Our most common verification strategies were to corroborate reports by checking online news, looking at attached photos or videos, asking our local volunteers to investigate personally or through their local contacts, or contacting the sender. We had an additional team on the ground that could travel to investigate and verify reports of large-scale fraud.

Our verification volunteers also had two additional trainings. First, they learned how to use ICT4Peace’s verification matrix plug-in, which helped administrators ascertain the reliability of reports. Second, they had training from Reuters reporters, as traditional media has developed a range of intricate verification strategies in the face of their need to draw from social media.

In addition, ICT4Peace’s Daniel Stauffacher and Sanjana Hattotuwa have been and will be teaching at the Folke Bernadotte Accademy.

In his presentation he referred to important recent initiatives such as Open Government Partnership (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/) of 8 founding countries lead by Bresil and the United States and 43 additional countries. The Open Government Partnership is a new multilateral initiative launched on 20 September 2011 that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a steering committee of governments and civil society organizations.

He then introduced a series of interesting open data initiatives that aim to foster transparency and efficiency in crisis management and development cooperation, inter alia such as Open Aid Partnership (http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/open-aid-partnership), The International Aid Transparency Initiative (http://www.aidtransparency.net/), OpenAid.SIDA, Schweden (http://www.openaid.se/en), Open Aid Data (http://open.aiddata.org/), Humanitarian Response – Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry (http://cod.humanitarianresponse.info/), Open Data For Resilience Intiative (OpenDRI) (http://gfdrr.org/gfdrr/opendri), Google Public Data (http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory).

Daniel Stauffacher’s conclusion was that open data can substantially support better crisis information management and development cooperation, for instance in helping implementing the Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry (http://cod.humanitarianresponse.info/). But in addition, he predicted that open government data and open data initiatives, combined with or leveraged by crisis mapping and crowd sourcing can even further enhance aid efficiency and transparency and humanitarian operations. A point that was eloquently also made by Caroline Anstey, a managing director of the World Bank in a recent op-ed in the International Harald Tribune in January 2011 (http://nyti.ms/w13s25).

Daniel Stauffacher’s presentation (in german language) can be found as a PDF here: http://bit.ly/yG59mL.
The Video presentation (in german language) can be found also under: http://www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.ch/2011/12/ogd-dinner/ or on youtube http://bit.ly/yLjI0f.

The ICCM network now features the video of this keynote on YouTube.

In this latest paper by the ICT4Peace Foundation, the authors have called for a non-binding code of conduct to strengthen cyber-security and mitigate the threat of growing cyber-security threats. The paper is a substantive basis for the call issued by the authors in an op-ed in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 6 July 2011, for such a non-binding code of conduct.

The paper describes also some recent developments in 2011 that took place at the policy-making level at the United Nations and important conferences in London and Berlin in the Fall of 2011.

Download the report as a PDF here or view it online here.

I am pleased to send you the ICT4Peace Foundation’s 2011 Year End Report, which you can read online here, or download as a PDF here.

2011 was, as the year before, rather tumultuous with the Arab Awakening and with political, economic and social upheaval affecting every corner of the globe. The year has also been marked by terrible natural disasters. It was a very busy year for the Foundation and as a larger community interested in promoting peace, democracy, human rights and development through the use of ICTs and social media. We believe great progress was made in increasing awareness and better understanding of the international community on the enormous potential that we have in using these social media, online platforms and ICTs in general.

An important event for the Foundation this year was the successful hosting, together with the Swiss Government and the EU Joint Research Centre, of the 2011 International Crisis Mappers Conference in Geneva. It was the largest ICCM gathering to date.

We continued our rich cooperation with UN ASG and CITO Dr. Soon-Hong Choi to support the implementation of the UN Crisis Information Management Strategy as part of the UN Secretary General’s overall UN ICT strategy. The Foundation also supported UN OCHA in building the Humanitarian Response – Common and Operational Datasets (CODs) Registry to make critical information during a humanitarian crisis more widely available and accessible.

