I just finished reading “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster” by Jonathan Katz and wanted to share my impressions of the book.
One of the questions I have looked into over the last few months, is how humanitarian organizations can use digital tools to get a better idea of what is going on in disaster-affected areas.
A photographer is suing AFP and Getty Images for 120 million US Dollars over photos that he had taken in Haiti after the earthquake and which he had shared on Twitter.
As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.
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!
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[...]
“So … how is Haiti these days?” – this is probably the question I have been asked most since I’ve come back. The problem is: the question is misleading because it assumes that it’s possible to make significant changes in a couple of months.
