As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.
Archive for November, 2011
Last week the newsletter from Good.is contained an article titled: “Gun Trafficking for Good: How to Get AK-47s Out of Africa”. The idea is to turn AK-47s into cufflinks, earring and other jewellery. I have a few problems with this concept.
The last three weeks were a mix of very intense ups and downs that left me frequently frustrated, sleepless and banging my head against a table, but ultimately gave me a sense of satisfaction that cannot be found in many other jobs: the knowledge that I had a very real, positive impact on the lives of people – and not just of an anonymous group of beneficiaries, but individuals whose names and histories I know.
Those of you who follow the elections in Liberia have probably heard about the violent incident that took place in Monrovia last Monday. A local paper has an interesting article on how the simultaneous outage of one of Liberia’s two mobile phone networks affected people who were close to the riot.
I have written about the logistical challenges in Liberia before, however I was not ready for what I found out today. It turns out that the eggs we buy in Sanniquellie are not from here (no big surprise there) or even from Liberia (surprising) but are imported from India (very big surprise)!
