“10 tactics for turning information into action” from Tactical Tech is such a rare example. 10 tactics is first and foremost a one hour long movie, but it’s also (watch out, here comes a buzzword) a toolkit. But in this case the name “toolkit” is actually justified. The DVD arrives with a set of cards that summarize the examples from the movie, give links to further resources and try to point you in the right direction in case you’d like to try this particular tactic yourself. The cards are also included on the DVD as PDFs.

10 tactics focuses on human rights, but a lot of the techniques can be applied in other contexts as well.

So, why don’t you get a few colleagues from your office and few more from friendly organizations close to you together and host a screening? It’s good fun, the examples are well researched and presented and it gives you a chance to look beyond what you are familiar with. And best of all, all materials are free (so far)! Check it out: http://www.informationactivism.org/

10 tactics for turning information into action (Trailer) from Tactical Technology Collective on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. “Us Now” – Can social media help us govern better?
2. Social Media toolkit for H1N1 (swine flu)
3. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response

If you want to know how the website was set-up, please click here for the configuration. In addition, I had some customization done on the theme and had an additional language, Haiti Creole, added to the front end. That version is not live yet, but it’s getting there.

The brand new Haiti Red Cross website

Screencast and on-site training

In order to make the most of my time in Haiti I prepared a few short instructional videos. And while my French is terrible, I found a good, free screen capture service: Jing.

Jing is a free software that let’s you capture up to five minutes of video and sound and share it online. It works really smoothly. And while the 5 minute limit might sound very short, I found that it is enough for most steps, as long as you do one video for each action. What I find strange is that the “Pro” version doesn’t let you capture longer videos.

I hope that those videos will also help the webmaster to train staff and volunteers outside Port-au-Prince.

Email with Google Apps

The Haitian Red Cross webmaster Charlot and I.

I hadn’t been aware that I would also be expected to set up the Haitian Red Cross’ email service, but I suppose I should have expected it. And while activating email through Plesk on the server was no big deal, in the end we decided to go with Google Apps.

Email security, backups and all these things are simply such a massive headache that I counselled against putting that burden on the webmaster. In my opinion a webmaster should worry about the site and not about whether email is backed up. I had never used Google Apps before, but it’s great! Once, you have managed to configure a server to work with Google Apps (and unfortunately the instructions are terrible) it works like a dream and of course you also have immediate access to Google docs, calendar etc.. I wish we could get rid of our exchange server at the IFRC and migrate!

Real life – outside base camp

On a more somber note: I have to admit I felt a bit inadequate in the middle of all these people who are providing water, shelter or basic health care. I mean, how does the need for a website rank in comparison to these needs?

On the last day I had the chance to leave base camp for a couple of hours so that I could get an idea of what life is like outside base camp and indeed for many of the staff and volunteers I was working with every day. It’s easy to forget when you are inside a compound and well cared for, but many of the people I was working with might not have a home to return to after work.

To cut a long story short: the needs are basically – everything. I mean, you name it, they don’t have it. We were walking through one of the camps where the Red Cross is working and even though you could see that a lot had already been done to improve the situation, what had been achieved seems like very little compared to what still needs to be done. Don’t get me wrong: I have seen everyone in base camp work every day from 6 am to well after dark. It’s not because people don’t work hard, that things take a long time. It’s because it’s such an enormous job.

The “land issue”

For me, the biggest revelation was to see the “land issue” first hand. I have to admit that I always found it hard to understand why we don’t just erect a couple of thousand tents and instead decided to distribute tarps and tool kits. I always found it difficult to accept that no land is available to set up those tents. But once you are there, you realize that it’s really true: there is no literally no space to put tents up! Every little bit of space is already taken up! I saw people living on the bit of green between the lane’s on Port-au-Prince’s main street.

And you can’t simply replace the rickety shelters that people have built themselves with “proper” tents either. Because those tents are bigger than the existing emergency shelters, less people would be able to stay in any one location. Which means that you first need a place where the rest of the people could go. And for that you need land.

There is a much better and far more coherent summary of the issue on the “tales from the hood” blog titled “Sorry, I’m just an aid worker“.  I highly recommend that you read this post if you are interested in the Haiti response.

Anyhow: Haiti Red Cross has email and a website now. It’s not much, but it’ll help Haiti Red Cross talk to the world about their work and what the reality is on the ground. And maybe that will help a little bit.

Related posts:

1. “Back to Haiti” – or – “I will digress”
2. First week in Haiti
3. Port-au-Prince from above – the camps in June

Anyhow, this project gives me the rather enviable opportunity to create something from scratch without having to worry about integrating any other systems or databases. And of course, in my mind I have played the “what if”-game many times. Now is my chance to put it into practice.