The Foundation developed and carried out training courses in Crisis Information Management (CIM) for multidimensional and multi-stakeholders missions in peacekeeping and peace-building. The content was anchored to new dimensions in peacekeeping and disaster management, including harnessing the potential of new media, the web, Internet and mobile technologies for increased situation awareness.

The work on the ICT4Peace Ushahidi Matrix Plug-in on information validation continued over 2011 and tested during the recent Egyptian elections, as well as the historic first democratic elections in Tunisia.

Late this year, the Foundation underwent an evaluation of its work since 2006 by the Swiss Government. The very useful findings and recommendations reaffirmed the unique role and relevance of the Foundation and will help refine its strategy from 2012 to 2016. We hope to continue to champion the use of ICTs in all aspects of peacebuilding, peacekeeping and crisis management over 2012, and beyond.

With my best wishes,

Daniel Stauffacher

Das erste Dinner der Parlamentarischen Gruppe Digitale Nachhaltigkeit in der neuen Legislatur widmete sich dem viel diskutierten Thema Open Government Data. Was sind Chancen und Risiken frei zugänglicher Behördendaten? Was wurde bisher erreicht, was ist noch möglich? Welche politischen Gründe sprechen für bzw. gegen Open Government Data?

Zu diesen und weiteren Fragen informierten sich die über 60 Teilnehmenden des Parlamentarier-Dinners im Hotel Bern. André Golliez, Initiant von opendata.ch und Partner bei itopia AG, eröffnete den Abend mit einem Einstieg in die Thematik und zeigte aktuelle Trends der Open Government Data Bewegung auf (PDF-Folien). Anschliessend erläuterte der Direktor der Schweizerischen Landestopografie Jean-Philippe Amstein die aktuelle Daten-Situation bei der Swisstopo und wies auf die notwendigen Reformen hin, die für einen vollständigen Wechsel auf Open Government Data notwendig wären: Umverteilung von rund 15 Millionen Franken, welche die Swisstopo jährlich am kommerziellen Verkauf ihrer Daten verdient (PDF-Folien). Danach gewährte der ehemalige Botschafter und Gründer der Stiftung ICT4Peace Daniel Stauffacher einen Einblick in den internationalen Kontext und zeigte beispielhaft auf, welche Chancen Open Government Data für Hilfsorganisationen bezüglich Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und Nothilfe bei Katastrophen eröffnet (PDF-Folien).

See full article on Blog Digitale Nachhaltigkeit here.

28 November, Geneva, Switzerland – Daniel Stauffacher, Chairman, ICT4Peace Foundation, participated as a member of the Futurict project team in the EU FET Flagship Pilots Midterm Conference, 24-25 November 2011, Warsaw, Poland. This project is co-lead by Prof. Dirk Helbing, ETH Zürich and Prof. Steven Bishop, University College, London along with approximately 300 research teams all over the world. ICT4Peace has been supporting the efforts of Prof. Helbing and Prof. Bishop to build this important project since spring 2010.

The EU FET Flagships are ambitious large-scale, science-driven, European research initiatives that aim to achieve a visionary goal. The scientific advance should provide a strong and broad basis for future technological innovation and economic exploitation in a variety of areas, as well as novel benefits for society. The six selected FET Flagship Pilots were officially launched by EU Vice-President Neelie Kroes in May 2011 during the fet11 Conference in Budapest. The Midterm Conference in Warsaw was an opportunity for the six Flagship Pilots (FuturICT, Graphene, Guardian Angels, The Human Brain Project, EPFL Lausanne, ITFoM and RoboCom) to promote their projects in front of approximately 250 experts, including EC, national funding agencies and other stakeholders.

What is FuturICT?
We have built particle accelerators to understand the forces that make up our physical world. Yet, we do not understand the principles underlying our strongly connected, techno-socio-economic systems. We have enabled ubiquitous Internet connectivity and instant, global information access. Yet we do not understand how it impacts our behaviour and the evolution of society. To fill the knowledge gaps and keep up with the fast pace at which our world is changing, a Knowledge Accelerator must urgently be created. For this, the FuturICT flagship project will promote an interdisciplinary integration of natural, social, and engineering sciences with novel paradigms of information technology. This will produce the synergy effects required to address many of our 21st century challenges. After the age of physical, biological and technological innovations, FuturICT will lead Europe into the next era – a wave of information-driven social and socio-inspired innovations.

