I just came across a really excellent post by Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier: “A List of Completely Wrong Assumptions About Technology Use in Emerging Economies”. If you have anything to do with using digital tools in a development context, I highly recommend you read this post. Though, of course, the problem is not limited to using web tools.
Archive for the ‘Non-profit technology’ Category
This is my first time in Africa. However, the one thing that all my colleagues with Africa experience had told me was: “Everybody has a mobile phone.” This made sense to me based on my experience in Haiti where, even though the country is extremely poor, many people even had two mobile phones, one for each network. In Liberia – not so much.
The BBC has now published elements process for verifying social media content, which makes for an excellent read. What emerges is a process that is more like that of a traditional intelligence agency, than what most people had in mind when joining journalism school.
A new “serious game” is trying to show what it’s like to be a journalist, an aid-worker or a survivor in a natural disaster. And it’s not doing a bad job!
A while ago I posed the social media staff guidelines that I created for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Since then, I have been asked by a few organizations to talk about the process of getting there. It seems that more and more organizations see the need and usefulness of having such a document. Below you find a presentation I have given on two occasions on that topic. At the bottom of my previous[...]
While taking the bus to work yesterday, I noticed the woman next to me reading this paper. And I just had to take a photo! As anyone who has working in the humanitarian sector knows, our love for acronyms is pretty ridiculous. In Haiti we even printed the most important ones on the back of t-shirts so that we could look them up more easily. The problem was – most of the changed so quickly that the t-shirt production couldn’t[...]
How useful are Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels for disaster response organizations? I’m looking at the question from three different angles.
Wired magazine just published an excellent article about the Red Cross Red Crescent relief operation in Haiti. Author Vince Beiser takes 13 pages to describe the inner workings of the operation. And while he is not shy on criticism, it is well balanced and fair.
