Disaster Relief 2.0: While you looked…West

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

While you looked…West

By Gianluca Bruni

Haiti.

Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Benin, Haiti, Haiti.
Kyrgyzstan. Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti. Pakistan, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti. DRC, Haiti, Haiti, Haiti. Somalia, how can IT help. Haiti, Haiti, Pakistan, Haiti, Haiti, Philippines, Haiti.

If you are involved in any role in humanitarian response, be that IT, planning, management, logistic or anything else, your 2010 has been similar to the above. You probably heard the word Haiti thirty times more than any other country. You’ve planned for it, you fundraised, you executed, you supported, you monitored, you learned the lesson. And very likely, you are now busy ensuring that the lessons we all learned from Haiti really sink into your organization and the ‘next Haiti’ will be better, faster, more cost-effective, more inclusive. You will access more information, you will share it better – and therefore, you will better cooperate with partners and ultimately provide better assistance to the people in need.

Benin, somewhere in West Africa, Q3 2010. “Thousands of homes damaged in heavy rains and hundreds of cholera cases reported” (the Guardian), “It is the worst flooding to hit the country – one of the poorest in the world – since 1963. Areas previously thought not to be vulnerable to flooding have been devastated and villages wiped out” (BBC). Two thirds of the country under water. 700,000 people homeless – it’s as if the entire population of Amsterdam was suddenly homeless. But it was not Amsterdam. The question is: how can the ‘new IT tools’ provide assistance in such a situation in Benin, where donor attention and resources are scarce, and therefore their optimal utilization is even more important?

Today, more than a year after Haiti, while learning the lessons, we need to keep in mind that Haiti was unique. It revolutionized the importance, the needs and services that we can and should provide in emergencies. But we need to think and ask ourselves how often there will be ‘another Haiti’, and how learning from Haiti can benefit the Benins, the Kyrgyzstans, the Myanmars and, why not, the DRC and the Somalia.

There is another challenge ahead of us: in situations… like Haiti… there are massive IT resources poured into the country. The private sector, the UN, the Non-Government Community, schools, universities, … individuals. Everyone wants to help. In WFP we have a saying that ‘everything that the humanitarian community needs in terms of IT has already been invented’ – and if it hadn’t before, it has been invented during Haiti. Our challenge is integrating all such tools, ensuring we don’t duplicate efforts and re-invent the wheel, and, mostly, that our IT efforts are all integrated and complement each other. And ensure that they can be used effectively by large and small, but not less important, humanitarian organizations.

The next humanitarian emergency won’t be IN Haiti. It won’t be LIKE Haiti. The next emergency is today, while I type, in Cote d’Ivoire, where the lives of humanitarian workers (yes, the people who are there to help) are at risk.

Ah. I fell in the same trap. Aside from the first paragraph, the word Haiti appears 11 times, while Benin only 3, and Cote d’Ivoire only once… It’ll be hard.

Gianluca Bruni is Chief of IT Emergency and Preparedness Branch for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). Since joining WFP in 1991, Gianluca Bruni has responded to many of the world’s most severe humanitarian emergencies. From the Great Lakes crises in Rwanda in 1995, to the tsunami in Indonesia and the recent earthquake in Haiti, Gianluca and his response team have been at the forefront of IT Emergency Response operations.  As Chief of the IT Emergency Preparedness and Response Branch, with offices spread between Dubai, Dakar, Rome, Bangkok and Kampala, Gianluca spearheads initiatives to increase efficiency and effectiveness of IT response to humanitarian emergencies around the world, and is behind some of the most successful emergency IT public / private partnerships.

View the original article here

Disaster Relief 2.0: Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

By Jacobo Quintanilla

In Haiti, local citizens and communities affected by the Jan 2010 earthquake participated in the relief effort in unprecedented ways. Through social media and communication tools, this local participation was a revolution in humanitarian aid. Despite the many question marks and variables still to be addressed on this front, there are two main outcomes that deserve to be highlighted.

One is that for the first time ever the volunteer and technology communities engaged in a very significant and permanent manner in a humanitarian operation. Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons and OpenStreetMap engaged volunteers from around the world to connect with responders and individuals on the ground through mobile and online tools. This level of input was new and valuable, and deserves the attention and inclusion that it is already getting from the more “traditional” aid community.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the humanitarian community is progressively realizing that responses to crises are too often undermined by a lack of information among the affected population. When a crisis hits, outside aid agencies simply don’t know enough about the local context, the local media landscape, or how information is consumed, to be able to disseminate life-saving information immediately and gather critical feedback from affected communities. Understanding and utilizing that information ecosystem is precisely what Internews, in partnership with local media, local populations and the humanitarian community, tries to do in all our humanitarian media projects around the world.

