TechnoTalk

The focus of a film calling for the capture of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony should have been on helping child victims instead, Amanda Weisbaum of non-governmental organisation War Child UK said on Wednesday.

The 30-minute film about Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) who is accused of terrorising northern Uganda for more than 20 years, went viral on the Internet after it was released last month.

Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. He is accused of abducting children to use as fighters and sex slaves. So far, regional forces and foreign troops have been unable to capture Kony.

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In a recent blog post I referred in passing to some of the hype surrounding “crowd-sourcing” projects in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.

That’s not to criticise the volunteers – mostly in the United States – who collectively devoted hundreds of hours to charting the needs of quake survivors on online maps, based on SMS texts sent from the disaster zone.

My point was that their gate-crashing of the relief response in Haiti posed a welcome challenge to the traditional humanitarian system – but also generated hyperbole about the effectiveness of crowd-sourcing in actually saving lives.

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A business that doesn’t communicate with its customers won’t stay in business very long — it’ll soon lose track of what its clients want, and clients won’t know what products or services are on offer.

In the multi-billion dollar humanitarian aid industry, relief agencies are businesses and their beneficiaries are customers. Yet many agencies have muddled along for decades with scarcely a nod towards communicating with the folks they’re supposed to be serving.

That’s because relief agency “lines of accountability” – to use a much-loved piece of aid jargon – are to the donor governments who fund the bulk of their activities, rather than to the people on the ground who are caught up in the crisis.

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As governments and security forces become more aware of the role of social media in coordinating protest movements they are developing new ways to block, hack and track citizens tweets, Facebook posts and other social-media messages.

The Frontline Club, an independent journalism organisation in London, held a panel discussion on Tuesday in association with the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) College of Journalism to debate the role of mobile apps that aim to empower protesters. Demonstrators and citizen journalists have an ever-widening range of virtual tools that can help them navigate safely around protest sites.

Two of the apps in focus during the discussion were web-based Sukey and the ObscuraCam camera app. Debate focused on whether apps would actually protect protesters and the value of citizen journalism vs “traditional journalism” in covering such events.

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I'll just give it a little go, I thought. After all, I've been hearing about this online trivia game allowing you to donate rice to hungry people for several years now. But not being the gaming sort, I'd never tried it out.

Ten minutes later, and I had jumped to level 45 out of 60 in the English vocabulary game, earned around 550 grains of rice and learned a few new words into the bargain. Not bad, eh?

The World Food Programme, the U.N. food aid agency, which is behind the Freerice game launched in 2007, is giving it a new twist for next week, which it has dubbed World Freerice Week (Feb. 6-11).

Based on the "Six Degrees of Separation" theory, which asserts that everyone in the world is connected to every other person through at most six other people, it's asking players to recruit six friends to join in the online fight against hunger.

Each correct answer to a Freerice questions wins 10 grains of rice, paid for by sponsored advertising banners on the site, which are donated to WFP to feed hungry people around the world (you need to disable any software you have that blocks ads or your answers won't count).

There are 45,000 questions in six languages on a range of subjects from flags of the world to chemistry and literature - enough to test even the brainiest.

Freerice has over 1 million registered players, who together have donated nearly 100 billion grains of rice to feed almost five million people since the game's launch, according to WFP.

During World Freerice Week, you can create groups on Freerice.com that include "Freerice6" in the group title. A Flip cam and Freerice T-shirt will go to the group founder with the most members, the group founder whose group raises the most grains, as well as the individual who notches up the most rice during the week.

"With 6 Degrees of Freerice, we’re on our way to harnessing the power of online networks to make a difference in the fight against hunger," said Nancy Roman, WFP’s communications director.

Importantly, it's also quite good fun.

Follow World Freerice Week on Twitter at @freerice and by using the hash tag #Freerice6.

Visit the World Freerice Week homepage: http://freerice.com/freerice6
You can also download posters, website banners, lesson plans and other promotional materials.

