difficulty of getting good information in conflict situations.

In a natural disaster, government agencies and international organisations are usually relatively comfortable to share information about the situation – but in a conflict, they clam up tighter than my wallet around Christmas. This is because natural disasters have fewer political implications than complex emergencies; while in a natural disaster the worst thing you can say about a government is that they’re negligent, in a conflict situation the government is usually a belligerent,

This means that timely / reliable / accurate information is hard to come by in Georgia, as Ivan points out and Ethan overviews (is that a verb?). I find it hard to get too worked up about the lack of “citizen war reporters” even though it is my fervent hope that the web is going to change the way we do business in both complex emergencies and natural disasters. My lack of work-up is simply because even if there were shedloads of citizen journalists covering these events, I would still treat them exactly the same as any other information source – which is to say, I wouldn’t trust them at all.

As an example, the single most critical humanitarian information issue in Georgia was the numbers and locations of people displaced by the conflict. This was problematic for a number of reasons:

1. Nobody had a clue how many people had been displaced by the conflict. There were multiple government agencies involved in looking after the IDPs (frequently a euphemism for “ignoring them”, of course), each with their own figures, none of which tallied with the figures that UNHCR or the Red Cross had; and of course nobody in the humanitarian community had bothered to sit down and agree on a number we could all work to. Lesson from Afghanistan, folks: your numbers are never going to be 100% accurate, and it’s better just to agree to a number and get to planning than continually be running after the latest figures – which are also going to be wrong.
2. Nobody wanted to talk about the IDPs left over from the previous round of conflict in 1992-93; a staggering 220,000 people (not 100% accurate, of course – just run with it!) have been rotting in terrible conditions for the last 16 years, and some of their stories can be found on IDP Voices. Nearly all of us who were new to Georgia found this astonishing, since it raised a rather difficult question: what the *&%$ has the government and the UN been doing for the last 16 years? It also confuses the picture because in purely humanitarian terms many of these “old caseload” IDPs were in a worse situation than the “new caseload” – and many of the “normal” citizens live in conditions as bad as either.
3. For both old and new caseloads, the main priority is ensuring their basic shelter, which comes under the Emergency Shelter cluster. Unfortunately the UN in Georgia had decided that they didn’t want to activate the cluster system (because it’s a bit of a hassle and you have to actually take responsibility for your actions) but they did want to use some of the cluster tools (particularly the ones that give you a fat sack of cash to spend). This meant that it was like stepping into a time machine to 2004 – you remember, when “co-ordination” was a competition to see who could hold as many meetings as possible with as few outcomes as possible.
4. Notwithstanding the co-ordination problem, nobody had a clue what to do with all them displaced. The government unveiled a not unreasonable resettlement plan for the new caseload at the start of September, but that plan rapidly ran aground on the harsh reality that the stock and state of public buildings in Georgia are likely not sufficient to house the IDPs according to basic humanitarian standards, even on a short-term basis. (Some interesting discussion on this at the Social Science in the Caucasus blog.) The question is whether that government plan can be reshaped into a more realistic framework that will engage the entire humanitarian community as well as being attractive to donors…

One of the things about shelter issues is that they tend to get worse the longer you leave them. Conditions deteriorate, particularly when people are housed in buildings that were never designed for residential use. In this case, many of the new caseload had been placed in schools and kindergartens around Tbilisi and other towns – which meant that we also had to deal with the fact that those institutions were needed for the start of the new school year. This was a particular tension for UNICEF, who often run a “Back To School” program – which wouldn’t look too good if there weren’t any schools to go back to. In addition winters in Georgia can get unpleasant, especially the closer you get to mountains, and thus another constraint on resettlement.

You might have noticed that there wasn’t much talk about information in this blog post. That’s because there wasn’t much information, as I explained previously. We got hold of the complete set of school locations from the MInistry of Education (shape files ahoy!) but nobody seemed that interested. We tried to persuade the different actors – Red Cross, UNHCR, Ministries various – to consolidate the figures for collective centres and the IDPs therein, but with little luck. Paolo Palmero from OCHA had gathered a lot of data during his 2005 visit, but none of it seemed to be circulating in the agencies.

Summary version: this response showed yet again the importance of investing in information resources before an emergency hits. That doesn’t just mean getting loads of satellite images (although UNOSAT did some impressive work on damage levels) but investing in relationships with government, relationships that can be leveraged quickly to mutual benefit. It means having a basic picture already in place – locations of schools, for example – that you can then overlay new data on top of – such as the estimated IDP numbers in those schools. This really needs a collective approach – one agency alone isn’t sufficient to achieve success, although you need a focal point for the effort – but it continues to make me wonder if we should be thinking about setting up an organisation that collects and disseminates operational data like this.

At least that would avoid me feeling like a numpty, turning up at meetings with my tiny spreadsheet of schools that might need some watsan rehabilitation…

• 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…

The Humanitarian Futures Programme is one of the most interesting initiatives out there, taking a longer-term view of the sector than most other policy and research groups. Originally I thought that they were going to be developing the humanitarian equivalent of the Singularity, but it’s more about building dialogue with key partners and getting people to think.

The Programme is looking for a part-time consultant to work to research the future of humanitarian collaboration.  The work is part of a two-person team, initially home-based but with some travel in the last quarter of 2008 and into 2009. Desktop review, interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, simulations – you know the score.

What’s interesting is that they are looking for someone interested in bringing non-traditional perspectives and new ways of thinking about collaboration into the humanitarian community (networks, social media and so on). This sounds a lot like the sort of thing that Aid Workers Network was supposed to promote and that ECB has been doing work on, so I’m all for it.

If you’re interested, send a half-page application letter with CV to Rosie Oglesby [rosie dot oglesby at kcl dot ac dot uk] by COB Thursday 12th June. There is a TORs available, if you ask really, really nicely.

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on technology. At least it’s relatively non-controversial, except that it isn’t, because Myanmar is one of those places where internet access is a non-starter, where satellite telephones are essentially illegal and where the technology infrastructure (e.g. suppliers and maintenance) is close to zero. What that means is that we’re going to be extremely limited in what we can do on the ground. So what is happening?

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps. UPDATE: MapAction have also deployed in support of OCHA and have maps available on their website.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet). Microsoft are focused on supporting the HIC, and are ready to respond to other requests from the humanitarian community.
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that – with regards to early warning – IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

I’m nowhere near being deployed for this one (particularly as the government apparently is still refusing entry to foreign aid workers), but all of this makes me feel that we’re headed in the right direction. However until the government lets agencies start doing their jobs with less restrictions on movement and communications, we’re not going to see the benefits – another example of how the technology can be rendered much less useful when the political environment isn’t supportive. I leave you with the words of Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in his speech last Thursday:

In spite of the technology that we have, in spite of the power that we have, in spite of the network that we have, we still lose lives needlessly… So it is more than just the power of technology, it is more than just the transformation of society through technology, it is certainly a shift in paradigm here in the minds of our people and particularly our leaders. Because if you don’t have that shift, millions and billions of dollars worth of technology cannot deliver effective, timely relief to people when they need it most, because we have reservations about opening up our borders for cooperation, because we have hesitation about cooperating with the outside world, because we have mistrust of the outside world.

• Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about it at the MobileActive website.
• The National Library of Medicine have published Information Seeking Behavior and Viewpoints of Emergency Preparedness and management professionals concerned with Health and Medicine (snappy title, guys). Murray Turoff has the entire text online there, or you can dowload the complete report [pdf]. “The emphasis of the study was on determining the current information seeking behavior, existing preferred sources of information, and unmet information needs of professionals involved with the medical and public health aspects of emergency planning, preparedness, and response.”
• A CSM article on Patrick Ball of Benetech. No great insights into human rights documentation and analysis, but a couple of nice stories about Ball’s experiences (HT: Flowing Data).
• NetHope have opened their West Africa Chapter - very gratifying for me to see these Chapters spreading ever wider. The ICT Skills Building Program is also going from strength to strength this year, with trainings announced for Nairobi, Johannesburg and West Africa.
• LINGOS have their new community website up and running [Warning: SharePoint alert!], with the invitation to register with them. The community is very active, and LINGOS offer a lot of resources on the website. Oh, and I’m sorry we never managed to organise that Webinar, Linda!
• The Economist realises that mobile phones are being used for election monitoring, public health, and advocacy – only a couple of years late, guys! – with the article A world of witnesses (HT: Katrin at MobileActive).

What’s interesting about the ReliefWeb Client Outreach statistics?

Quite a lot. ReliefWeb is the single most information portal for the humanitarian community, so it’s worth paying attention to how that community uses online services, what sorts of information it values, and so on. It’s also interesting because ReliefWeb went through a huge overhaul a couple of years ago, described in Sebastian Naidoo’s valuable article from the Information Management Journal, “Redesigning the ReliefWeb” – a redesign which I think was more interesting for the process (described by Sebastian) than the final result – but unfortunately there isn’t really any available baseline comparison to judge whether that investment has been worthwhile.