Two of the most important channels for communicating information during crises are the existing local media, known and trusted by the local population, and the emerging mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We saw this in Haiti, documented in the report “Lessons from Haiti: Media, information Systems and Communities.

However, despite a great display of potential in the response to the earthquake in Haiti, new technologies, humanitarians, local media and affected populations have yet to connect in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner to improve the effectiveness of relief operations and increase community resilience. The lack of communication also undermines transparency and accountability of humanitarian actors and makes the people we serve feel further disengaged from the aid response.

As a community, we need to invest energy, expertise and resources into increasing the capacity of local media and local communities to prepare and respond to disasters effectively. In today’s 2.0 context, this includes understanding the effective utilization of a variety of new technology and social media tools to ensure that local media and local communities are better equipped to be the first responders in any emergency or disaster. Internews efforts to connect community radio stations by mobile network in Central Africa Republic and enable journalists in Kenya to use FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi outside of crisis situations are ways we’re working to build this capacity locally.

Emergencies are not the best time to experiment with untested initiatives. We learned in Haiti that trying to introduce new technologies during an active operation can be unnecessarily frustrating, ineffective, and even a disruptive exercise. This was highlighted, along with many of the important achievements and opportunities for partnership and dialogue between the humanitarian and the technology community, in the report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies.

We need to know what tools work and what processes they can improve. The key component is still to figure our how communication tools and processes can be further localized to serve the needs of local communities. This effort takes specific investments of time and resources in advance of the next disaster.

We may never be truly ready for an emergency, but we can help local communities and local media to be better prepared. We also need to keep in mind that we still need to get the low-tech solutions right first. At the end of the day, everything goes back to basics: human interaction.

Jacobo Quintanilla is Humanitarian Director at Internews, an international media development organization, and Board Member of the infoasaid project, an Internews/BBC World Service Trust joint initiative that aims at improving how aid agencies communicate with disaster affected communities. Jacobo was part of the Internews Emergency Response Team to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and later became the first Coordinator of Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) in Haiti. In 2011, Internews launched a new Center on Media, Innovation, Research & Learning aimed at maximizing the potential of digital technologies and innovative approaches to solve new challenges in the rapidly changing global information and communication landscape.

View the original article here

Disaster Relief 2.0: Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

By Jacobo Quintanilla

In Haiti, local citizens and communities affected by the Jan 2010 earthquake participated in the relief effort in unprecedented ways. Through social media and communication tools, this local participation was a revolution in humanitarian aid. Despite the many question marks and variables still to be addressed on this front, there are two main outcomes that deserve to be highlighted.

One is that for the first time ever the volunteer and technology communities engaged in a very significant and permanent manner in a humanitarian operation. Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons and OpenStreetMap engaged volunteers from around the world to connect with responders and individuals on the ground through mobile and online tools. This level of input was new and valuable, and deserves the attention and inclusion that it is already getting from the more “traditional” aid community.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the humanitarian community is progressively realizing that responses to crises are too often undermined by a lack of information among the affected population. When a crisis hits, outside aid agencies simply don’t know enough about the local context, the local media landscape, or how information is consumed, to be able to disseminate life-saving information immediately and gather critical feedback from affected communities. Understanding and utilizing that information ecosystem is precisely what Internews, in partnership with local media, local populations and the humanitarian community, tries to do in all our humanitarian media projects around the world.

Two of the most important channels for communicating information during crises are the existing local media, known and trusted by the local population, and the emerging mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We saw this in Haiti, documented in the report “Lessons from Haiti: Media, information Systems and Communities.

However, despite a great display of potential in the response to the earthquake in Haiti, new technologies, humanitarians, local media and affected populations have yet to connect in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner to improve the effectiveness of relief operations and increase community resilience. The lack of communication also undermines transparency and accountability of humanitarian actors and makes the people we serve feel further disengaged from the aid response.

As a community, we need to invest energy, expertise and resources into increasing the capacity of local media and local communities to prepare and respond to disasters effectively. In today’s 2.0 context, this includes understanding the effective utilization of a variety of new technology and social media tools to ensure that local media and local communities are better equipped to be the first responders in any emergency or disaster. Internews efforts to connect community radio stations by mobile network in Central Africa Republic and enable journalists in Kenya to use FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi outside of crisis situations are ways we’re working to build this capacity locally.

