humanitarian.info

The O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference is another one of these confabs that I watch from a distance, filled with a mixture of awe and dread. (Awe at the sheer brainpower that you can see in the many presentations, and dread at what might happen next.) This year, Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron gave a presentation on DisasterTech to the poor and huddled masses that attended, updating some of their earlier thoughts on areas such as SMS, open source and distributed approaches.

Now I like Jesse and Mikel, and I agree with the lines along which they’re thinking, but when I see slides that say “225,000 deaths preventable with existing technology”, I start to worry about whether the expectations of those poor and huddled masses from the technology world are being raised just a little too high… but I’d rather wait until I can hear the audio rather than just read the slides.

One point they did make that’s worth picking up (because as far as I know, this is the first time it’s been explicit) is that disaster technology tends to follow this pattern:

1. Disaster
2. Ad Hoc Adaptation
3. Championship
4. Iterative Improvement

That’s pretty accurate – most of the more interesting developments of the last few years have followed that model. However there are definitely problems with Championship – not as a concept, but in terms of where to target your “championing” efforts.

I believe that most technology dissemination in this sector isn’t through organisational adoption – there’s just too much autonomy at the local level – but through word-of-mouth. Somebody sees something working, tries it out and takes it forward (or not) – but only within their particular part of their organisation. What this might mean is that we need to take a viral approach to this, rather than seeking to get management (i.e. top-down) approval, particularly if we want to reach smaller groups on the ground.

With that in mind, we have to be anthropologists as well as technologists. Cultures are different, communities are different and people are different; what “works” in terms of viral dissemination in the US is simply not going to work in Bangladesh. It’s not just the technology that has to adapt to these different environments; it’s us as well. Hopefully the start-up jockeys at the conference realise that…

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.

I’ve corresponded with Mikel Maron for a while now, interested particularly by the work that he’s been involved with introducing Wikis into the UN. However his first love is geospatial and his favourite project is OpenStreetMap, which is a free editable map of the whole world that can be viewed, edited and used in a collaborative way from by anybody, anywhere.

Mikel has been thinking about how this type of approach might be used in disaster response, and he recently gave a presentation at the State of the Map event in Manchester in which he outlined his thoughts so far – you can hear a podcast of his talk, view the slides that accompanied it and read the notes from it. Mikel acknowledges that he’s not an expert, and while there’s a lot of things that I agree with him about, there’s also a lot of assumptions built into his talk.

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The Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery wins the award for UN office with the most unwieldy title. Forget about UN reform, the real issue is giving all these initiatives names that actually make grammatical sense.

However the Office of the… well, they’ve published a really interesting report on the role of public information in accountability measures, called The Right to Know (pdf file). Once again, I’m several months late, since this was published in October. Sue me.

The report takes a wide-ranging look at the issues linking information and accountability, which has also been identified by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, the excellent IFRC World Disasters Report 2005 and my own article for the Humanitarian Practice Network.

The basic message is we need to invest more in the transmission of information to the people most affected by disasters. No surprises there, but this report goes into the practical details a little more than the others mentioned above, and is definitely worth the time.

National Geographic carries an interesting short article entitled Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds, looking at how geoRSS can make sharing spatial data simpler, quicker and more useful.

The article deals with prediction rather than response, and the question of how geoRSS might improve disaster response is still open. The obvious one is data sharing from needs assessments or situation reports, but that goes back to the problem that most people don’t really understand the role of spatial data – let alone set up their mobile phone as an automatic GPS ping, like Tim Hibbard in this article.

What it’s about is changing peoples attitudes towards spatial data – making them realise its value – and offering them the tools to work with that data more effectively.  If we can do that, we can let the end users define what they need, and maybe develop it themselves – which some are already doing with Google Earth.  So maybe it is about their mobile phones after all….
Hat tip to Mikel Maron.

Happy birthday to Saundra and all the staff at D-TRAC! Below the radar, D-TRAC have been doing a lot of legwork in terms of practical NGO accountability. Focused tightly on post-tsunami Thailand, they provide a physical focal point with dedicated staff working on support to the NGO community.

One of the things that their work demonstrates is that it takes a lot of resources to reach even a basic level of co-ordination – which in turn raises the question of how to expand this type of work to have a wider reach. They’re now looking at how they can open offices in other countries, providing the same field-focused services.