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Google has launched a new Google Crisis Response project: Google Public Alerts, a platform designed to bring relevant emergency alerts about bad weather, public safety, earthquakes and other disasters to users searching  Google maps

The new platform includes alerts from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) will be accessible when you search on  Google maps, Google said on its blog.

Whether you see an alert depends on which alerts are active at a given location, their severity, and your search query.

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LONDON (AlertNet) - The innovative capacity of business will help expand Internet access in the developing world, Uri Rosenthal, Netherlands foreign minister said on Tuesday in an interview with AlertNet at the London Conference on Cyberspace.

Internet freedom and human rights are foreign policy priorities for the Netherlands, which feels it is being held back in international forums by countries with less concern, other interests and "lowest common denominator" outcomes, a spokesman said in a statement.

The Netherlands will host a high-level meeting on December 9, 2011, in the Hague which will focus on the role of governments in proactively protecting online freedom, how to work better together to support bloggers and cyber-dissidents and how to ensure companies take more responsibility for protecting online freedom, the statement said.

The conference will be accessible online and streamed live on Facebook at www.facebook.com/NLinternetfreedom. Follow the conference on Twitter: @onlinerightsNL

More information will become available at www.minbuza.nl/internetfreedom

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Featuring panellists Mark Jones, Reuters global communities editor; Mark Charmer, Akvo.org founder, communications director and producer of Watercube.TV; Mark Rock, Audioboo CEO and founder, Greg Barrow, World Food Programme deputy director of communications and social media; Karina Brisby, head of ShiftLabs and former head of Oxfam's digital campaigns; Marieme Jamme, president of Spot One Global Solutions, founder of iConscience, co-founder of Africa Gathering, and Guardian newspaper blogger.


Meegloo's Mark Steadman and Mark Spofforth and Geoff Tidey from Lovefre.sh also participated in the day-long symposium, which was co-hosted by the World Food Programme.

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By Angelica Valeria Ospina

The underlying sense of ‘belonging’ and ‘connectedness’ to a social group can play a key role in the ability of vulnerable communities to cope with and recover from the impacts of climate change.

Acknowledging the linkages between cultural identity and climate change resilience is particularly relevant within vulnerable developing contexts given the richness of their traditional knowledge and cultural heritage, the need for innovative responses to the challenges posed by climate change, as well as the new opportunities provided by information and communities technologies (ICTs) to access, assess and use information and knowledge.

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By Airlie Taylor

In partnership with “infoasaid“, a collaboration between the BBC World Service Trust and Internews, ActionAid is rolling out a project in Isiolo district, Kenya which aims to help combat food insecurity amongst communities affected by the ongoing drought.

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One Young World ambassador Elliott Verreault is founder and CEO of It’sOneHumanity. The opinions expressed are his own.

Citizens of the world are increasingly demanding more from their leaders, organisations and businesses, and humanitarian organisations are no exception. 

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With the onset of the earthquake in Haiti in last year, the use of technology in information sharing has been widely discussed within the international development and humanitarian community, and rightfully so. Three seemingly simple questions often come up. People want to know “Who is doing what? Where? Why?” On the surface the questions seem simple, but as you delve into the data world you quickly realize that these questions are quite difficult to answer, and how to access this information is often the center of a complex debate.

Most practitioners and donors can agree on one thing. Having readily accessible answers to these questions might be the key to improving aid delivery to millions around the world, and ultimately, help pave the path to eradicate hunger and poverty globally.

One thing that is often clear in the delivery of aid is that there is often a clear imbalance between supply and demand for various products, services and commodities, hence making some things more accessible and others less. The same is true for data. When available, we instinctively attempt to squeeze every last drop of information that can be derived from it. When scarce, we exhaust all resources, sometimes seeking innovative solutions or as we have seen from recent media reports, controversial methods to acquire data and information. Data’s ability to enhance our knowledge and understanding of a subject matter, and assist in visualization and decision making, makes it a highly prized commodity. To put it simply, data isn’t just for data geeks.