The conditions

• Website must be easy to maintain
• Must have a backend
• Must have a backend in a language that can be used by the people maintaining it
• Multilingual support
• Cheap
• Site should be up as quickly as possible
• Big developer community

With all that in mind I suggested to use WordPress as a CMS to drive the website. The National Society accepted this proposal and I have been fine tuning it since then. It’s running on a dedicated virtual server. For the design we decided to modify a premium theme.

Below is the set-up that I have in place so far. Please chip in, if you have any additional suggestions. I hope others will find it useful as well. All plug-ins can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

• After the deadline
  Checks spelling, style and grammar of your English language posts.
  
• Category header content
  Let’s you add HTML at the top of your category or tag-pages. In my opinion, you shouldn’t need a plugin to do that, but it’s the only way I found to add custom text to the top of category or tag-pages.
  
• Contact Form 7
  A customizable contact form. Supports many languages.
  
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Generates a human readable sitemap.
  
• Easily navigate pages on dashboard
  The site will have a lot of pages (as opposed to posts). This plugin makes it easier to jump to individual pages.
  
• Google XML Sitemaps
  Adds a Google XML site map.
  
• Lightview Plus
  Improves the standard WordPress gallery and has slide show features. I have not figured out how to make this multi lingual yet. The plugin requires that you buy  the lightview script for 3 euros.
  
• Media Tags
  Allows you to assign tags to your media files which will make it easier to find them in the future.
  
• Registered Users only
  Hides the site from anonymous users while still under development.
  
• Sociable
  Adds Twitter/Facebook etc. “share” buttons to all posts and pages. I love how customizable this plugin is!
  
• WP DB backup
  Emails me a complete database backup every day. The frequency is customizable, as are the tables that are being backed up.
  
• WPML multilingual CMS
  This plugin is seriously impressive! WPML does not only create a multilingual structure for your site but also helps your editors with the translation workflow and even supports translations of widgets and text-strings (though that doesn’t always work 100%). Since my day job is to maintain a multilingual site I can tell you that I’d be much happier if we had this!   The plugin was developed by a translation company that integrates their translation services into the plugin. Very smart.
  
• WPtouch iPhone theme
  Delivers site news for mobile devices (not just iPhones). Since the site is for a disaster-prone country where mobile phone are widely used, this could be a useful feature.

I have not installed any YouTube and Flickr plugins yet because the one’s I’ve seen haven’t really convinced me.

I am still looking for a good comments-plugin that is available in multiple languages. Please leave a comment if you know one.

What would you add to this list?

Related posts:

1. A website for Haiti Red Cross
2. Major changes coming to Facebook pages
3. How SMS saved lives in Haiti – behind the scenes of Ushahidi

I had been hoping that “Networked Blogs” would help me to get the word out, but so far I’m a bit disappointed. While I get some traffic from the Networked Blogs-directory, I don’t find it an effective tool to promote individual posts. Currently my page has only one fan – me. Since this is a bit depressing it’d be great if you could add yourself. Thanks and I hope you’ll have a happy 2010!

Related posts:

1. Why “RSS to Facebook” is bad for you
2. “The Worldlog”: new blog catalogue for aid and development sites
3. A busy week

Social media guidelines for IFRC staff

The International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement in general and the IFRC in particular are very complicated organism. So please let me explain a few things:

1. This is not your National Red Cross or Red Crescent Society

These are NOT the staff guidelines of the American Red Cross, the British Red Cross, the Turkish Red Crescent etc …

These are the social media guidelines of the “International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies”. The IFRC is an organization where all 186 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are members. It is not a headquarters  but a service provider to the National Societies who can take or leave what the IFRC produces. Some National Societies already have their own social media guidelines.

2. “Neutrality” and “Freedom of Speech”

How far you’ve gone always depends on where you are coming from.

I realize that the parts about “neutrality” and “keeping your manager in the loop” might sound very restrictive to some people, especially those from democratic countries.  But you have to keep two things in mind:

A, Our Code of Conduct says:

“[All staff shall] not publish any work (including writings, photographs, video footage, etc.) that has been produced in connection with, or that is related to, their assignment and functions with the Federation without prior approval of the Secretary General.”

This could easily have been used my management to shut people down who have their own blogs or use social media to talk about work. Instead we went exactly the opposite way and turned this (with the help of stakeholders who could make that decision) into “keep your boss in the loop”. This is a pretty big step.

B, The IFRC demands of its employees restraint when it comes to political controversies:

“[All staff shall] not publicly express any opinions on events connected with political affairs or engage in political activities that could reflect adversely on the impartiality, neutrality or independence of the Federation (…)”

This clause has been part of everyone’s employment contract for many years. Obviously it also has to apply online.