Globalisation and technological change have made our world a different place. This has created or intensified a number of serious problems, such as global financial and economic crises, political instabilities and revolutions, the quick spreading of diseases, disruptions of international supply chains, organised crime, international conflict and world-wide terrorism, and increased cyber-risks as well.

Although the creation of more and more interconnected systems and the pace of innovation in the area of information and communication technologies (ICT) have contributed to the above problems, future ICT can also be key to the solution. It can create unprecedented benefits for our economy and society, based on a whole range of new methods and innovations. For this, ICT must acquire the ability to flexibly adapt to the needs of society.

In this way, it can become a stabilising factor fostering transparency, trust, respect for individual rights, and opportunities for participation in social, economic, and political processes. This requires us to establish a new science of multi-level complex, global systems and a co-evolution of ICT with society, by bringing the best knowledge of experts on information and communication systems, complex systems and the social sciences together.

The vision of the FuturICT flagship project is to develop the capacity to explore and manage our future, based on a fundamental understanding of the institutional and interaction-based principles that make connected systems work well.

The methods and ‘Big Data’ needed for such a scientific endeavour are now becoming available: it is, therefore, time to make a ‘Big Science’ effort to couple methods and data with theories and models, like in the Human Genome Project. This endeavour should be open, because we need to prevent private monopolies of socio-economic data, and it should be federated, because joint interdisciplinary efforts are the only way to tackle humanity’s global challenges and ensure leadership in socio-inspired ICT innovations. The investments into the FuturICT project can benefit citizens and society in many ways: by promoting collective awareness of the impacts of our decisions and actions, by mitigating global problems and systemic risks, and by creating new possibilities to participate in social, economic and political affairs. In particular, FuturICT will create the basis for new spin-offs, business opportunities and jobs.

FuturICT is a visionary project that will deliver new science and technology to explore, understand and manage our connected world. This will inspire new information and communication technologies (ICT) that are socially adaptive and socially interactive, supporting collective awareness.

Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying our complex, global, socially interactive systems constitutes one of the most pressing scientific challenges of the 21st Century. Integrating complexity science with ICT and the social sciences, will allow us to design novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive technologies based on socially inspired paradigms. Data from a variety of sources will help us to develop models of techno-socioeconomic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inspire a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organised ICT systems. This will create a paradigm shift and facilitate a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society. In response to the European Commission’s call for a ‘Big Science’ project, FuturICT will build a largescale, pan European, integrated programme of research which will extend for 10 years and beyond.

Why do we need it?
Today, society and technology are changing at a pace that often outstrips our capacity to understand and manage them. It seems that we know more about the universe than about our society. Therefore it is time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. As the recent financial crisis demonstrates, the systems that we have built to organise our affairs now possess an unprecedented degree of complexity and interdependence among their technological, social and economic components. This complexity often results in counter-intuitive effects driven by positive feedbacks that lead to domino-like cascades of failures. Neither the precepts of traditional science, nor our collective experience from a simpler past, adequately prepare us for the future. It is simply impossible to understand and manage complex networks using conventional tools.

We need to put systems in place that highlight, or prevent, conceivable failures and allow us to quickly recover from those that we cannot predict. We need this insight to help manage our financial markets but also to tackle other risks, such as flu pandemics, social instabilities, or criminal networks. At the same time, policymakers are currently faced with major decisions of how to plan the general infrastructure of services to cope with the demands of the future, and what is more, to do so in a sustainable manner. The same decisions are also posed to individuals who wish to improve their own lives. Thus now is the time to create a paradigm shift moving from a focus on the system components and their properties towards evaluating their interactions. These interactions are often hard to measure but create collective, emergent dynamics, which are characteristic of strongly coupled systems.