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Strange but true. Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates’ foundation is challenging university boffins to reinvent the toilet for the developing world.

About 1.5 million children die each year from diarrhoeal diseases, according to the United Nations. But most of these deaths could be prevented with proper sanitation, safe water and better hygiene.

“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet,” says Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program.

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Mobile technology has profoundly changed the way we communicate in everyday life, and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake it also become clear that it can be a vital means to give information to survivors of disasters.

A new book now sheds light on how mobile technology can also be used as a powerful tool for conflict prevention and management.

"Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management", edited by Marta Poblet from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, brings together experts and practitioners from fields such as mobile technologies, information systems, computer sciences, online dispute resolution and law.

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(Updates reaction from ECHO in paragraph 9)

By Natasha Elkington

A few months ago I wrote a story about a controversial online game posted on Facebook called the “The City That Shouldn’t Exist” that was consequently pulled off the Web days after its launch amid claims it objectified refugees and lacked sensitivity.

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By Kathy Calvin – CEO, United Nations Foundation

Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was reelected to a second term, opening a new chapter in the U.N.’s work to tackle global challenges. Innovation, and in particular the skyrocketing use of mobile technology around the world, presents perhaps the greatest opportunity to accelerate the U.N.’s efforts to meet these challenges.

A new report, Mobilizing Development, spotlights ways we can harness the power of mobile technology to help the U.N. advance the health and welfare of people in the developing world. It evaluates the nearly $30 million Technology Partnership between the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation and shares what we’ve learned from this collaboration: both the successes and the lessons learned.

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Dealing with change requires the capacity to self-organise, while embracing novelty and experimentation.

When the need for change and transformation is exacerbated by external disturbances, such as those related to climate change, the ability to plan, learn and develop creative solutions become key attributes of resilient systems.

At the same time, the high rates of adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are enabling novel ways of community organisation, and the re-arrangement of processes and functions through innovative mechanisms for online collaborative planning, learning and problem solving in the face of climatic impacts.

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By Julie Mollins

LONDON (AlertNet) - A new social networking website created by the World Food Programme to encourage the fight against world hunger has raised enough money in only a few weeks to feed more than 100,000 children, the United Nations agency said on Tuesday.

The online fundraising initiative set up to support school meal programmes allows potential contributors to find out how many children can be fed for the price of their favourite food.

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Julie Montgomery is a senior manager and technical specialist at InterAction, the largest alliance of U.S-based international NGOs doing relief and humanitarian work abroad.

Global food prices are at their highest level in several years, with the World Bank saying last month that  another 44 million people joined the ranks of those living in extreme poverty in low and middle-income countries since June of last year.

Estimates of the number of hungry people range from  850 million to 1 billion worldwide and recent hikes in basic commodities such as wheat, maize, sugar and oils put vulnerable populations in struggling nations at even more risk, particularly in countries that import much of their food. Recent spikes in gas prices can only add to these problems.

Against this dismal backdrop, it is no surprise that members of the InterAction NGO alliance are paying special attention to food and agriculture-related projects in nations hardest hit by price hikes and soaring poverty levels.

Incidentally, higher poverty is linked to increased malnutrition as people are forced to eat less and substitute more expensive food with cheaper, often less nutritious, staples.

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Adele Waugaman is Senior Director of the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, which is dedicated to leveraging the power of technology to support and strengthen global health and humanitarian work. The opinions expressed are her own.

It’s no secret that technology is reshaping the business world, radically altering established industries like the news media, music and movies.

But there has been comparatively little analysis of how advances in technology are transforming humanitarian aid, particularly in the field of disaster response.

Today there are over 5 billion mobile subscriptions in use, and cell phones are enabling connectivity in places where previously we only talked of a digital divide.

