ICTs for Risk and Crisis Management: Technical and ethical challenges

Realised that though I had blogged about my interview at the Global Risk Forum held in July 2010 in Davos, Switzerland, I hadn't uploaded the presentation I delivered at the panel discussion. I do recall that I was the only one in a panel of 5 that kept to time. Rather than go into a …

Haiti and Beyond: Getting it Right in Crisis Information Management

The ICT4Peace Foundation released a new briefing today, co-authored by me, critically looking at the response to the devastating Haitian earthquake in early January. We chart in brief the significant progress made in the use of ICTs in humanitarian aid, and also how much more needs to be done in order to sustain and systematise …

Crisis information wiki on Chile earthquake

Image courtesy Wikipedia Just set up for the ICT4Peace Foundation, like I did before for the Haiti earthquake, a wiki to curate information on the Chilean earthquake. As noted on the OpenStreetMap wiki, the 2010 Chile earthquake occurred off the coast of the Maule Region of Chile, on February 27, 2010, at 03:34 local time …

Haiti and the perennial challenge of information lock-in

Erik Hersman from Ushahidi makes the following pertinent observation, amongst others, in a recent blog post on the Ushahidi Situation Room for Haiti. “Decision-makers on the ground still do not have access to accurate, real-time data. That may be because of firewalls, lack of bandwidth, people are unaware these resources exist, the command structure of …

IRIN podcast on use of technology in January 2010 Haiti earthquake aid effort

UN OCHA's IRIN news service has a podcast up that features some of my observations on the use of technology / ICTs in Haiti's January 2010 earthquake aid efforts. As I was speaking, I kept thinking how much had changed from the response to Cyclone Nargis just two years ago (albeit dealing with a very …

Ushahidi’s Goma release incorporates features from ICT4Peace Foundation’s crisis information management prototype

Ushahidi's launched a major new update to their platform called Goma. I'm looking forward to downloading their new thin client mobile apps. Their J2ME app does not yet support the Blackberry Bold, so I'm going to download the Windows Mobile version of it on a Samsung i780 later today. I was very pleased to see …

Microsoft Vine: An inebriated approach to emergencies

Microsoft Vine is a programme and service I first saw demonstrated at Microsoft HQ in Redmond two weeks ago. Since then it's gone to a public beta for testers around Seattle and there are some reports that Facebook integration is present and Twitter integration planned. However, all throughout the presentation in Redmond and now looking …

Cyclone Nargis: Lessons and implications for ICTs in Humanitarian Aid

Almost a year ago, in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, myself and others at the ICT4Peace Foundation were copied to a spate of emails that included voices from inter-governmental, non-governmental, private business and commercial organisations, academia, former field level practitioners and others on how best to respond to the monumental challenges of information and …

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 …