ReliefSource

February 22 - HumaniNet and N-TEN are co-hosting another Webinar, this time featuring Sebastian Naidoo, Managing Editor of ReliefWeb. Sebastian’s going to talk about how relief organizations can utilize the coordination tools and services offered by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in particular ReliefWeb. This follows hot on the heels of Craig Duncan’s presentation at Lift06 - the video of his presentation may or may not be available at freestudios.tv. Go there in any case, as there were also interesting presentations at LIFT06 from a range of other speakers - humanitarian work was only one of their threads this year.

Needless to say, although I was in Geneva that day, I completely missed Craig’s presentation and now suffer from pointless guilt. However I do spot a pattern emerging - a new charm offensive from ReliefWeb! Not that they need it. For those of you that don’t know, ReliefWeb is the primary source of information about humanitarian affairs, thanks to the tireless efforts of its staff. They have excellent feeds on country and thematic information, as well as professional resources - vacancies, training and the like. Following its recent redesign, ReliefWeb are a model for every young boy or girl, an object lesson in how to gather and present an enormous range of complex information in an easily digestible form.

As of this Sunday, I’m going to be in Sudan for about a month, carrying out the second field visit for the ECB4 assessment. This means that I’ll actually be posting some actual, honest-to-goodness perspectives from the field - which is far more interesting than just commenting on other people’s blog posts, right? Right.

While we’re waiting for my flight, I thought I’d post something entirely unrelated to ICT or relief work. Courtesy of Sanjiva, I entered my travel details for last year into the Great Circle Mapper, to find out exactly how far I travelled in 2005. That’s 165140 km, people! No wonder I’m tired.

And here’s a meme right back (although it’s a pretty old one). Ever since I first went over the water, I’ve had a running competition with myself: to visit more countries than I’ve lived years on this earth. So far, so good - I’m on 50 at last count, although it depends on how you count the countries - personally, the whole Balkans thing makes my head hurt. Here’s my current status, courtesy of the Visited Countries project of Douwe Osinga.

Please note that no Google Maps were harmed in the making of this blog.

Sanjana has posted his thoughts about ICT4Peace in a post that takes a slightly different angle. He appreciates that the report was written at all; but laments the fact that is has such a bias towards website-based, northern initiatives. Unfortunately, we’re guilty as charged, particularly because most of the research was carried out via the web. However the charge of northern bias doesn’t stick that well, for two reasons.

First, as Sanjana points out:

“It is however interesting how a single report of this calibre - well written and relatively well researched - can overwhelm the work of a smaller organisation, such as InfoShare in Sri Lanka. Though we receive brief mention in the report, I know not of any other organisation that pioneers the use of ICT in Peacebuilding in the fashion that we’ve engineered in Sri Lanka over the past 3 years.”

There’s the problem in a nutshell; although our resources were limited, we certainly looked for other organisations in southern countries working with technology in this arena - but we couldn’t find them. That doesn’t mean that they’re not there - but the digital divide just makes it very difficult to get away from a northern bias.

Second, the report was targeted at a very specific audience. As Sanjana says,

“This failure to engage with the South, and the top-down approach of research, is never more explicit than in the recommendations of the report - which though good are somewhat mundane to those of us who have gone beyond them in our work. It is perhaps a question of audience as well - the report necessarily addresses those unfamiliar with the concept of ICT for Peacebuilding and thereby needs to capture what to us may be obvious and passe.”

The report was indeed targeted at an audience unfamiliar with the concept - or indeed, unfamiliar with conflict issues in general. The recommendations were targeted more at international organisations than those working at the grassroots, for several reasons. The most important reason was that institutions such as national governments and the United Nations are in a position to allocate funding and other resources to create an environment that would make the work of grassroots organisations easier.

One of the problems we faced with the report was exactly this: how does one bridge the gap between high-level policy institutions and grassroots operations? In the spirit of the chicken and the egg, which comes first? Hopefully the next iteration of ICT4Peace will start to address that issue, by opening up the text for wider contributions, and focusing more on building communities and networks around these issues. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, though - if anybody does, please feel free to send them to me on a postcard (or in the comments box below).