How will it work?
The FuturICT flagship project will align the research of hundreds of the best scientists in Europe through a 10 year, €1 billion research programme to develop new methods which integrate different scientific models, data and concepts. To build capacity, regional support will be developed alongside educational programmes for young researchers.

FuturICT will build a sophisticated framework for simulation, visualisation and participation, called the FuturICT Platform. A suite of models forming the Living Earth Simulator will power Observatories, to detect and mitigate crises plus identify opportunities in specific areas. These models will be driven, and calibrated, by data aggregated in real-time, which are gathered by a digital Planetary Nervous System. Both models and data will support the decision-making of policy-makers, business people and citizens, through a Global Participatory Platform, which is intended to facilitate better social, economic and political participation.

What will be the benefit?
The FuturICT project will produce benefits for science, technology and society by integrating previously separated approaches. ICT systems of the future will provide the social sciences with the datasets needed to make major breakthroughs in our understanding of the principles that make socially interactive systems work well. This, in turn, will inspire the design of future systems, made up of billions of interacting, intelligent components capable of partially autonomous decisions. One goal is the creation of a privacy-respecting, reputation-oriented, and self-regulating information ecosystem that promotes the co-evolution of ICT with society. The tremendous growth in social media, mobile applications, Open Data and Big Data will enable complexity science to tackle practical problems by uncovering laws of interaction and help us understand the implications of strong couplings, thereby forging a new science of global systems that are more resilient to disruptions.

Furthermore, FuturICT will produce outcomes that are relevant to society, creating systems that help decision makers assess the implications of alternative strategies. FuturICT’s Global Participatory Platform will thus provide something like a policy ‘wind tunnel’ where the consequences of decisions can be explored. Hence the project will create a focus on resilience and sustainability.

Exemplar, case studies will be performed in order to address major challenges such as smart cities or smart energy systems, but also build up our capacity to model systems and understand data. Additionally these studies will improve our understanding of over-arching, key concepts such as risk, trust, resilience and sustainability which are relevant to a wide range of systems, including ICT systems. Having all this new information in place will allow FuturICT to study interactions among society, technology, environment and the economy through interconnected Exploratories. This will allow us to create an Innovation Accelerator that will discover valuable knowledge in the flood of information, help to find the best experts for projects, and support the distributed generation of new knowledge, hence promoting innovation.

FuturICT will start an era of social innovation, sparking off novel, socially inspired technologies, spin-offs and whole new business areas.

Who is involved?
Active collaborations are now taking place among Europe’s top universities with hundreds of researchers engaged in the project. Hubs to support regional activities have been created in many European countries. FuturICT communities also exist in USA, Japan, China, and Australia. Individuals and a wide range of scientific organisations have expressed their explicit support, as have small and big businesses. Each supporter recognises the vital importance of securing funds for this area of research to build European expertise within an integrated project and create an innovation economy based on the digital revolution, while at the same time benefiting humanity. Affiliations with existing complementary projects are being established and new projects are being encouraged.

FuturICT: National Focus Areas and Responsibilities
Regional hubs have been set up in many countries to coordinate activities. Some of the collaborating institutes are shown; we envisage different institutes joining the project as it develops. In addition collaborations have started with e.g. Microsoft Research, IBM, Telecom Italia, Yahoo! Research, Disney Research and many others. Please see the website www.futurict.eu for the full list and details of the hubs.

Contacts
Prof. Steven Bishop UCL, FuturICT.eu Pilot Phase Coordinator, email: sbishopuclacuk
Prof. Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich, Chair of FuturICT.eu Steering Committee, email: dhelbingethzch

Keynote Address by Delilah Al-Khudhairy on behalf of the European Commission’s inhouse science service at the Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Good Afternoon Dear Colleagues,

It is also my pleasure to welcome you to the 3^rd International Conference of Crisis Mappers.

