23 November, Geneva, Switzerland – The ICT4Peace Foundation and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), in collaboration with the International Network of Crisis Mappers successfully organised and co-hosted the 3rd International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM). ICCM 2011, held at the International Conference Centre Geneva, CICG, Switzerland from 14 - 15 November, was the first to be held outside the US and also the largest so far, with over 400 participants in attendance. The conference brought together the most engaged practitioners, scholars, software developers and policymakers at the cutting edge of crisis mapping to address and assess the role of crisis mapping and humanitarian technolo...

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The ICT4Peace Foundation is pleased to announce that Mr. Alain Modoux, former Assistant Director General of UNESCO and founding member of the ICT4Peace Foundation Board has been honoured for his lifelong support to free, independent and pluralistic journalism at the "Pan African Conference on Access to Information" held at Rhodes University in Cape Town. Mr. Modoux also played a seminal role in initiating and for championing the Windhoek Declaration of 9 May 1991 on free, independent and pluralistic journalism through the United Nations General Assembly and UNESCO. The Windhoek Declaration was also an important building block for the adoption of, inter alia, the paragraph 4 and 55 regarding freedom of opinion and...

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ICT4Peace is pleased to announce, that the Zentrum für Internationalen Friedensdienst (ZIF) in Berlin and the ICT4 have signed an MoU, that will provide a framework for cooperation in the fields of education, training and promoting capacity development for African peace support training institutions as well as in the field of crisis information management. In particular, ZIF and ICT4Peace will cooperate in the furtherance of training and capacity building in the field of crisis information management for peace support operations. A priority task of such cooperation is to elaborate and introduce best practice in training in the fields related to peace support operations (PSO), conflict resolution, crisis managem...

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In 2010, the ICT4Peace Foundation mandated Ushahidi to develop a plugin for Ushahidi's existing web based platform to validate information generated from the ground. This plugin, called the Matrix, was integrated into the core functionality of Ushahidi and used successfully in the Egyptian parliamentary elections of 2010. Mr. Kamal Sedra, Manager of the Ushahidi Platform in Egypt (http://www.u-shahid.org) noted: "The new generation of crowd sourced crisis information management tools developed by ICT4Peace and Ushahidid have made extraordinary progress in providing validated information to decision makers in crisis, through assessing the reliability of the source and the probability of the occurrence". Based on...

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The ICT4Peace Foundation and the Swiss Government supported OCHA to build The Humanitarian Response - Common and Operational Datasets Registry to make critical information during a humanitarian crisis available to the public. Access the datasets here. The Common Operational Datasets (CODs) are critical datasets that are used to support the work of humanitarian actors across multiple sectors. They are considered a de facto standard for the humanitarian community and should represent the best-availble datasets for each theme. The Fundamental Operational Datasets (FODs) are datasets that are relevent to a humanitarian operation, but are more specific to a particular sector or otherwise do not fit into one of the seve...

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See larger version of the NZZ article as JPG here or as PDF here. The ICT for Peace Foundation called for a International Code of Conduct to prevent cyber-conflicts by states and non-state actors. In an op ed of the leading German language newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Daniel Stauffacher, Chairman of the ICT4Peace Foundation stated that "new online threats such as cyber-espionage and cyber-conflict are very hard to counteract with traditional security policy and instruments. It is now necessary to move forward and develop an international rules-based framework to set standards for the behaviour of states in cyberspace.” The full text in German can be found here. The English version is as follows: Cyber...

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Tim Berners-Lee and British former Prime Minister Gordon Brown were at the University of Geneva on Wednesday 6 April to talk before 2000 people about the future of the web and its role in initiating change. Both leaders are prominent directors of the World Wide Web Foundation, whose mission is to help expanding access to the 80 per cent of the world’s population who do not have access to the web and trying to help people in Africa, Asia and Latin America put useful local content in their languages on the web and access it via simple, ubiquitous, mobile phone technology. Today, the minimum infrastructure required for providing mobile browsing is available. Some 95 per cent of existing phones worldwide have a basic b...

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"The ICT4Peace Foundation was kindly invited to participate at the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid & Development Conference & Exhibition 2011 (DIHAD). ICT4Peace Chairman Daniel Stauffacher presented on the topic of the impact of new technologies on coordination and information management in crisis. At DIHAD 2011, Valerie Amos, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs together with the UN Foundation, Vodafone Foundation launched the report: Disaster Relief 2.0 - The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, which was prepared by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. The impact of new technologies on coordination and information management in crisis(function() { var scri...

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3 March 2011: The ICT4Peace Foundation launched today its latest crisis information management wiki focussing on the unrest in Libya. The wiki, the first of its kind on the web, features, Background information on Libya and UN operations Key UN contacts Key situation reports, including from UN OCHA A plethora of carefully curated Twitter feeds and other social media updates in English Videos, photos and podcasts Mainstream media news updates, including streams and content from Al Jazeera, New York Times, BBC, France24 and CNN. Discoverable and free GIS / mapping resources Google Maps mashups Ways to help IDPs and refugees Please access archive of the wiki here.

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11.1.11, Switzerland: The ICT4Peace Foundation, in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and GeorgiaTech, is pleased to release, on the occasion of the anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the first in a series of papers looking at the increasingly important role of information and communication technology (ICT) in conflict prevention, peacebuilding, peacekeeping and crisis response. Unlike other papers on innovative technologies (crowdsourcing, social networking etc) dealing with crisis response, reconstruction and humanitarian aid, this collection of thought provoking pieces by esteemed writers, including former Finnish President and Nobel Peace Priz...

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