ReliefSource

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.

Well, not exactly famine… but a lot of people in Tajikistan are probably quite hungry, considering how poor the country is. I’ve talked about how NGOs should be blogging more here; now from Steve Buckley at Christian Aid:

“We recently tried a public weblog during a recent trip to Central Asia. The idea was to get away from official accounts of life in the region and try to bring back real time, emotionally charged, stories from the field - mainly for staff but also for supporters, friends and family. The blog turned out to be an unprecedented success for us achieving 6,000 readers from a standing start at the beginning of the year… and also making the site the most visited web site by Christian Aid staff.

“We’re pretty pleased with this first public effort and hope to continue the concept for some other (but not all) staff trips. You can read the blog here - http://nightingalesangatwcc.typepad.com - and note that entries will continue to be posted for a few days more.

“We’re also using web logs as a way to stay in touch with staff who are out on secondment to other organisations, or even those who have left Christian Aid for pastures new. All part of an emerging ‘Orphans’ scheme that tries to keep staff involved with Christian Aid after they have left paid employment with us.

“Most exciting of all we’re also starting to use weblogs internally for team reporting, replacing more traditional after-the-event reports. Early days at the moment as we’re still rolling out our SharePoint system but the signs are encouraging.”

More NGOs are starting to blog from the field, which is great - even though this is more from a development organisation, these perspectives are vital. The next step… I’d like to see Christian Aid use these blogs to give national staff in their country programmes a platform to communicate with Christian Aid’s supporters - and to represent their work within their own country as well.

In other blogging news: I took part in an IRC chat on Tuesday with some of the big names in the blogging / digital divide / online disaster response - names such as Rebecca McKinnon, Dina Mehta, Andy Carvin, etc. The chat also included staff from Alertnet, the Reuter Foundation online news service for humanitarian organisations, and was a discussion about how blogging, wikis, and other services can be organised more effectively to support disaster response. It will be interesting to see where the discussion goes; I’ll update on it as the Wiki gets going.

I’m not really sure how I missed “How NGOs can harness new technology” by Grey Frandsen, which was published by the Humanitarian Review in their Autumn 2004 issue (currently listed as their current issue, which means that their publication rate is even worse than this blog).

Some of the descriptions of the technology in the article are - how can I put this kindly - inaccurate. Skip to the end, however, and Grey hits a very solid target, namely that “these technology systems are all developed on different platforms and are not yet standard throughout the humanitarian community… Accordingly, it is not clear whether these products will have an impact on the entire humanitarian community and how effective they will be at changing the way the community handles complex operations in total.”

Sounds familiar. The findings are consistent across the board - the need for a common platform is pretty overwhelming and, in the humanitarian context, can’t be argued against on the basis of corporate interests. The other note of interest in the article comes even later, and applies equally to this blog: “Don’t let articles like this one entice you to employ a new, expensive system without making sure it fits into your technology plan.”

Not that I’m cheerleading for a “new, expensive system,” since I can’t even afford the hosting costs for this site….

The notes from my presentation at the recent NTEN conference are now available. I concentrated on the practicalities - where the gaps are in our responses, and what approaches are going to fill those gaps effectively. Talking to people at the conference afterwards, I realised that I was right to emphasise joint approaches, rather than efforts by individual organisations. The organisations involved in humanitarian responses are so varied in backgrounds, mandates and approaches that there can be no single “right” way to implement ICT projects that applies to all. Instead, we need to focus on building liks between organisations and sectors in a way that improves the flow of information so that they can get on with their work.

Oh, and to remember that, in the end, all of these activities are only useful if they help the beneficiaries. Notes are here.

It’s embarrassing, but in my youth I could often be heard telling people “Information just wants to be free!” I can’t even remember what I meant now. I was probably crazed with power at the time. But I was on a phone conference with Microsoft earlier today, and at one point somebody started to talk about how we would have to discuss how to deal with proprietary data collected during a humanitarian response. Suddenly, the years rolled back and information just wanted to be free again…

One of the problems that I’ve faced repeatedly is that UN or NGOs in the field just aren’t very good at sharing their information, either with their peers or with the beneficiaries. Most often, the objection is raised that, if we share information (particularly from assessments), our “competitors” might take that information, use it to develop a project proposal, and take all the cash from our donors’ pockets.

Please. Donors don’t give us money because our assessments are amazing, or because our project proposals are dazzling. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of assessments and proposals in my time, and generally they’re crap (especially in a sudden-onset emergency, when everybody’s losing their marbles). The donors give us money because we already have a contract with them, or we know them from that bar in Kabul, or because we happened to drive past their office and they desperately need to spend a $500,000 budget by lunchtime.

If we’re talking about a public entity (a non-governmental organisation) using public funds (either from a government or from the general public) to carry out public service (providing relief to communities) in a foreign country where the government has a clear stake in responding to and recovering from a disaster?

All the data collected by that NGO should be made freely available as quickly as possible, with the only possible exceptions made for privacy or security issues.

Discuss.

The NTEN conference went very well - tremendous interest in the idea of Humanitarian Open Source, particularly the Sahana experience. I delivered a short panel address (I’ll post the notes as soon as I have time to type them up) and participated in a workshop with some really interesting people who’d been involved in the Hurricane Katrina response. The keynote speech was delivered by Mike Hess of USAID, who provided an interesting overview of his involvement in humanitarian and reconstruction work over the last 15 years. He’s one of the people inside the US administration who gets it, from a humanitarian perspective, and it was interesting to hear him link the US experience in civilian and military response in a way that made sense.

As always, the offline discussions were just as illuminating as the main events - it was good to catch up with Ted Okada from Groove (now Microsoft/Groove, of course, or possibly Groove/Microsoft), as well as sharing the platform with casual visionary Paul Meyer of Voxiva. Conference details are on N-TEN’s website, agenda and workshops and so forth, here. You can find a nice article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy Relief Groups Say 2005 Disasters Point Out Vital Technology Needs.

I love this. Forget about all of our big aid organisations and their assessments - wouldn’t it be great if the beneficiaries just e-mailed us and told us what they needed? I’d like to shake Amadou Doutchi by the hand, and here’s why:

“Doutchi, who already had his own account on a free, Web-based e-mail service, came up with a list of governments and aid groups to approach, including the World Food Program… In mid-June, Doutchi traveled 80 miles south to the regional center of Maradi to send the e-mail from an office there. When he checked his inbox a week later, he said several organizations had responded asking for more details on the community and its needs. Doutchi believes a $150,000 donation from the Canadian government can be traced to his e-mail, though Canadian officials could not immediately comment.”

The full story is at CNN.

This has been in the works for a while: this blog serves as a running commentary on news about the use of technology in the humanitarian sector. I’ll use it to track new (or old) developments, link to other articles or blogs, and use them as a starting point for my own crackpot theories.

Who the hell am I, and what do I know about it? My name is Paul Currion; you can find more background at my website, www.currion.net. I work as a consultant on information management for humanitarian operations, particularly in terms of aid co-ordination. In answer to the question that everybody asks - yes, this is as interesting as it sounds.

My other interests aren’t half as interesting.