I’d love to promise you that this is going to be really exciting, but it isn’t. All I can give you is an impressionistic take on the stats…

A large proportion of users are coming back at least once a week, if not more often. This is an impressive result which demonstrates how critical ReliefWeb is for the sector. It’s also a tremendous opportunity for ReliefWeb to create a real community around the site, which is something that hasn’t really been explored properly yet. This question is particularly important because the achievement needs to be qualified – the main reason why people visit ReliefWeb is “Job Searching”. This isn’t a surprise to anybody who knows ReliefWeb – the Vacancies section has always been the most popular section of the site – but it remains problematic. How can ReliefWeb use the popularity of the vacancies to direct users towards more interesting and/or useful parts of the site.

It’s very obvious how narrative-driven ReliefWeb users are: the five most valuable types of information are all textual (Situation Reports, Country Background Information, Analysis and Evaluation, News and Assessments). Most of these resources, in my opinion, offer a very low return on investment for the reader – they’re lots of work to plough through, with very little substantive content for most of them. So what about non-narrative information? Maps are sixth in line, most valuable to 9.2% of respondents, and Financial Reports and Appeals are most valuable to a miserable 2.9% of respondents. That’s not a bad % for maps, but are people getting maps from other sources – UNOSAT, MapAction, HICs? It would be useful to know exactly what maps they’re downloading – this would be a very useful stat for ReliefWeb to release.

There are some interesting open questions tucked away at the end of the survey (what technical features would you like, what is the main weakness of the site) but they haven’t been crunched into anything useful. The pop-up box just gives me a long, long, long list of responses, many of which are gibberish. I used to speak gibber, but my language skills are rusty – it may take me some time to get anything useful out of them. A quick glance at the responses demonstrates a sad truth of surveys – never, ever ask an open question, because you’ll only get a useful answer about 30% of the time.

ReliefWeb’s position as the single most important online resource for the humanitarian community isn’t going to be challenged any time soon – but it will be challenged. While it is an effective portal site – breakdowns by country / disaster / theme – I’m not convinced that ReliefWeb is really using its position to shape the way the sector uses online tools, to represent the sector to the outside world, to provide critical operational information in a wide range of formats.

The only way that will change (particularly since ReliefWeb suffers from being trapped inside OCHA) is if enough people lobby OCHA to enable ReliefWeb to be more responsive both to the needs of users – but also to the changing technology available to us. In many ways ReliefWeb reflects the problems facing the UN as a whole, in danger of being overtaken by faster and more flexible organisations. This user survey is a good starting point for ReliefWeb – and it’s especially impressive that they’ve made the entire results of the survey available if you want to see for yourself.

Stuff I should have blogged at the time:

• What if? – New York emergency housing competition results: Last September, New York City launched “What if? “, an open competition to find innovative designs for high-density emergency provisional housing for 38,000 households in the aftermath of a hurricane and flood disaster in afictional, one square mile neighbourhood of the city called Prospect Shore. Ten winning entries would get US$10k to develop their ideas further. The competition issued some useful materials about NYC’s vulnerability to hurricanes, and created a really rich scenario for designers to get stuck into. All submissions are now online, and it’s a headfunk of gorgeous design and ingenuity. The ten winning entries were announced in January, and can be viewed here . My own favourite is the gloriously mental S.C.A.F.F.O.L.D. , designed by Jay Lim.
• Intravenous Facebook : Takes all Types is a US charity which has developed a Facebook app for supporting blood donation drives. The idea is to give Facebook your blood type and zip/postcode, and Takes all Types will email you when a local blood bank needs you. What tweaks humanitarian.info’s curiousity is their claim that the app will be “a powerful way to save lives in a blood emergency”. I think that’s overcooking its potential to improve on existing systems in a meaningful way, particularly given the enduringly complicated motives of blood donors. Thanks to sociologist Richard Titmuss, it’s conventional wisdom that paying money to blood donors decreases both the quality and quantity of blood in a bank. This isn’t set in stone though. For example, blood donation schemes in parts of the Former Soviet Union have never been run on a voluntary basis, and renumeration remains necessary to sustain bloodbanks; there is also some research suggesting that non-direct rewards for donors, such as tax credits, may encourage more blood donation. I wonder if the indirect rewards gained through online networking sites can provide sufficiently compelling motives for people to do more than simply sign-up; it seems to lack a “ladder of engagement”, and asks too much of people too early.
• Church and solid state : 400,000 mosques in Malaysia are to get high speed broadband, delivered over the power lines. This “Smart Mosque” project is being delivered by Velchip Sdn Bhd, will cost US$14 billion and aims to provide affordable Internet access to 60 million people. Breathtakingly large aggregate numbers, for sure, and I leave it to better minds to look at the possible effects this may have. Out of interest, in England Anglican churches outnumber broadband exchanges by a factor of 2.88 (16,157/5,600): perhaps the Church of England should be cutting a deal with British Telecom.

