Patrick Meier visited the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington D.C. and got a tour of the brand new Digital Operations Center which AmCross is using to monitor social media during emergencies.
Archive for the ‘Red Cross Red Crescent’ Category
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.
There are moments in this line of work that you just can’t find anywhere else and that fill you with such a joy and sense of accomplishment that you never want to do anything else. This is such a story:
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.
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[...]
How useful are Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels for disaster response organizations? I’m looking at the question from three different angles.
Last year, when I heard about World Humanitarian Day for the first time, my first impulse was that this sounded pretty self-righteous. I mean, where is the World Firemen Day or the World Truckdriver Day? Two professions that are very dangerous and that probably contribute more to people’s lives than most professional aid workers do. Since then I have changed my minds slightly. For one thing, there is never anything objectionable about remembering colleagues who have died. But more importantly[...]
