One incident that captivated and moved the public was the moment when a 20-year old Malaysian student, Mohammed Ashraf Haziq, was robbed by a gang who had appeared to be helping him.  Not only did social media help raise awareness of the incident (hundreds of thousands of people have viewed a mobile phone video of the moment on YouTube), but it also helped provide a platform for pooling public support for Mohammed.  Below is an extract from an interview with former charity worker, Jamie Cowan, the person behind the Twitter and Tumblr campaign #somethingniceforashraf, which was huge success in raising cash and awareness, including support from companies like Sony and Halfords.

The Man Behind the Blog #somethingniceforashraf – A Social Media Q&A With Jamie Cowan

By Tom Knight

Please talk us through how #somethingniceforashraf got off the ground.It was something me and a colleague thought up on Tuesday morning last week over breakfast. Putting together the Tumblr blog only took 20 minutes. Then we tweeted a few people we knew and it simply took off from there.

Organisationally it only exists within the goodwill it has been able to channel.

Did you consciously move very quickly? Were you aware of time pressure?
I didn’t expect it to get as big as it did, as quickly as it did. It was easy to do. It took 20 minutes to start, and then it caught. There are probably loads of people who tried to do something to help. It’s hard to break down exactly why our idea worked while others didn’t.

People liked it – it’s a simple as that. If people like something, they consume it and share it. That’s how things get big.

Until last week I didn’t use Twitter that much. I had an account but I barely used it. Having set up the website and looking around Twitter, I didn’t really see anybody trying to do something similar. There was Riot Cleanup, Operation Cup of Tea, and Keep Aaron Cutting. They were doing some cool things, but they were different.

Why did you choose to concentrate on Twitter over other social networks?
I’m personally a heavy Facebook user. I set up a Facebook campaign page, but it didn’t really take off. Only about 100 people followed it.

I’ve discovered that Twitter is more explosive: things happen quicker and at a greater volume. The hashtag was going Tonto for two days – everyone was bashing it around. But by the Thursday and the Friday, it was dead. That’s the way Twitter works — it’s very spiky.

For spreading news quickly, Twitter is perfect. But if you want a deeper level of engagement, I would have thought Facebook is more appropriate.

Once people were using the hashtag, how did you get them onto the website?
There was a TinyURL attached the original tweet and then Google started performing for us. Whenever people were searching ‘something nice for ashraf’, it sent them straight to the Tumblr. We were using a specific set of words, which was quite Google-friendly

People can be counted on to find stuff if they know about it. Getting people to the site, in the end, wasn’t too much of a challenge. The challenge was making sure people knew about it in the first place.

If people want to do something on the internet, they’ll find a way to do it. It’s when they’re not really that bothered about doing it that people would not do as much as they could.

Did you have a handle on analytics? Were you kept informed throughout the campaign by statistics?
No. The only figures I have access to are from PollDaddy, and the amount we have collected in donations. More than 40,000 people voted on the poll on the site, which is quite incredible.

It must have been very exciting.
It was really exciting, brilliant. The good thing about it all was here was something horrible that had happened to a guest in our country and people felt the same way about it as I did and wanted to redress the balance. I did it because I know people are nicer than they looked as a consequence of all the riots.

In total we’re going to raise just under £23,000. The money we raised is obviously important. But it was an easy way for people to demonstrate that they’re nice and that they’re good people. That’s where a lot of the value came from.

Did you feel as if the campaign was running out of control at any point?
We’ve had to stop taking donations. I would be interested to find out how much the campaign could have got if we let it run on. But we thought we had raised enough so we shut it down. Ashraf is only a young lad, and I didn’t want him to be getting so much money that it became a problem for him. If somebody’s got £100K landing on their desk, there are some bad things which can come out of that.

We didn’t want it running out of hand. The whole premise was doing something nice for him. £23,000 is enough money to do something very nice. Anything on top of that would have been gratuitous, particularly at a time when there were loads of other causes which needed money and support. I started redirecting on the site to other causes that people could donate to. It felt like the right thing to do.