In tandem dynamic new networks have sprung up, changing the way we interact online.  Facebook offers a good example.  With over half a billion members, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third most populous nation.

These tools, and improved access to these tools, are enabling a new culture of community driven communications that is challenging and changing the nature of disaster response.

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, survivors sent pleas for help via text message, and concerned citizens around the world plugged in to help out.  They used cloud-, crowd-, and SMS-based technologies to gather, translate, geolocate, and publish information about urgent humanitarian needs.

In other words, individuals outside of the humanitarian system were becoming important sources of information about the emergency response.

Yet without a direct interface to the humanitarian system, these emerging ‘volunteer and technical communities’ can end up producing data without the assurance that it can be acted upon by aid workers.

To bridge this gap, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned a report to examine how technology is reshaping the information landscape in which aid groups respond to sudden onset emergencies.

The report, Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, analyzes how humanitarian and technology groups worked together in Haiti and makes recommendations for strengthening this collaboration in future emergencies.

Launched today at the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid and Development Conference, the report gets to the heart of many of the hard questions we must ask to effectively embrace the opportunity that advances in communications technologies present for emergency response.

Questions like:


•      How can we make the response of largely volunteer-based technology groups more consistent and reliable, so that aid groups can count on information from these groups in all emergencies, not just the ones that consistently grab news headlines?


•      What models can we create to support innovation and collaboration between the formal humanitarian system and the largely grassroots-driven volunteer technical community?

This report, which is available for download at the U.N. Foundation<http://www.unfoundation.org/disaster-report> website, is intended to be a springboard for discussion. 

A number of individuals whose work is profiled in the report also are contributing to this conversation through a blog series that is open to comment and will run for several days on the U.N. Dispatch<http://www.undispatch.com/> blog.

In the nearly fifteen months since the earthquake in Haiti, collaboration between aid and technology groups has intensified.  Earlier this month www.LibyaCrisisMap.net<http://www.libyacrisismap.net/> went live—the first extensive mash-up of U.N. humanitarian information crowdsourced through individuals registered with volunteer and technical communities.

If the rapid advances in these recent months are any indication, then the path ahead will be paved by this dynamic new collaboration.  The Disaster Relief 2.0  report proposes a potential way forward, but where we go will depend too on your say.  Add your voice to the discussion.

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New communication technologies, with social media leading the way, have played an undeniable role in supporting and enabling the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Similarly, internet has provided citizens in authoritarian societies an additional channel for activism beyond the official control of the head-of-state.

Much less attention has been paid, however, to the potential of communications technology in advancing global gender equality. These same ICT-applications could also open up a new window of opportunity for women to network and act beyond the control of the head-of-family in countries where women’s role in the society has traditionally been very limited.

Globally, the spread of ICT has been phenomenal. There are now more mobile phones than clean toilets. A recent survey in Kenya predicts that the largest growth in ICT take-up in the coming years will be among young women between the ages of 18 and 35. These new communication channels are used to connect with peers, both in the next town or village, and worldwide.

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Google and Twitter have launched a service enabling Egyptians to carry on tweeting, circumventing the country’s internet shutdown amid anti-government protests.

The speak-to-tweet service lets people leave a voicemail on an international phone number and the service then instantly tweets out a link to the voice message using hashtag #egypt.

The service has only just been launched, but it sounds like something that could be useful in earthquakes and other major disasters as a means of getting information out to the world when internet connections go down.

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It has almost become the stuff of legend how new communications technology applied during the Haiti earthquake relief efforts has changed humanitarian disaster response.

On the one hand you had the volunteer-based, technology-focused community of crisismappers and social media experts, on the other the world of established aid and United Nations agencies - essentially a "homemade raft meets supertanker" scenario.

With these two sides thrown together with the same mission – to help survivors - the relief effort became a living laboratory for the use of short code messages (SMS), interactive online reports, crisis maps and collaboration between radio stations and mobile phone users.