As Patrick Meier and Jen Ziemke have mentioned, this is the first time this conference is held in Europe, whose location was chosen for several strategic reasons, three of which I would like to highlight:

• The European Union is the largest donor of humanitarian and development assistance globally
• The ICT sector in the EU account for some 8% of its GDP. Furthermore, the EU also has a seven year research programme at the European level with a budget of about 12 billion euros earmarked for R&D in ICT, Security and Space to address challenges in homeland security, civil protection, health security and global security challenges, including humanitarian disasters, amongst other issues. About 9 billion euros is for ICT research alone.
• Geneva is the host of a large number of UN Agencies and other Inter-governmental Organizations, NGOs and business companies engaged in humanitarian operations, and whose operational needs can help to guide academia, industry, research organisations and the crisis-mapping community to develop and deliver relevant and reliable products and services.

This year’s conference has been co-organised with ICT4PEACE Foundation, The Crisis Mappers and the Swiss Confederation who I would like to thank profusely for the effort and hospitality. Moreover, it has been a pleasure for our team to work closely with Daniel Staufacher, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Barbara Weekes since the beginning of this year. Our thanks are also extended to Patrick Meier and Jen Ziemke for helping us to transform together the N. America Crisis Mapper Experience into a European One and with who both the JRC and ICT4Peace Foundation have been working closely during the whole year to realize this Conference. Our thanks also extend to the World Bank, ESRI and the John Carroll University who have helped with sponsoring the Conference.

The goal of the 3^rd Int. Conf. for Crisis Mappers is to bring together practitioners, researchers, developers of ICT solutions and policymakers to discuss and assess the role of novel ICT solutions in the fields of emergency response and humanitarian aid interventions, as well as the challenges of main streaming ICT services and products in the operational practice of emergency response and humanitarian aid communities.

In the last decade, the use of ICT solutions has been steadily growing in the humanitarian and civil protection communities for a number of reasons: better and cheaper computers and mobile devices, cheaper and more accessible storage capability including through cloud computing, better spatial and temporal resolution satellite data and equally important better awareness and increasing confidence by the user communities in emergency response and humanitarian relief in the reliability and quality of ICT derived services and products. Today, we are seeing:

• the growing use of ICT solutions to support humanitarian and emergency response interventions in the field
• the accepted use of remote sensing derived products to support emergency and humanitarian interventions
• the increasing use of Web-based platforms to support information sharing and collaborative initiatives

But, more recently, and particularly since Haiti 2010, new interesting initiatives such as voluntary crowd sourcing and social media have entered the arena.

The opportunities provided through continuously evolving ICT solutions and new sources of information such as social media and voluntary crowd sourcing come along with new challenges we must address if we wish to mainstream them in the operational workflow of emergency response and humanitarian relief- They include:

• Massive information overload from all sorts of information sources, traditional and non-traditional
• Massive ICT overload
• New actors engaged in information generation

In addition, the new initiatives social media and crowd sourcing also raise the important challenge of information trust, reliability and sustainability.

The use of ICT solutions in the field, through for example, the combined use of web-based platforms and mobile devices, implies that we are able to quickly and in NRT transmit geo-located photos, videos, data communications and text reports from the field to situation centres, to voluntary initiatives, and to also share with and between actors in the field.  How do we build trust, reliability and sustainability in developments related to practitioner and voluntary information generation initiatives?

Remote sensing derived products and traditionally produced geo-information layers are routinely used today in support to emergency and humanitarian preparedness and response.  Usable, reliable and trusted products are key characteristics of products provided today by traditional service or information providers. Again, how do we build trust, reliability and sustainability in novel developments related to the new voluntary information generation type initiatives building around remote sensing and other geo-information data that we have seen evolve since Haiti last year?

Timeliness of relevant and trusted information is essential in the emergency and response phase of any crisis. Today, in the civilian domain, for a number of reasons, there are limited improvements we can expect from satellite-derived information in terms of providing a situational awareness at time intervals much more frequent than 24 hours on a daily basis over the same crisis spot. Therefore, there is an expected interest by actors in the emergency and humanitarian relief communities in understanding the limitations and added value of the use of field-based practitioner sensing and voluntary community sensing to address information gaps. In a number of recent disasters, the mainstream media appear to have taken up crisis mapping solutions as an integral part of the reporting. This is not yet necessarily the case in the emergency and humanitarian relief communities. Why?

