humanitarian.info

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.

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.