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A new version of TweetDeck, the computer application that helps bring order to the cacophony of the Twittersphere and other social-media networks, will allow users to send and monitor updates within the Google Chrome web browser.

Rather than having to download a desktop computer-specific application, "TweetDeck for Chrome" users will be able to stream social-media updates through multiple vertical channels in a manner similar to the original desktop TweetDeck application, released in 2008. The channels will also scroll horizontally.

"Since we launched the desktop version a few years ago, the number one requested feature is 'can I run this inside a browser?'", TweetDeck founder and CEO Iain Dodsworth told AlertNet on Tuesday during a preview event in London at the TweetDeck Batcave.

"There are some people that aren't allowed to install things on their machine and it is just easier for them to run it inside a browser."

TweetDeck offers humanitarian agencies free co-branded TweetDecks in which users can choose to have their own branded feeds as the default column settings.

In addition to using TweetDeck to synthesize Twitter searches for information during humanitarian crises, the application has a messaging system, which can be embedded into its border, rather than in the columns, to broadcast important messages to specific locations, Dodsworth explained.

TweetDeck for Chrome will launch free when Google releases its Chrome Web Store, expected later this year. 

TweetDeck operates with 15 employees based in the UK, U.S., France and Poland.

By Julie Mollins, AlertNet, London

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A message from the editor

For the curious or the nostalgic, an online archive called the Wayback Machine lets you type in a favourite web address, click "take me back" and chuckle at a site's past incarnations when the internet was in its infancy.

Like insects preserved in amber, the screenshots hold clues to the times. AlertNet, which started life in 1997 as a tool for aid workers to share operationally sensitive information, is no exception. In the site's earliest version, the old pinwheel logo of the Reuter Foundation (back then there was no "s" in Reuters, let alone a "Thomson") abuts a melodramatic lightning bolt.

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NAIROBI (AlertNet) - How much state attention and help can you expect if the area where you live is not even marked on official maps? Not a lot, decided the residents of one of Africa's biggest slums and designed a digital map of Kibera - a great help in all too familiar emergency situations.

Kibera, on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, is home to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people but still appears as a forest on government maps.

Thirty of its inhabitants used the global positioning systems technology to establish the location of such landmarks as roads and health clinics and uploaded the resulting map onto the Open Street Map website which anyone can update with new data. And when parts of the slum were flooded in May, they quickly drew up a separate map showing which areas had been submerged.

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NEW YORK (AlertNet) - Adele Waugaman works for the United Nations Foundation and manages a partnership with the Vodafone Foundation.

She spoke with AlertNet about using technology to create networks and connect people during humanitarian crises at the U.N. Foundation Digital Media Lounge at 92Y, a space set up for bloggers and social media journalists for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Summit.

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I had a fascinating meeting at Google in London this morning. Attended by some very senior journalists, former top-level government officials, and representatives of NGOs, universities, and think tanks, the three- or four-hour session looked at a proposal for a new way to approach conflict prevention.

Called "PAX", the idea is to gather SMS, images and video from the general public in areas of conflict (in the style of FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi), and combine that with satellite imagery to form a massive open database that could be accessed to help pressure key governments and others into preventative action.

The proposal poses serious questions, of course, and many in the room (including me) expressed concerns on some points and constructive scepticism on others. Though Chatham House rules prevent me from identifying individual contributions, let me outline some of the general issues raised from my own perspective.

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LONDON (AlertNet) - Twitter has increasingly been used to spread awareness about humanitarian issues and to raise funds to help people affected by disasters. But it can be hard to find the right feeds in the flood of daily tweets, so website Online Degree Programs has come up with a handy list of "100 Terrific Twitter Feeds for Humanitarians".

You may think it's a shameless bit of self-promotion to re-publish the list because @AlertNet is at the top but I also like it because it highlights different areas of humanitarian work.

But it's by no means comprehensive, so feel free to let us know of others you like by posting a comment at the bottom of this post.

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