I feel duty-bound to direct you towards two exciting articles which are also quite brief, so they won’t take up too much of your day. I realise that you’re busy.

First up, it’s Sahana getting a mention in the Wall Street Journal, in an article with the snappy title of (sigh) Managing Disaster. Actually it’s just a puff piece written by the Business Roundtable, but it’s nice to see IBM and Sahana getting mentioned for the Chengdu earthquake deployment.

Second, it’s another insightful article by me for ICT Update magazine, entitled Communicating Peace. In it, you’ll find words of wisdom like ” What is important is not the technology itself, but how people use it.” It will only take 5 minutes of your time to read it - but a lifetime of enlightenment will follow.

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.

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.)

No sooner had I written yesterday’s post about digital security than the New York Times has a piece by Nicholas Kristol on how the Save Darfur campaign website has been under attack recently - from Chinese IP addresses.

As the coalition’s China advocacy campaign has intensified, officials have noticed increasingly sophisticated and subversive attempts to intercept emails and infect computers with malicious programs.

Kristol relies mainly on innuendo to suggest that the Chinese government might be behind the attacks, with very little evidence to support the accusation. From a technology point of view, though, it’s irrelevant who’s responsible - this is a cautionary tale for NGOs and other organisations. We can enjoy the benefits that technology brings - but we also need to guard against the dangers. The price of liberty, and all that…

Cisco have done a lot of good in our sector through their support to NetHope and similar initiatives, no doubt about that. However the promo video on their Telepresence site manages to showcase the least useful way we could possibly use their technology, as well as putting the stereotypical “young white middle class aid worker” in the centre of the frame - instead of the people that we’re supposed to be helping.

UPDATE: Okay, so I got hit by the grumpy stick this morning.  On the other hand, the first draft of this post was far more vitriolic…

UPDATE 2: Also, did you catch the obscure Western reference?  This blog is in danger of becoming too much like my personal blog…

• Following the collapse of the political process in Kenya, bloggers White African and Kenyan Pundit - both of whom are worth reading, by the way - have developed a Google Maps mash-up which deals with electoral violence in the country.  Called Ushaidi (’witness’ in Swahili, I think?), it enables people to report events either online or via SMS.  It’s not the first time something like this has been tried, but this an interesting organic attempt to pin down exactly what’s happening in the country.  As anybody working in human rights knows, gathering this sort of information is extremely difficult - particularly later on when it might be needed.  More explanation from White African in this blog post, coverage at Global Voices (with an interesting article on cyber activism in Africa) and the BBC.

• There’s been a fair amount of discussion about how the media and responders can work more effectively together in the last couple of years, and of course a whole heap of blogs and similar about how the new technology is going to change the face of disaster response, etc, etc.  So far, not much has happened, but TVE Asia and the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok have just published a free resource called Communicating Disasters.  It’s an interesting but disjointed read - I’m not exactly sure who it’s targeted at, to be honest…

• There was a brief flurry of blogging around Nathan Eagle’s article, The Mobile Web is NOT helping the Developing World - and what we can do about it, mainly because it burst the bubble of optimism around bringing the internet to the poorest through the Miracle of Mobile Telephony (TM).  Of course, Nathan’s position is not that it isn’t possible, just that we’re not doing it right at the moment.  Personally, I’m still waiting for some hard evidence that these efforts benefit the poor rather than the relatively well-off - but that might just be splitting hairs.

• Witness have launched The Hub, their online platform for human rights-related videos and media, after a long incubation period. Cutting through the bumf, it’s intended to connect individuals and organizations who are working on human rights around the world. It’s an interesting lunge at building global connectivity in a sector (human rights) that is notoriously factional, and the focus on media is potentially powerful - particularly new media forms, such as mobile phone content, which are incredibly powerful tools for mobilizing support. You can register at http://hub.witness.org/login.

• The November issue of Scientific American carries an article by Sheri Fink entitled “The Science of Doing Good” [purchase required, unfortunately]. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the article. Initially I wasn’t convinced that this was going to be much good (sorry, Sheri!) but I was wrong. It moves between different areas - refugee registration, GIS, human rights, and so on - quite smoothly, while communicating the main obstacles that we face without making excuses. As an overview, it hits most of the initiatives in the sector that are accessible to general readers, so it should engage a wide audience and give them a pointer towards the area that might interest them the most. This is A Good Thing.
• “Mapping for Better Accountability in Service Delivery” [pdf] by Katharina Welle is the latest ODI Briefing Paper. The paper uses WaterAid’s work as a case study to demonstrate how the use of mapping can be turned into a policy tool. Although the paper was actually funded by WaterAid, it’s an interesting approach to emphasise that gets away from the “cool” factor of mapping.
• The latest Peace IT newsletter [pdf] is just out from Crisis Management Initiative, with articles on a range of recent developments including Humanitarian FOSS and the Global +5 Symposium. Again, this is a very nice overview of some interesting projects, although not much in the way of analysis, so be prepared to follow up on specific projects.
• NPR carries an interesting audio segment on the Reverse 911 service. From their blurb: “The Reverse 911 communication system was given the lion’s share of credit for successful and fatality free evacuations from San Diego County’s wildfires a month ago. But the program may not have been as effective as previously thought.” The clip is still pretty positive about the concept, but once again it seems that the cheerleaders for technology may have underestimated the reality on the ground.

There’s a new addition to the current crop of educational games from UNHCR (see below), so I thought that I’d provide a quick catalogue of the games that I’m familiar with. Please feel free to add any others in the comments section, and I’ll update the list.

