About a year ago I helped write the terms of reference for a study on how the “formal” humanitarian system was, and could, work with volunteer and technical groups. Today the report is out: Disaster Response 2.0: the future of Humanitarian information sharing has been launched by my boss, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos in Dubai. My friend John Crowley from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative was the lead author, and the work was commissioned by the UN Foundation/Vodafone Foundation technology partnership and UNOCHA.
I’ve been doing a bunch of press around the launch, and I’m pretty happy to have made the New York Times: Online Mapping shows the potential to transform relief efforts. There are a bunch of other articles and blogs worth reading. This whole effort is continuing in some great ongoing work by colleagues and friends, and we’ll see where we end up at this time next year, notwithstanding the rather trenchant comments of my old colleague Paul Currion.
[...] a Disaster Response 2.1 report” where they pointed out a number of errors and issues with the DR 2.0 report I’d mentioned last week. Their corrections are useful, and, together with Gisli’s response to their response (my head [...]
[...] Just finished my first piece of live radio in years and it was huge fun: I did an interview for the first edition of the BBC’s “Click” radio show. We talked a bit about how online volunteers can get involved in crisis response, and the newly launched Disaster Response 2.0 report. [...]