humanitarian.info

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story – I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?