Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation, delivered a public lecture on Big Data & social media for crisis management at Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH, one of the leading international universities for technology and the natural sciences in the world. The Foundation was invited by Prof. Dirk Helbing, Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modelling and Simulation. ICT4Peace is an active partner of Prof. Helbing's FuturICT project. Sanjana's presentation looked at events on the ground from his home country, Sri Lanka, as well as, at the time of the presentation, content generation on and around the bombings at the Boston marathon, as key examples of how today informa...

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Image courtesy UN Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited to deliver a presentation at Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) in Berlin, Germany, on 15 April 2013. A short write up about the presentation on the ZIF website can be read here. The ICT4Peace Foundation works closely together with ZIF in the design and implementation of the Crisis Information Management course, which was last delivered in Nairobi, Kenya in February/March 2013. Sanjana's presentation focussed on how Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) were contributing to a paradigm shift in the praxis, study and design of peacekeeping, peacebuilding, election monitoring and humanitaria...

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Photo courtesy Uni. of Lugano Since the first cohort of students over three years ago, the ICT4Peace Foundation has lectured at the Master of Advanced Studies in Humanitarian Logistics and Management at the University of Lugano. Led by Sanjana Hattotuwa, the Foundation's modules are broadly anchored around two key areas - one, the impact of new and social media on the web, Internet and via mobiles on humanitarian aid, situational awareness and more effective design and delivery of relief systems. Two, an overnight simulation exercise, based loosely around the Haiti earthquake, that takes students to around 30 of the leading humanitarian websites as well as new media platforms and portals and gets them to search for,...

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Sanjana Hattotuwa will give a public talk at Zurich's world renowned ETH on big data and social media for crisis management on 16th April, from 17:00 - 19:00hrs. Details on the ETH website here. Those interested in the topic can read The potential and challenges of open data for crisis information management and aid efficiency: A preliminary assessment published by the ICT4Peace Foundation in March 2012.

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The ICT4Peace Foundation on Tuesday, 12th March met with The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)’s Peace Mission Support and Rapid Response Section. Several discussions with the PMSRRS have occurred over 2012 on ways to support OHCHR’s mandate with the use of ICTs. Discussions this week focussed on information security and in particular the challenges of leveraging crowdsourced data into situational analysis. Presented with a list of key challenges and needs by the PMSRRS, the Foundation developed a matrix of ICT options, as well as key presentations to help build internal staff capacity to deal with crowdsourced information verification and greater awareness about field an...

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ICT4Peace Foundation's Daniel Stauffacher and Sanjana Hattotuwa were invited to present a lecture on ICT for Peace and Global Justice by the 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology (TU Delft) at The Hague Institute for Global Justice on 11 March 2013. As the Institute's event page notes, Representatives of the UN-accredited organization ICT4Peace will present their work, with support of visual demonstrations, on Crisis Information Management and the role of information and communication technologies in this. Information and communication technologies are crucial in obtaining, communicating and transmitting accurate and timely crisis information and hence to effectuate an appropriate response to man-made and natura...

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Member of the ICT4Peace Foundation's Advisory Board, Egyptian digital activist, blogger, and WACC member Kamal Sedra will lead the webinar about how social media has influenced—and is influencing—the Egyptian political landscape. Based in Cairo, Mr. Sedra founded and manages DISC Development, an organization that works in the fields of Human Rights and Freedom of Expression, and provides technical support for other civil society actors. Mr. Sedra also serves as a Senior Technical Advisor for ICT4Peace Foundation, a Swiss NGO that supports global peace through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). He is a well-known digital activist, blogger, and digital media consultant, having served as a trainer...

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Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA), Zentrum für Internationale Friedenseinsätze (ZIF) and ICT4Peace Foundation announce the new Crisis Information Management Training Course at the International Peace Support Training Center (IPSTC), Nairobi from 23 February to 3 March 2013. The Course will teach Information Management practices in Crisis, including Peace and Humanitarian Operations. A special focus will be given to the use of new Media, including SMS, Twitter, crowd sourcing and crisis mapping to obtain manage and share data. This Course is also linked to the UN Crisis Information Management Strategy Implementation. For more information, click on the image below. Course Description Efficient and timely ...

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Image courtesy chinamil.com.cn/Zhang Zhe Daniel Stauffacher, President of ICT4Peace participated in the Fourth Xiangshan Forum (Beijing, 16 to 18 November 2012) entitled “Asia-Pacific Security: New Issues and New Ideas”. The aim of the Forum was to provide a "high-level academic platform for leaders and senior scholars from world-renowned security-defense think tanks to exchange ideas on hot issues concerning global and Asia-Pacific security and defense, and to explore approaches to cooperation and dialogue among these think tanks". In particular, Daniel Stauffacher was invited to co-chair a working group, called: "New Areas in Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation: Space Security and Cyber Security". He called...

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Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law together with the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and Google.org, convened a two-day workshop to advance strategic thinking on how to leverage new technologies to strengthen U.N. human rights monitoring around the world. Bringing together a small group of United Nations Human Rights Council mandate-holders, leading civil society activists, government representatives, and technologists working at the intersection of technology and human rights, the workshop developed concrete proposals for how technology platforms can be used to amplify the voices of mandate-holders, broaden their engagement with activists and citiz...

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