Blog: Disaster Relief

Kicking off the Global Symposium +5 in Geneva

I just got out of a working group where we outlined best practices, key issues, standards, and recommendations for Innovation to Improve Humanitarian Action, which will be presented at the Global Symposium +5 that  starts tomorrow here at the Place des Nations in Geneva. This meeting is a follow up to the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange in 2002 and aims to identify best practices and preferences for information management and exchange based on the past five years of experiences in the humanitarian relief community.

I will add the official notes to this post as soon as I get a copy (hopefully tomorrow). The working group followed a very exciting process with people from the United Nations, academia, and private sector all working together closely to identify underlying patterns that can help encourage innovation with in the the humanitarian community.

Some other highlights of the day were meeting Jeroen Ticheler, a GIS expert from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He showed me some really neat maps from the Open Layer project, which is out of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. These maps are simply beautiful. I recommend that you check out a few of them here.

Also I got to play with SPOT, a personal GPS tracker that I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on when it comes out in November. Once they are a little smaller, these will be great to give to team members to map where they are and go. To display this information you can just embed a Google map into their profile and have the map pull in the geo RSS feed from the SPOT service.

I will be in Geneva for some meetings until the end of the week and hope to spend all my free time at the conference, so hopefully I'll have more updates soon.

Making Preparedness Information More Accessible

Yesterday we handed off the beta version of the new Disaster Assistance component Kit that we built for the American Institute of Architects’ Communities by Design Initiative. The kit is a fully functional disaster preparedness curriculum that aggregates AIA Communities by Design’s excellent resources to   one website that runs off of a usb drive that’s actually smaller than my thumb nail.

The kit is more than just a great resource library – it also bridges the gap between disaster preparedness and disaster response in an exciting way. 

All of the website components – the site itself (powered by Drupal), the server that runs it (powered by Xamp), the browser (Firefox on a stick), and the PDF viewer  (Sumatra) – are all self contained on the drive. This means that the kit will work on any computer in the world regardless of whether it’s connected to the internet, and it will run on both PCs and Macs.

The AP reported yesterday that Arlo Guthrie is touring to benefit Katrina victims. Will he be selling any ringtones to help raise money? I don't think that "Brownie you're doing a heck of a job" would be the best choice, but clips of "City of New Orleans" play well on cell phones might help get funds from a younger generation.

This morning we launched www.dcpak.org, just a week following the devastating earthquake in South Asia that has left upwards of 40,00 people dead in Pakistan. We built the site for the local Washington DC based NGO, ImPak, to help keep people informed of the relief effort. The goal of the site is to provide timely information on how people can help existing relief organizations that are already on the ground.

It has a great list of places to donate and probably one of the best resource libraries listing other sites focused on the relief work and writing about the devistation.