Companies like Sony and Big Fish Bikes started approaching you and offering donations to replace Ashraf’s stolen property. How did they reach out to you?
Directly, on Twitter. Halfords and lots of other businesses start making offers. It was really good.

What do you think was in it for them?
They just wanted to help. I’m sure they’re pleased with the positive PR that came out of it, but I don’t think that’s the primary reason for them acting. I think they saw that something pretty bad had happened and they had the means to provide an answer — just the same as the individuals.

Everyone always points the finger at business, accusing them of being cynical, but there are a lot of good people working in business and a lot of cultures which are actually nice. I think that’s encouraging.

When Halfords offered a bike I told them one had already been offered, but we would still welcome any donation they wanted to make.

The whole thing demonstrates that if you do something positive, how readily people are to respond. Most people are nice. They just need to be presented with opportunities which are easy to demonstrate how nice they are.

It seems incredible that you can go from not being an active Twitter user to the architect of such a wildly successful Twitter campaign.
Actually, I don’t to use Twitter because it looks messy. But it clearly serves a purpose and I would definitely use it again for the right reasons. If I decide I want to do something I’ll definitely redeploy some of the things I’ve learned over the last week.

And what are they?
The key thing is that I did something at all. I was literally sat having breakfast last Tuesday morning and I was lucky to have an idea, to set up a site and see if anyone wanted to do anything.

Then, even more importantly, I actually went out and did it. It wasn’t anything clever with social media — but doing it was the key thing. It was the fact that people liked it which made it big.

My message would be, if people want to set out and do something, do something good. If it’s not good, nobody’s going to want to spend time on it. Have an idea, give it a go, and makes sure that it’s a fundamentally good thing.

And if you’re using Twitter, remember to move quickly because it’s a very explosive medium.

The other thing is, it could have looked like a con. After Hurrican Katrina a lot of people set up fake fundraising accounts. Some people got in touch asking me if what I was doing was legitimate.

I had to tell people that I couldn’t offer any guarantees, they just had to trust me. Twitter was useful for that sort of thing because you can be very public about those conversations.

You’ve got to put in quite a lot of time to be reactive. If someone has a concern, you’ve got to deal with it, otherwise it’s going to turn into something much bigger and reduce people’s confidence in it, if you don’t respond quickly and honestly.

Source: Business Fights Poverty

Below is a round-up of media sources related to Libya. Both traditional media and new media is covered.

Media Coverage

Al-Jazeera compiles a comprehensive live blog of each days activities and events in Libya. It is available here (in English) and dates from February 17.

On top of their live blog coverage, Al-Jazeera also provides an interactive graphic of the coalition operation in Libya, Odyssey Dawn. It covers what each country involved is doing and what resources they have committed to enforcing the no-fly zone.

CNN also maintains a live blog of events in Libya. It includes news reports from the CNN network.

The Guardian has developed a great interactive timeline of Middle East protests, including Libyan protests. The map includes an overview of key dates, actions, government and opposition actions, and international reactions to events in the region, and covers every country in the region. It dates from December 19, 2010, covering from the beginning of the Tunisian uprising.

The New York Times/International Herald Tribune has developed an interactive map of Libya, showing day by day overviews of the Libyan protests. It covers the hotspots in the country, and shows areas under rebel control, government control, airstrikes enforcing the no-fly zone, and other information.

Al-Jazeera English is also available as a 24-hour live stream on their website and on their YouTube channel. On top of their livestream, the YouTube channel also provides recent reports from the Al-Jazeera network.

The BBC has developed a live page for all of its coverage on Libya. It includes a live stream of their coverage, as well as real-time updates to their Twitter stream, along with information about coalition forces and breaking news from Libya.

Social Media

One of the more prolific Twitter accounts throughout the Libyan uprising has been the @LibyaFeb17_com account. The twitter account and the Libya 17th Feb website brings together a range of sources, both social media and traditional media outlets, and provides a comprehensive coverage of the Libyan uprising and conflict.

A similar account is the @feb17voices account on Twitter. This account is dedicated to relaying Libyan voices to Twitter, and also brings together a number of different sources into its Twitter stream.

@Tripolitanian is a Libyan Twitter user covering the Libyan conflict from a personal perspective. He has amassed a rather large following, and his tweets provide a different insight into the conflict.

@ShababLibya is the Twitter account of the Libyan Youth Movement. They also have a corresponding Facebook page.

The Guardian roundup of Twitter accounts covering the Middle East protests as a whole, developed in February, still provides a great resources to visually see the abundance of tweets coming from withing and relating to Libya.

There are a number of Twitter lists that are worth following. The Global Voices Libya Unrest 2011 list is a great starting point if you are looking for lists of Twitter users to follow. Some of the best hashtags to search for include #Feb17, #libya, #Tripoli and #Benghazi

@feb17voices also maintains a page at AudioBoo, where you are able to access audio bites from people within Libya. An example from 22 March, from a doctor based in Misrata, is included below.

*We’ll continue updating this page as more, comprehensive sources of information become available.

• 70m of the world’s teenagers are out of school
• 21% of the worlds teenage girls are married or living “in union” with a partner
• 59% of teenage girls are married in Niger – the highest proportion in the world. The lowest proportion is in Algeria at 2%

The Guardian has put together data available in the report, available for download here.

Related indicators data regarding adolescence and the GPI are available below:

• Youth Bulge
• Primary Enrolment
• Secondary Enrolment
• Mean years of schooling

An article from the Guardian outlining other major points in the report is included below.

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This year Unicef’s annual flagship State of the World’s Children report, released on Friday, focuses exclusively on adolescents. A recognition, says Unicef, of the increasingly urgent need to invest in the world’s 1.2 billion 10-19 year olds, an invisible generation who are nevertheless pivotal in global efforts to reach the UN millenium development goals targets by 2015.

The report argues that adolescents are often marginalised in development budgets and programming, and that if this is not corrected then investment in global poverty, health, education and employment goals will be compromised.

Many of the world’s teenagers were babies or young children when the MDGs were established in 2000. Since then, many of them will have been the direct beneficiaries of the significant global gains in child survival, primary education, access to safe water and sanitation.

The fact that the world has achieved a 33% drop in infant mortality in 11 years in testament to the fact that progress can be made when matched by political will and national investment.

However, the report says this investment and support tails off when these same children enter the second decade of their lives, and that development programmes are not sufficiently making the link between an investment in early childhood and the need to consolidate these gains into early adulthood.

For example, although millions of children have been vaccinated against dangerous diseases, one-third of all new HIV cases in the world involve 15-24 year-olds. In Brazil, 26,000 children under the age of one were saved between 1998-2008, but in the same decade 81,000 Brazilian teenagers were murdered.

According to Unicef, adolescence is the most dangerous period of many children’s lives. This is the time when young people, especially girls, are at the highest risk of dangers such as child marriage, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. But these dangers are yet to be reflected in child protection resources and assistance.

The report says that greater investment in adolescence is also crucial for further progress towards the MDGs. Adolescence is the pivotal decade where poverty and inequality pass on to the next generation, and is most apparent among poor adolescent girls who become mothers.

Those with low levels of education are at particular risk of perpetuating intergenerational cycles of poverty, discrimination and inequity. Almost half the world’s adolescents do not attend secondary school or do not complete their studies. Despite the advances towards gender parity in primary education, girls are still far less likely to attend secondary education than boys. The development advantages of education, particularly for girls, have been proved time and time again. Educated adolescent girls are less likely to marry early, get pregnant and have a better knowledge of HIV/Aids and health issues.

Adolescence is also a time when other cultural forms of gender discrimination come into play and perhaps presents the best chance of confronting and challenging institutionalised attitudes and behaviours.

Country-by-country statistics at the back of the report reveal some interesting findings on adolescents’ attitudes to violence against women.

The data shows a general tendency for girls to justify domestic violence more than boys. This phenomenon, however, is not universal, as in some countries, such as Azerbaijan, the opposite is true).

In Benin, for example, girls are almost four times as likely to justify domestic violence than boys the same age. Researchers also found that younger girls were as likely to excuse violence than older women. How likely is it that these pervasive attitudes towards violence get passed down to the new generation of daughters?

Unicef argues that in the current global economic climate, a stronger focus on adolescents is becoming increasingly crucial as children are now reaching adolescence as the world is gripped by social and political insecurity, spiralling food prices and rising unemployment.

The global economic crisis has compounded a situation where 81 million young people are unemployed and 15-24 year olds make up one-quarter of the world’s working poor. This is likely to have a significant impact on future economic recovery and growth.

The latest International Labour Organisation report showed that youth unemployment is now a significant concern in almost every national economy. More than 20% of international companies consider inadequate education of the potential workforce to be a significant obstacle to higher investment and faster economic recovery.

Earlier this week, Alasdair McWilliam of the Overseas Development Institute, blogged on this site about the extent of youth unemployment in countries in the Middle East recently beset by political unrest and upheaval.

Despite the region being a “star performer” in terms of development indicators such as health and education, unemployment among 15-24 year olds stands at over 25%. With two-thirds of the region’s population now below 24, young people are not being absorbed into the economy and employers are complaining of poor education and low skills.

McWilliam also argued that that– youth unemployment and a lack of political voice – two factors attributed to the growing unrest in the Arab world – are not included in prominent measures of development.

The Unicef report also suggests that the MDGs do not adequately address the challenges and dangers facing the world’s youth. Although many of the MDGs are related to adolescence, the goals themselves focus more explicitly on the survival and health of under-5s, reflected in specific and clearly defined targets on infant mortality, infant immunisation and primary school enrolment. According to Unicef this has partly allowed an under-investment in programmes targeting teenagers and young people.

The conclusion of the report is stark. The global fight against poverty, inequality and discrimination will be compromised if this doesn’t change.

SOURCE: The Guardian

Keeping up with the latest news and events coming out of the region is difficult, and often news becomes outdated extremely quickly. Instead, many are turning to Twitter (and Facebook) to get their news and updates on the situation across many of the regions countries. Below is a list of prominent Twitter users who are covering events in the Middle East, and they provide interesting insights into what is ahppening in the region. (Source: UN Dispatch)

Andy Carvin has played a central role in relaying information on the Libyan revolution on Twitter. His Twitter stream is updated minute by minute, providing updates both from Libyans and news organizations. His tweeting is raw; often the information is unconfirmed (which he labels as such), but he is a critical node spreading news and information on the protests.

Sultan Al Qassemi is a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs. During Egypt’s revolution, I relied heavily on Al Qassemi for information on events in the country. Now he is providing the same quality reporting during Libya’s revolution. His tweets are a mix of news and analysis, and less rapid fire than Andy Carvin. However they make up for it with calm, informed commentary on events.

AliTweel is a Libyan living in Tripoli. He is a central part of a small group of Libyan Twitters that have been instrumental at getting information out of the country after the media blackout.

Ghazi Gheblawi is a surgeon and new media writer/broadcaster living in London. He is plugged into the Libyan Twittersphere and has been using his contacts to help report on events on the ground.

Tripolitanian is an anonymous Libyan. Many of his tweets have relayed information about what is being shown on Libyan State TV and reporting on other areas in the country.

Sherine Tadros is an Al Jazeera reporter for the Europe, United States, and the Middle East. Her Twitter stream is a well curated mix of retweets and confirmed news stories.

Hisham Matar is a novelist from (among other places) Libya. Matar’s tweets are less about reporting events on the ground and more about providing original commentary on Libyan events.

Abdurahman Warsame is a broadcast journalist for Al Jazeera and a blogger. Over the last 24 hours he has been a valuable source for reporting events before they appear on Al Jazeera and other news stations.

Iyad El-Baghdadi is a businessman from Dubai who has been following events in Libya closely. His stream mostly offers retweeted messages from news and Libyans.

The Guardian has also produced an interactive map of Twitter users covering protests across the Middle East and North Africa. The map provides basic details about each country, and a constantly updating stream of tweets from Guardian journalists, prominent Twitter users, bloggers and experts. The map is available here.

The Global Peace Index Twitter account also houses a list of Twitter users from the region who are covering many of the events and protests, offering interesting perspectives on events as they happen. The list is available here.

Countless other tools are also popping up across the web tracking the protests and unrest in the region. A Google maps layer has been created showing reported violent clashes in Libya against pro-democracy demonstrators. The list gathers its data from social media sources (primarily Twitter), and while it acknowledges many of these reports remain unconfirmed, it shows an interesting way in which social media is being utilised throughout the region.

The debate over development effectiveness and efficiency is growing, and many are looking into how development aid can be better improved. USAid recently launched a new approach to their development work, while many other development agencies around the world are conducting reviews of their programs and how they are undertaken.

The Brookings Institution have recently released a report focuses on how the international aid system can be improved through three main areas of reform: clear mandates, a better architecture, and partnership and leadership.

A brief overview of the report is included below, or the report can be downloaded here.

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Global development assistance efforts are experiencing a critical moment of change. This moment is not a week or month but a several-year period in which political scales are tipping, rationales and underlying assumptions are being reexamined, and new systems and approaches are emerging.

Collectively, the public and private institutions involved are working around the world to alleviate poverty and human suffering, support equitable economic growth, foster better governance, promote global public health, prevent conflict, and strengthen the resilience of communities vulnerable to external shocks. These development actors operate at the threshold of a significant inflection point as they seek to answer big questions, including:

• With many of the poorest developing countries not on track to meet most of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), what can be done to dramatically improve poverty reduction efforts focused on education, gender equality, nutrition, maternal mortality, and other key health concerns?
• How should development strategies incorporate climate resilience and lowcarbon growth, and how should aid donors proceed with related financial support?
• How can aid be improved to help jumpstart a process of self-sustaining economic growth?
• How can external organizations support the achievement of stability in fragile states?

The solutions to these problems require major shifts in the international dialogue on development and aid, followed by key architectural and operational changes across a wide range of actors. Large donors like the United States must lead by modeling and implementing fundamental reforms.

In a recent CGD working paper Who Are the MDG Trailblazers? A New MDG Progress Index, CGD research fellow Ben Leo and Julia Barmeier assess individual country performance against eight core MDG targets (extreme poverty, hunger, education, gender, child mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, and water). For each target, the Index compares a country’s actual performance over time with the rate of improvement needed to reach the target by 2015.

To better present the results of the paper, this interactive MDG web tool illustrates each individual country’s progress towards the highly ambitious MDG targets. The tool includes MDG Progress Scorecards for each country, which include performance trajectories for each core target. In addition, we have provided supplementary map overlays for those MDGs with absolute performance targets (education and gender), which are widely considered as biased and unfair to countries starting off a low-base. These alternative measures illustrate each country’s average annual progress – arguably a much more realistic measure of real-world improvements. Finally, we’ve included the complete underlying dataset to provide our users with even greater workability.

As illustrated in the tool, the authors find evidence of dramatic achievements by many poor countries, such as Honduras, Vietnam, Laos, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Cambodia, and Ghana. These countries’ performances suggest that they may achieve most of the highly ambitious MDGs. Moreover, Africa accounts for many star performers. Interestingly, poor countries perform nearly on par with middle-income countries. And not surprisingly, the list of laggards largely consists of countries devastated by conflict, such as Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guinea-Bissau. Most countries fall somewhere in-between, demonstrating solid progress on some indicators and little on others.

The interactive map of the MDG Progress Index can be found here.

SOURCE: Center for Global Development

But what do you think about this? Have a look below.

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When I sat down to write an article on the countries with the highest standard of living, I thought it would be easy. But, how do you define “standard of living”?

Merriam-Webster.com says it means:

1 : the necessities, comforts, and luxuries enjoyed or aspired to by an individual or group
2 : a minimum of necessities, comforts, or luxuries held essential to maintaining a person or group in customary or proper status or circumstances

The World Bank says:

The level of well-being (of an individual, group or the population of a country) as measured by the level of income (for example, GNP per capita) or by the quantity of various goods and services consumed (for example, the number of cars per 1,000 people or the number of television sets per capita).

The Merriam-Webster definition is rather ambiguous – it depends what you define as “necessities” and “comforts” – but the World Bank definition seems unashamedly material: that standard of living is related to how much money you have and what you spend it on.

Yet many different agents have come up with many different ways to define, measure, and rank standard of living, and they aren’t all based purely on economics. Here are four methods, with the top ten ranked countries under each system.

1. Gross Domestic Product

Gross Domestic Product is the total market value of all the goods and services produced in a country in a year. Since our prevailing world view is still stuck on more money = better life, GDP is often used as a quick and dirty way to infer a country’s standard of living.

This is, to use a technical term, complete crap. Not only can money not buy happiness, but not all spending is good spending. Clearing up a pesky oil spill or sustaining multiple wars in foreign lands might be great for expenditure and therefore GDP, but doesn’t mean the country or its people are any ‘better off’ than they were beforehand.

There are tons of other reasons why GDP is not a good indicator of standard of living – for example, it doesn’t factor in wealth distribution, or the negative effects of higher production – but it’s regularly and easily measured, and relatively easy to compare across countries. For now, at least, it’s here to stay.

GDP top 10 in 2010 according to the IMF (GDP given in millions of $):

1. United States (14,624,184)
2. China (5,745,133)
3. Japan (5,390,897)
4. Germany (3,305,898)
5. France (2,555,439)
6. United Kingdom (2,258,565)
7. Italy (2,036,687)
8. Brazil (2,023,528)
9. Canada (1,563,664)
10. Russia (1,476,912)

2. Human Development Index

The  Human Development Index was instituted in 1990 as a way to assess development in terms of human wellbeing as well as economics. It’s a composite statistic that takes into account health, education, and income.

It’s used by the UN Development Programme each year in its Human Development Reportsto produce a sort of league table of countries, each of which are placed in one of three divisions: developed, developing, or underdeveloped. But country rankings are relative rather than absolute, and there is no ecological dimension to the index.

3. Satisfaction With Life Index

Developed by a psychologist at the University of Leicester, the Satisfaction With Life Index attempts to measure happiness directly, by asking people how happy they are with their health, wealth, and education, and assigning a weighting to these answers.

This concept is related to the idea of Gross National Happiness that came from Bhutan in the 1970′s. Although it may sound like a country-wide gurning contest, it was actually a casual remark by the king that was taken seriously by the Centre for Bhutan Studies, which set about designing a survey to measure the population’s well-being. The idea is that material and spiritual development should take place side by side, underpinned by sustainable development, cultural values, conservation, and good governance.

Satisfaction With Life Index top 10 in 2006 :

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada

4. Happy Planet Index

The  Happy Planet Index was introduced by the New Economics Foundation in 2006. The premise is that what people really want is to live long and fulfilling lives, not just to be filthy rich. The kicker is that this has to be sustainable both worldwide and down through the generations.

The HPI is calculated based on life satisfaction, life expectancy, and ecological footprint. It doesn’t measure how happy a country is, but how environmentally efficient it is to support well-being in that country.

In other words, if people are happy but they’re guzzling more than their fair share of natural resources, the country will not have a high Happy Planet Index. But if people are happy and have a medium environmental impact, or are moderately happy and with a low impact, the country’s score will be high.

Happy Planet Index top 10 in 2009:

1. Costa Rica
2. Dominican Republic
3. Jamaica
4. Guatemala
5. Vietnam
6. Colombia
7. Cuba
8. El Salvador
9. Brazil
10. Honduras

SOURCE: Matador Network
AUTHOR: Nick Rowlands

John Crowley, of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and writing for the UN Dispatch, looks at the role technology is increasingly playing in assisting with humanitarian relief projects.

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The disaster response operations of 2010 taught the humanitarian community hard lessons in how to communicate more effectively both with each other and with disaster affected communities. In reports reflecting on the year since the Haiti earthquake, key members of our community (see Internews and the ICT4Peace Foundation) are pointing to the need to adapt practices in the humanitarian response system to new realities, including policies to protect the security of data about vulnerable populations.

Turning these recommendations into implementable practices is going to require input from many stakeholders, including humanitarians from large agencies as well as representatives of the volunteer technical community. The United Nations Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership and UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have partnered with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to conduct these consultations and propose both a framework developing this long-term dialogue and defining how new tools and practices can be integrated into the realities of the work in the field.

Consultations to gather both information and recommendations toward a framework that facilitates coordination between international humanitarian institutions and volunteer technical communities are ongoing, and will be presented in a report to be released this March. The report is intended to seed discussion between various stakeholders in emergency response and open a conversation through which practitioners and policy makers can discuss and seek solutions to technology-related emergency response challenges, including those seen in Haiti, Chile, Pakistan, and other emergency operations.

Based on dozens of initial interviews with staff from UN agencies, large NGOs, governments and the emerging community of humanitarian technologists and mappers, the Harvard team has distilled six of the core challenges, which are listed below.

The six findings so far include:
1. Mobile technologies and satellite communications are bringing everyone—humanitarian organizations, international institutions, volunteer technical communities, and the affected populations—ever closer together. More often than not, victims of disasters and conflicts have cell phones and can communicate via SMS in real time. The headquarters of various agencies are ever more closely connected to the operations in the field. And thousands of volunteers who until recently would have sent donations are now contributing mapping and crowdsourcing services.

2. As a result, information flows are accelerating, raising expectations around increasing the tempo of information management and coordination in emergency operations.

3. At the same time, the methods for data and information exchange are moving from document-based systems to flows of structured data via web services. This movement from the narration of ongoing events in long stretches of unstructured prose to streams of data in short, semi-structured formats require humanitarian staff to perform double duty. They are simultaneously working within an existing system based on the exchange of situation reports while filtering and analyzing high volumes of short reports arriving via SMS and web services.

4. Information Management in the humanitarian system is not tooled to compile, translate, and analyze the increased messaging from an affected population, the VTCs, or the demands of headquarters. For field staff who are working in difficult circumstances in technology-hostile environments, the sense of information overload is unprecedented and increasing.

5. Field staff and their managers are saying that the best method for integrating non-traditional information flows with humanitarian information management practices is to link new data flows into existing workflows and shared data standards. Adding new work flows will break the system.

6. As a result, stakeholders are calling for an interface between the humanitarian system and its cluster coordination mechanism and the various new sources of information—from the disaster affected community and the volunteer/humanitarian technologists.

SOURCE: UN Dispatch
AUTHOR: John Crowley

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 – The world’s richest countries have made modest progress in improving policies that support development but still have a long way to go, according to a Center for Global Development analysis released just days before Group of 20 leaders are expected to adopt a development action plan at their summit in South Korea.

The Center’s 2010 Commitment to Development Index (CDI) shows most wealthy nations have modified their policies since 2005 in ways that make them more supportive of sustained growth and poverty reduction in the developing world. But the CDI found overall improvement has been slight, and the seven major industrialized countries, in particular, could do far better.

Only three of those seven – Canada, the United States and Germany – were ranked in the Index’s Top 15. The United Kingdom, which recently announced plans to boost development aid amid a government austerity campaign, ranked 16th, pulled down by a poor showing on the Index security component due to arms sales to undemocratic regimes.