So UNHCR releases a Google Earth layer to great fanfare:

Unveiling a new UNHCR layer in Google Earth before invited guests at UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters, Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone hailed the project as means to educate people worldwide on the plight of refugees and on the humanitarians who help them.

“Google Earth is a very powerful way for UNHCR to show the vital work that it is doing in some of the world’s most remote and difficult displacement situations,” said Johnstone. “By showing our work in its geographical context, we can really highlight the challenges we face on the ground and how we tackle them.”

I download the UNHCR KML file, fire up my creaky old version of Google Earth and have a look. The first thing I notice is that every time I click on a link for more information, it tells me how much it costs to buy school or farm equipment, and gives me a link to UNHCR fundraising so I can cough up right there.

So Google Earth – one of the most powerful yet accessible technology tools ever created, at the vanguard of a geospatial data revolution – is reduced to lining the pockets of UNHCR – an agency, incidentally, that recently came bottom of Ranking of Donor Agencies on Best Practices in Aid (Where Does The Money Go? [pdf], Easterly and Putze 2008). I don’t think that this is the best way to reach out to the public if you’re serious about educating them about refugee issues.

Now that I’ve got that rage off my chest, what’s positive about the UNHCR Google Earth layer? Well, it’s a start, and there are some interesting features; if you click on the layer for accessibility, it presents you with a visualisation of the catchment areas of water points in a refugee camp.

This is useful because it starts to give people an idea of one of the key issues for refugee management and the complexity of running a refugee camp. However it doesn’t really go much further than that – there’s no explanation of why those catchment areas are important, or how this information could be used. I’d also be surprised to hear that UNHCR staff working in the field are using this sort of tool to plan camp construction and management, but I’d love to hear from any UNHCR staff if I’m wrong… but that’s exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.

It does give a sense of the global span of refugee issues, and by focusing on three different locations it does present a range of different environments. However it’s still peddling the message that refugees are fundamentally people who need help, and that international organisations are the only ones that can help them. There’s nothing (that I saw) about the primary responsibility of governments to address the needs of refugees, or about the fact the primary source of support for most refugees is the refugees themselves.

If you’re interested in finding out how great UNHCR is, it’s a fantastic resource. If you’re interested in getting a deeper understanding of refugee issues, you probably want to look somewhere else. I realise that I’m starting to sound really bitter in these sorts of posts, but please understand – that’s because I think we should be doing better. Much, much better.

Well, not yet, but they will [pdf]. Janet Ginsburg explains the development of the idea of the Humanitarian Technology Review, while Bruno Giussani covers the recent TED breakfast, where Eric Rasmussen gave an update on InSTEDD.

Initially the idea of a Humanitarian Technology Review sounds like a good idea – if it’s done right. The first two questions – remember the first two questions, everybody! – are: who is the target audience, and what do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? The briefing paper I linked to above says

The Review’s readers, like the Review itself, span many niches: medical researchers, software developers, policy-makers, funders, doctors, veterinarians, communities trying to prepare for or reeling from disasters – even other media.

The one group that is noticeable by its absence is – well, me. People like me, anyway, who seem to fall under the catch-all term “practitioner”. I see doctors and veterinarians in there, but which doctors and veterinarians, exactly? I think it’s likely that I’ve misunderstood – the briefing is explicit that this is about building connections between disciplines, and it’s clearly aiming at a wider audience than the humanitarian community.

If we look at the disciplines that they’re talking about, it’s a wide selection, so it’s probably easier for me to focus on the technology examples given in the review:

• lightweight fabric + satellite technology = a cheaper portable satellite dish
• software + cell phones = real-time surveillance for bird flu
• GIS + interactive mapping = real time tracking of fires and floods
• solar panels + refrigerator = reliable field transport for vaccines
• filter + straw = a mobile water purification device
• open source water tech + microfinance = funding for small water projects
• genetic sampling + fast data analysis = identifying a pathogen in hours

I’m going to think about those examples over the next few days, but I’m struggling to see how a publication can cover all of these and still appeal to a coherent audience. That’s why communities of practice exist around epidemiology, water and sanitation, and the like – because they’re focused enough to hold peoples’ attention.

The success or failure of the HTR will be in the delivery, and on that front I’m very positive about their proposal to combine different delivery streams. At the very least, InSTEDD’s deep pockets will enable them to experiment and see what works, although I’d warn them not to expect collaboration to magically appear – two years on ECB teaches you that for nothing.

(NOTE: Full disclosure – I thought about a similar idea a few years ago, but gave it up because I didn’t think it was viable. Two attempts have been made to develop this sort of thing previously – ReliefWeb’s HIN and CMI’s PeaceIT [pdf] – but the InSTEDD concept is much wider.)