Mobile phones can be a great tool to help people in emergencies. To help organizations or activists decide when and how to use SMS, the GSMA recently published a draft “Code of Conduct for the Use of SMS in Natural Disaster”.
Archive for the ‘Red Cross Red Crescent’ Category
My girlfriend and I have personal connections to Boston, so we obviously followed the developments of April 15 quite closely from afar. Here are my impressions, particularly concerning the role of social media.
Mobile-enabled early warning systems are transforming the way humanitarian organisations deliver aid, and also how we build long-term resilience in concert with affected communities. With the International Telecommunication Union reporting nearly six billion mobile-cellular subscriptions worldwide in 2011 – and a notable 79 per cent penetration in the developing world – the rise of mobile communication continues to shape aid innovation.
The “Social Media for Good roundup” is an infrequent series of posts where I share interesting links I found on the web. This week with: Open Street Map for dummies, examples of multimedia storytelling, social media guidance for civil servants, community based humanitarian response and tech tools for emergency management.
The Philippines are currently reeling from the impact of three successive typhoons that have displaced close to 250,000 people and killed at least 50. Being one of the countries with the highest social media penetration, affected communities and disaster responders alike are using Facebook, Twitter and standard Google tools to communicate needs and coordinate the response.
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.
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:
