I think of information management a little bit like of logistics: You don’t notice it if it works smoothly, but it has a massive impact if it doesn’t work. But, unlike with logistics, many people are so used to IM being crap that they think that it cannot be improved. Let me tell you: good information management is possible, it’s not even difficult, and it can do lots to improve humanitarian aid.
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 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.
What would you do if you could build a non-profit website from scratch without worrying about any integration issues? That’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment. In this post I’m sharing my ideas and I’d love to hear your’s.
If, like me, you like playing computer games like “Civilization” or “Tropico” or board games like “Settlers of Catan”, then one of the first things you learn is, that you need to build roads if you want to be successful. Why that is so important in the real world and what happens if you don’t have adequate roads, is something that can be seen in Liberia.
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.
You might be wondering why there have been no updates to this blog and whether I have already lost appetite for the topic. The main reason is: I needed a break. Not so much from this blog but from anything that was work related.
After listening to a 45 minute piece on BBC 4 called “Haiti and the truth about NGOs” I had to get a few things off my chest.
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!
I’m probably the last person who doesn’t have an iPhone or Android phone yet – and I also want to keep it that way. At the same time I was always a bit jealous of the connectivity that comes with these smart phones. Then I discovered what I had been looking for all the time: I wireless router small enough to fit into a pocket.
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[...]
