Ushahidi helps develop Crisis Information Management demo tool

From the ICT4Peace Foundation came news today of its collaboration with Ushahidi. The ICT4Peace Foundation, Geneva has mandated Ushahidi to develop an ICT4Peace Crisis Information Management Platform Demonstrator (CIMD), based on Ushahidi’s existing platform with the following features and functionality. A product that is able to be deployed in the field with a minimum of […]

Recommendations and ideas to strengthen best practices of Crisis Information Management at the United Nations, New York

This is an excerpt from Interim Report: Stocktaking of UN Crisis Information Management Capabilities that can be downloaded in full from here. The authors strongly feel it is timely for the UN System as a whole to address, at a strategic level, issues of crisis information management and technology best practice and interoperability – to […]

Interim Report: Stocktaking of UN Crisis Information Management Capabilities

Sanjana Hattotuwa and Daniel Stauffacher From October 2007 to February 2008, representatives from the ICT4Peace Foundation met informally with a number of high-level representatives at key agencies based at the United Nations in New York in preparation for a stocktaking exercise on crisis information management capacities and best practices. These meetings with heads of agencies, […]

ASEAN Ministers call for greater civ-mil coordination and information sharing in disasters but not for interoperability

The Chairman’s statement at the recently concluded 41st ASEAN Ministers Meeting notes quite strongly the need for greater civilian – military cooperation and information sharing in disaster preparedness and response.  “The Ministers called for in greater civil-military coordination for major, multinational disaster responses through training, information sharing, and multinational exercises. They recognised that military assets and personnel, […]

Automation vs. control

The title assumes that automation is about giving up, to whatever degree, control of a process. That’s a key tension in many of the systems I design for peacebuilding. Users like to know they are in charge of what’s happening, but complex processes are impossible to manage without some degree of automation, even if at the […]

Websites at Risk – Archiving information on human rights, governance and peace

I created and launched Websites at risk yesterday as a simple yet effective means through which to archive information and knowledge produced on the web in Sri Lanka on human rights, peacebuilding and democratic governance. This has been on my mind for a while ever since I was appalled to be told that the website […]

The pitfalls and future of social networking

An  article in The Economist highlights the pitfalls of social networking platforms and technologies today and their possible evolution in the future. “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, […]

Managing the catastrophic loss of information and knowledge

The amount of information already out there is mind-boggling. Equally so is the amount each of us generate through emails, photos and multimedia content generation. All this means, according to an IDC report (The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe), that in 2007 for the first time, “the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded […]