While looking at the role of social media in the response to recent floods in the Philippines I came across Project NOAH, the “National Operational Assessment of Hazards”, which is an impressive example of how Google maps can be mashed with historical data, current predictions and reports from the public to provide everyone with a more comprehensive picture.
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.
Between working on a few small projects, helping my girlfriend move to Copenhagen and applying for consultancies, I haven’t had a lot of time to share the interesting articles and blog posts that I come across on a daily basis. So, before the list of things marked “Ooooh! Nice!” get’s any longer, here is an extra-long instance of the Social Media for Good Roundup.
In many situations, the main problem faced by information managers is not a lack of data, but the fact that data is stored in too many conflicting formats and full of inconsistencies and errors. This week I discovered a few free Google tools that can help to turn messy data into clean data.
I have just spent a few days brainstorming on a policy paper about how information collection and analysis can be improved to lead to better decision making in times of crisis. This blog post contains some of our central thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think about them.
Making data look good is becoming more and more important. Here are three tools that will help you turn numbers into compelling presentations.
Like many consultants, I spend a lot of time reading articles and blog posts from around the web. Here are some posts I found particularly interesting. This time they are about data journalism, crisis mapping, Twitter and a creative YouTube video.
Robert Kirkpatrick from the UN’s Global Pulse team is talking about how United Nations agencies would like to use big data to search for crises in real-time. It’s a fascinating talk about how his team has been using data mining techniques to monitor food prices and what more could be done.
