Blog: Humanitarian Assistance

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.