• Against All Odds. The game that lets you experience what it is like to be a refugee from UNHCR.
• Stop Disasters. A disaster simulation game from the UN/ISDR.
• WFP Food Force (download). It’s up to you to save and rebuild the island of Sheylan with WFP.
• 3rd World Farmer. Puts you in the shoes of a family of farmers in one of the poorest areas of the world.
• Darfur is Dying. Players must keep their refugee camp functioning in the face of possible attack by Janjaweed militias.
• Ayiti: the Cost of Life. Your goal in this game is to help the Guinard family get an education and improve their lives.
• Disaster Watch.
• Prisoners of War. Among the Red Cross’s tasks are to visit prisoners of war (POWs) who are protected by the Geneva Conventions, and provide them with assistance.
• Peacemaker. Experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East or the agony of plunging the region into disaster.
• The Transaid Challenge.  You are an African health worker, delivering services and supplies from health centres to villages that need them.

About the time of Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people getting excited about the power of the web to respond to disasters (some of which were loosely grouped under the title Recovery2.0). The idea was that the power of the web could be harnessed to improve the speed and coverage of disaster response, creating a multiplier effect with all of those people in the world that wanted to help but didn’t know how.

Needless to say, I wasn’t one of them (grouch, grouch, grouch). That wasn’t because I didn’t think the web had the potential to transform disaster response practices - I think it does have that potential and it’s already transforming our work.

(We had an interesting idea-tumble earlier this year between Jesse Robbins, Mikel Maron myself on a very specific instance around Katrina.)

My reservations were to do with the problem that we often have in responding to disasters - unqualified people showing up to help. In this case, those people are virtual rather than physical - but they still create the same co-ordination problems.

Recently, a guy called Steve Fossett disappeared while flying across the US. I’m not sure whether this made many headlines internationally, but it was quite a big deal in the US. Shortly after the search attempts began, a couple of web-based distributed searches began using satellite imagery, the most notable of which was through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, closely followed by Google Earth.

Those efforts have now ceased, although neither Fossett or his aircraft have been found. Wired magazine just published an article entitled Online Fossett Searchers Ask, Was It Worth It? which captures some of the difficulties that the Amazon project faced without really going into the underlying problems. While feelings amongst the Turkers appears to be mixed, the opinion amongst the professionals comes through much more clearly:

“The value of the contribution is hard to quantify because ultimately we failed to find Steve, but it seems reasonable to imagine that this could work,” Chantrill says. “I don’t see any downsides to it, so long as people don’t pester the professional search-and-rescue teams with poor leads.”

Yet that is exactly what happened, much to the exasperation of Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan, who says her e-mail and voicemail boxes were flooded with leads from folks working on the Mechanical Turk. Many times, they mistook search aircraft in the air for Fossett’s plane — even though it’s unlikely Fossett’s plane would have appeared intact.

“The crowdsourcing thing added a level of complexity that we didn’t need, because 99.9999 percent of the people who were doing it didn’t have the faintest idea what they’re looking for,” Ryan says.

“In the early days, it sounded like a good idea,” Ryan continues. “In hindsight, I wish it hadn’t been there, because it didn’t produce a darn thing that was productive except for being a giant black hole for energy, time and resources. There may come a day when this technology is capable of doing what it says it can deliver, but boy, that’s not now.”

The web has a clear value in disseminating information, which can by itself empower them to act. Does it go beyond that, though? Are the tools available to us through the web going to completely change the dynamic of disaster response, engaging more people than ever before, working at a distance rather than in the field.

There are two basic principles behind Disaster2.0 or Recovery2.0 or people-to-people aid or whatever you want to call it. The first is that the internet can cut out or automate the middleman in the way it has in the private sector - getting rid of some of the troublesome and costly human elements that make disaster response difficult. The problem with that is that it also eliminates the implicit knowledge needed to approach the task in a coherent way; knowledge which is only gained with your boots on the ground.

The second principle is that a distributed approach to share out repetitive tasks amongst a wide range of people will make those tasks easier. The problem with that is that if there’s nobody directing those tasks, then you may as well not bother; and if you have unqualified volunteers working on them, they’re far less effective than trained professionals and not accountable in any way for their work.

The spirit of volunteerism is the basis for all humanitarian work. We need to encourage people to engage with these issue, and I welcome these types of initiative as useful learning experiences in how to do that better. We need to remember, however, that managing volunteers has a cost as well, whether they’re physically present or virtual, and unless they have a specialised skill (and believe me, analysing remote sensing data is a very specialised skill) they can cost more than they contribute.

I also want the humanitarian sector to professionalise, to deliver more effectively to people in need, and I worry that this type of approach gives the wrong message, while at the same time raising people’s expectations about how they might be able to contribute to what is, after all, a life and death business. How do we balance our need to engage the public in order to draw on their huge potential without undermining our actual response?

… for one very good reason, and that’s because I’m not at the Global Sympsium +5 in Geneva. However it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, since it’s a pretty big deal. I’m also not liveblogging the NetHope Bi-Annual Summit in Panama, and that’s because I’m not there either. I’m sure that there are good explanations for my otherwise inexplicable absences, but that’s not important right now.

The Symposium +5 is being held five years after the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange (hence the +5 title - do keep up). That first symposium was a very mixed bag - it was the first time that the various actors in the sector had come together, so it was a very big deal. Because it was the first time, however, it was a little unfocused - nobody was really sure where the sector was going, although we weren’t short of ideas.

The Final Statement [pdf] that came out of that meeting wasn’t a bad one, but I had a lot of concerns about whether any progress would be made on the key points. This was partly because the wording was quite vague, as always with consensus documents, but mainly because there was (and remains) a lack of leadership in the perenially fragmented humanitarian sector. So where are we, five years later?

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