Tracking organisations has been one of D-Trac’s big concerns, and we’ve been talking about whether Sahana might be adapted to their needs. The news that OCHA is going to throw open their Who’s doing What Where application to the community might make it possible for us to collectively develop a W3 system that can be implemented across the entire humanitarian community on an open platform.

Five years ago, I wrote an article for Humanitarian Exchange, published by the ODI Humanitarian Practice Network, entitled “Learning from Kosovo: the HCIC Year One.” It was the first thing I’d written about information management, and it was right at the start of my learning curve in this field.

I thought it would be interesting to update that article, and revisit some of the issues that it raised. So in the latest issue of Humanitarian Exchange, you’ll find another article, this time entitled “A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing: five years of information management for humanitarian operations.”

I packed in more points than I probably should have, so it’s quite a dense piece, but it’s probably summed up by these two sentences:

Five years ago, I believed that better information management would enable better management overall. Yet it is hard to determine whether all this activity has actually improved the provision of humanitarian assistance, since there are no clear criteria for measuring their impact.

The good news includes more partnerships, sometimes between agencies, but also with the private sector; the bad news includes a lack of leadership in this area, particularly given the recent implementation of the cluster approach by the UN. The most important point I wanted to make, however, is one that I’ve mentioned before. I’m going to repeat it now, because it seems to me to be important enough:

We are public organisations, funded by public money, working for the public good. In the interests of accountability, all information that we gather in the course of our work should also be public. The only qualification that should be made to this is if that information might in any way endanger the safety or security of beneficiaries or staff. Without the free flow of information, the process of coordination is crippled, and we all must take responsibility for this.

So I guess that’s my new mantra.

Also interesting this month is an article by Jeremy Shoham of the Emergency Nutrition Network and NutritionWorks. The article, “Information is a prerequisite, not a luxury“ expands on the importance of information management in the context of Food Security. Although he makes the case for what I would say is an overly ambitious system, the article is an excellent overview of some current thoughts in food security (along with a jab at the bias towards food aid, which thankfully is starting to diminish).

The Stockholm Challenge is a well established global networking program for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) entrepreneurs for over ten years. It continues to be a leader in demonstrating how information technology can improve living conditions and increase economic growth in all parts of the world. One of the main features of the Stockholm Challenge is the ICT prize, the Stockholm Challenge Award, which has attracted over 3000 projects over the years.

This year, Sahana is a finalist for the Award. They don’t have a Disasters category, so we’re in the Health category, which is a little bizarre. But it’s a great recognition of all the work that the Sahana team has put into the project over the last year.

Also nominated from the humanitarian sector are a couple of familiar names. The Fritz Institute has been nominated for their Humanitarian Logistics Software, and the guys at RisePak have also been nominated for their earthquake response work last year.

Congratulations to everybody, although I probably won’t be able to make it to the awards ceremony in Stockholm on 11 May….

It was impossible to avoid the tsunami last week, even if one wanted to. I spent a while thinking about what I wanted to post, since my original intention for this blog was to focus on information management in humanitarian operations, not to speak more generally about the humanitarian sector. But there’s a lack of other bloggers discussing humanitarian issues, so I guess this will have to do. (Incidentally, if anybody knows any humanitarian bloggers, please send me links!)

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This is fairly old news, but Baseline magazine went tsunami-crazy in May, with three articles on how ICT was used in the tsunami response. I particularly liked the inappropriate “Tidal Wave of Problems” title – sensitivity obviously not the strong point of their editorial team.

A Tidal Wave of Problems

It’s difficult to land planes when there’s cows on the runway. No, really?

World Food Programme: Wave of Support

I’m not entirely sure that WFP’s roll-out was quite as fast as this article makes it out to be:

Unfilled Promise

They managed to get a very long article out of how the latest technology tested by the military wasn’t actually used at all in the tsunami response.

Notwithstanding my criticisms, it’s good to see this kind of work getting coverage, even if a lot of articles out there are just rewrites of agency press releases. Baseline did a good job covering some of the less visible aspects of the response, and hopefully we’ll see more of the same in future.

Incidentally, if anybody has any other stories on these sorts of issues, send them my way.