Coming from a country like Germany this initially felt like a pretty big violation of my rights as a citizen. But  for a lot of people in the field, being seen as coming from a neutral and impartial organization can literally be a life saver.  Many of them routinely have to work with very controversial people or even in war zones. How your organization, and the people working for your organization, are perceived might not only influence whether you have access to the vulnerable people you want help but it might also have very serious security implications.

3.Guidelines vs. policies

The role of guidelines within the IFRC is to give advice, not to set rules. Rules can only be set in policies which is why these social media staff guidelines contain no new rules. They merely look at existing policies within the organization (such as the code of conduct) and give guidance on how these should be interpreted in the context of social media. This was done in consultation with human resources, the legal department, the staff association, two directors, an undersecretary general and other stakeholders.

Changing policies on the other hand can be an extremely lengthy process. In some cases you might need approval from all 186 member National Societies and is a  process that can easily take two years. These guidelines on the other hand were completed in less than three months.

Why the social media guidelines matters

For the first time the IFRC is encouraging staff who are not professional communicators to actively and publicly talk about the organization and their work. The guidelines create clarity and reduce the risk of arbitrary repercussions – it’s definitely harder to shut someone up now than it was before.  On the other hand the guidelines also make clear what is unacceptable from an organizational point of view and that you might have to answer for what you write online.

Personally I hope that this document will start discussions within some National Societies about whether a top-down model for communication is still appropriate and I hope that this in turn will lead to the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement becoming more open. I realize that this is a big dream – but I hope that I have planted one of the seeds to make it happen.

Download the Social Media Staff Guidelines of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC); 8 pages (PDF)

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think!

Related posts:

1. Social media staff guidelines are being finalized
2. Talk with me – Social Media for the Red Cross Red Crescent
3. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response

Their method: Get as many bloggers as possible to write about this topic. No matter what the normal topic of the blog is, no matter whether it is a long or a very short post. Basically they are trying to flood the web with their chosen issue for a day, which would then also attract interest from traditional media.

From a social media strategy point of view I find that very interesting and I think it might be worth for big organizations that have a lot of supporters to think about how they can steal that idea.

The topic of this year’s Blog Action Day  is “Climate Change”. And yes, I really did sell my car, though it was more a coincidence that it happened today. However, the process of selling it  made me think about two things:

Did I decrease humanities carbon footprint?

The car I sold was a nine year old Peugot 206 that I was driving about once a month. So I’d say my personal carbon footprint is not going to change much because I sold it.

What about the person buying it? It’s fair to assume that he would have bought another car if I hadn’t sold him mine and considering his budget, it is unlikely that he would have bought a newer, more energy efficient car. In all likelihood he would have bought a different car similar to mine, which means that me selling my car to him didn’t make a difference to his carbon footprint either. Too bad.

Significantly reducing the world’s carbon footprint is easy

However, this whole thing made me think about energy efficiency in general. It amazes me that we seem to focus so much time and resources on trying to develop new technologies when there is still so much room to optimize the ones we have at the moment. And it would be faster and cheaper, too.

The International Energy Agency estimates that “Energy-efficient buildings, industrial processes and transportation could reduce the world’s projected energy needs in 2050 by one third”. One third! In comparison,  the fossil fuels used worldwide for transportation contribute to only 13 per cent of greenhouse gases. But what do we focus on? The more difficult and smaller issue, i.e. transportation.

Obviously increases in energy efficiency would also include transportation so it’s not quite fair to compare these numbers. But I find it bizarre that most of the public debate seems to focus on trying to find fuel alternatives when we could do so much more with existing technologies.

We need new laws

I for example live in Geneva, Switzerland, in a building with single-pane windows and old wooden frames. The insulation is so bad that I can feel the air coming through. I don’t even want to know how much energy I’m wasting every winter because of this, but it must be a lot. And this is not just my building – it’s most buildings in my street and many buildings in the city. Fixing it would be easy – just get new windows! No new technology needed. But there is no law that would require the owners to do that (I made inquiries) and as a result it’s not being done.

My wish for Blog Action Day

I could have a wish for Blog Action Day then it would be this: Let’s all try to get national laws passed that make increases in energy efficiency a requirement for all industries and sectors of life. This would be the fastest and cheapest way to quickly reduce how much energy we spent and significantly reduce greenhouse gases.

Read more:

• The European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
• Blog Action Day

Update: During Blog Action Day more than 31,000 trackable blog posts have been written about climate change. Bloggers in 155 countries participated. These included the blogs of the UK’s Prime Minister and the White House blog. CNN also reported on the event. Not bad, I’d say. A full summary of Blog Action Day 2009 can be found here …

Related posts:

1. “The Worldlog”: new blog catalogue for aid and development sites
2. Don’t split design and CMS – lessons learned from a web relaunch
3. Twitter blocks duplicate posts