Emergencies are not the best time to experiment with untested initiatives. We learned in Haiti that trying to introduce new technologies during an active operation can be unnecessarily frustrating, ineffective, and even a disruptive exercise. This was highlighted, along with many of the important achievements and opportunities for partnership and dialogue between the humanitarian and the technology community, in the report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies.

We need to know what tools work and what processes they can improve. The key component is still to figure our how communication tools and processes can be further localized to serve the needs of local communities. This effort takes specific investments of time and resources in advance of the next disaster.

We may never be truly ready for an emergency, but we can help local communities and local media to be better prepared. We also need to keep in mind that we still need to get the low-tech solutions right first. At the end of the day, everything goes back to basics: human interaction.

Jacobo Quintanilla is Humanitarian Director at Internews, an international media development organization, and Board Member of the infoasaid project, an Internews/BBC World Service Trust joint initiative that aims at improving how aid agencies communicate with disaster affected communities. Jacobo was part of the Internews Emergency Response Team to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and later became the first Coordinator of Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) in Haiti. In 2011, Internews launched a new Center on Media, Innovation, Research & Learning aimed at maximizing the potential of digital technologies and innovative approaches to solve new challenges in the rapidly changing global information and communication landscape.

View the original article here

Disaster Relief 2.0: What the UN could not have done without the Volunteer Technical Community

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

What the UN could not have done without the Volunteer Technical Community

By Andrej Verity

The office that I work for – UN OCHA – recently took a big leap forward by engaging the VTCs for responding to the Libyan and Japan crises. We dove into a collaboration with the VTCs in a first effort to try to make the responses better. However, the most common questions I have received are “So what?” and “What was the impact?”.

When the Libya crisis broke out, I asked permission in OCHA to call a meeting between OCHA and many of the VTCs. In the first teleconference, the Stand By Task Force (SBTF), an organized group of 150+ volunteers skilled in online Crisis Mapping, was activated to map out the social media and traditional media reports from within the country – the result: LibyaCrisisMap.net. So what?  Well, given that the UN had virtually no access to the country, we now had situational awareness. How much is that worth to a agency planning its response?  Could you plan with virtually no information? I know the site was being used by agencies such as the World Food Programme, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) the Red Cross,and USAID to perform certain types of analysis and to aid in their planning.

In addition, we requested the SBTF to help with collection of Who’s-doing-What-Where (3W) information and baseline indicators values.  Within 48 hours, we had 100+ activities collected and compiled. Let’s put that in perspective: the same amount of data took about 4 weeks in the Philippines, 2 weeks in Haiti, and 2 weeks in Pakistan to be made avalable.  See an improvement? Combining this data with Libya Crisis Map, we can now overlay the reported health needs with the actual health response – gap analysis. In regards to the baseline indicator compilation task, it had never been done before so I cannot even compare it to past experience. More future potential.

Crisis Commons compiled data sources under the framework of the Common Operational Datasets (CODs) for Japan. Within minutes of our request, they had a Japan Data Profile wiki online. They automated Google searches as well as Google Translate to search Japanese sites. I understand that the compiled data was used by MapAction responders (supporting UNDAC), NetHope partners, and others providing relief.  The comprehensive search and compilation would not have happened without the VTCs.

This was our first step and we have learned many lessons.  In combination with these lessons learned and the recommendation from the Disaster Relief 2.0 report, I believe that we are just starting to find our footing in the collaboration space with the VTCs. I am hopeful that we have found a concrete way forward.  I am excited. OCHA is planning a lessons-learned session with the VTCs in June, but the question is: “will we have time to stop and review?”.  I am already getting emails from partners such as Open Street Map and Internews asking when we will be starting a Crisis Map for Cote D’Ivoire.  We have taken one step, but might have to run sooner than we thought.

Andrej has been an Information Management Officer in UN OCHA for the past 7 years. He responded to three recent major emergencies in less than one year: typhoons in the Philippines, earthquake in Haiti and floods in Pakistan. In two instances, he was the lead OCHA Information Management Officer on the ground.  Although a strong advocate for collaboration with the V&TCs, he is also a realist and knows that a lot of work is required to reach the true potential of such collaboration.

View the original article here