is now up and running.

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.

The Final Report of the Global Symposium +5 on Information for Humanitarian Action refers to the need for timely information no less than 14 times. The report was of course released last week - a full 6 months after the symposium itself.

You should probably read it in any case.

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.

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.

Chris Albon leads us to UNOSAT’s latest and frankly greatest production - a map of Somali pirate activity. Pirates are no laughing matter, but all this map lacks is a big X to show where they buried all the WFP food shipments they’ve been hijacking. I have no idea how this post provides any insight into how technology can support the humanitarian community, but hey - pirates.

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.)

Marla Petal at RiskRED emailed me following my recent post on PreventionWeb. RiskRed is concerned with promoting education about disaster risk reduction, but its most interesting project from my perspective is the DRRlibrary, a DRR resource site with a social bookmarking approach, using tags to classify useful websites and documents.

When you visit the DRRlibrary, what you see looks almost identical to del.icio.us, the mother of all social bookmarking sites, with a few extra functions. Searching through the tags is quite simple - as well as being able to sort by date, title or URL of each link, there’s also a tag cloud on the main page and a browser (which works fine but is a little confusing). It’s great to see this approach being used, and I assume that Ian O’Donnell at ProVention had something to do with it - I’ve had too many discussions with him about just this approach for it to be a coincidence!

Any downsides? Well, tagging can get very unwieldy very quickly, and tags like “seismic-resistant construction” are a little too specific to make for simple searches. (I blow hot and cold on this - when I look at my own del.icio.us links, I have problems understanding my own tags, which is a bad sign.) However this isn’t a show-stopper, and it’s the sort of thing that will sort itself out as the project grows. From a technical point of view, the only potential spanner in the works is that the DRRlibrary is based on Scuttle (open source, hooray!). Scuttle is only at release 0.72, and the lead developer has announced that although the project isn’t dead, it is dead slow.

The big questions aren’t about the site itself, but about how it relates to other sites. How, for example, can we ensure that the DRRlibrary is interoperable with PreventionWeb, particularly if the latter starts to offer more social networking features? At the moment there’s no tagging on PreventionWeb, but it’s the sort of thing that could appear; and even if it doesn’t, there’s a danger of duplicating resources and creating confusion amongst users.

It’s early days, though, and there’s plenty of time to address these issues. DRRlibrary is a welcome addition to the range of resources out there - not just for DRR, but for anybody who’s interested in how the web can be used more creatively to share knowledge in this sector.

It’s fair to say that Craig Duncan was largely responsible for ReliefWeb, the site which has become the primary hub for the humanitarian community on the web. It’s not perfect, but there’s a number of good reasons for that, particularly the problem of addressing legacy systems in the age of Web2.0. He’s now moved from OCHA to UNISDR, and is the Senior Co-ordinator of PreventionWeb, a new website which hopefully will become similarly indispensible for the disaster prevention / risk reduction / preparedness community.

This demo gives you a good idea of what PreventionWeb is about, and it looks like Craig and his team at UNISDR have taken the opportunities presented in building a website from scratch. The layout is clean and the site is easy to navigate, and things like RSS feeds are clearly flagged, but the site doesn’t really take advantage of the full range of Web2.0 type interactive functions. This last point may become a problem, as UNISDR has correctly identified that they need to rely on contributions from practitioners, rather than generating all their own content; and engaging users more actively in the site is one of the best ways of doing that.Like the blurb says,

PreventionWeb is a new information service to increase knowledge on disaster risk reduction (DRR). For the first time, a website will provide a common tool for both specialists and non-specialists interested or working in the area of disaster risk reduction to connect, exchange experiences and share information.

There are two questions that will impact on the success of PreventionWeb. First, will people adopt it as a resource in the way that they have with ReliefWeb? Second, will ISDR be able to get beyond ReliefWeb’s relatively passive model and generate a sense of community around DRR? This is just the beta version, however, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the site develops.

Unlike me, Sanjana did attend the +5 Symposium, but he wasn’t too impressed. He’s posted some thoughts on why exactly that was, including a post entitled “Where was the innovation?” where his perspective can be summed up best by a single line:

There was not a single point that came up during the discussions that I had not covered in this blog, sometimes over a year ago.

If we put it in those terms, I’d guess that not a single point came up at the Symposium that hasn’t been discussed in the field within the last 2-3 years. There’s always going to be a lag between innovation as it happens in the field and mainstreaming that innovation into the agencies - for example, GIS is still not part of the basic kit a decade after it was first introduced to the sector - but the way our organisations are set up actually prevents that from happening.

Sanjana has an interesting perspective on the event, which I would characterise as being an informed external, and - while in general terms I can’t disagree with his overall frustration - I find myself simultaneously agreeing and disagreeing with him on several points. More on OCHA +5 Symposium fallout shelter