The traditional emergency and humanitarian relief processes were designed around sharing information between known and trusted teams and their partners – they were not designed to easily integrate information from new sources such as social media or voluntary geo-information production initiatives. They also cannot always adapt quickly their workflows to accommodate new ICT solutions, new voluntary crisis mapping teams or to quickly integrate local volunteered information.

This means there is still a lot of work ahead of us to build more trust in new ICT uses and to systemize and mainstream this in the operational workflow of emergency and humanitarian relief communities. And this also applies to new crisis crowd sourced and voluntarily generated geo-information. 

Furthermore, we should keep in mind that Natural Disasters, conflicts and other types of disasters are not reducing. The total number of disaster events is trending up: The first half of 2011 has already produced more events than most years before 2006. This increasing trend will ofcourse add a strain on practitioners engaged in emergency preparedness and response, who have to save lives and improve the well being of survivors, particularly those who have a mandate to act in disasters and crises inside and outside the EU or widely outside the EU. They need trusted, reliable and sustainable information and tools that they can easily integrate in their operational workflow. Therefore, we have two enormous challenges ahead of us:

• Building and maintaining trust, reliability and sustainability as a regular feature in traditional geo-information products and ICT services
• A better understanding of the challenges, the needs and design for trust, reliability and sustainability of new sources of information originating from community sensing or crowd source mapping or other, and how best to use them in complement to traditional geo-information products and ICT services.

What we wish to avoid, particularly for the practitioner, is to have more information at the expense of having less relevant, less reliable and less trustworthy information. Trust, reliability and sustainability will remain the largest challenge.

Thank you.

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 technology in crisis response. The Crisis Mapping field has emerged in the last five years as a dynamic web of advanced technology, user generated mapping, and new methodologies in crisis reporting.

The overarching themes of ICCM 2011 were validation, security, key partnerships between formal humanitarian organisations and informal volunteer networks, scalability of crisis mapping projects and the challenges resulting from as well as potential of mainstreaming crisis mapping into humanitarian relief and aid.

Delilah Al-Khudhairy on behalf of the European Commission’s inhouse science service, JRC and Sanjana Hattotuwa on behalf of the ICT4Peace Foundation delivered keynote addresses that were very well received by the participants. In her address, Delilah Al-Khudhairy repeatedly stressed the need to strengthen trust, reliability and sustainability of new sources of information originating from community sensing or crowd source mapping. She went on to note that “What we wish to avoid, particularly for the practitioner, is to have more information at the expense of having less relevant, less reliable and less trustworthy information” adding that “We must remember that one of the key success measures in emergency and humanitarian relief response is whether the ICT services and geo-information products or the novel volunteered crowd sourced information can or has helped to save more lives, to further improve the well being of affected communities, and to further increase our society’s resilience to future disasters”.

In his keynote address, Sanjana Hattotuwa reiterated the importance of these points and went on to draw in broad brushstrokes the new landscape of ICTs in humanitarian relief and aid work. Flagging enduring concerns over information overload, the technical challenges of curating crowd sourced data as well as enduring organisational challenges of more efficient and effective response in the face of rising expectations and public scrutiny, Sanjana also stressed the importance of sharing failure and beyond the telegenics, hype and promotional material around technology platforms and tools, the fact that crisis mapping matters only when it helps save lives.

Over 20 Ignite Talks on Day 1 followed the keynote presentations. At five minutes each, these presentations delivered a glimpse into the world of crisis mapping, and how far it has progressed from even three years ago. Presentations ranged from cutting edge technical innovation and social engineering to the protection of civilians in violent conflict.

On Day 2, self-organised sessions at ICCM lookedin-depth at a diverse range of issues and challenges, ranging from verification frameworks for crowd sourced data and quality standards to operational security for crisis mappers and opening up humanitarian information. All sessions were well attended and participants actively contributed to the discussions, making the interactions lively, probing and informative.

ICCM 2011, as planned by the ICT4Peace Foundation and JRC, brought together a more diverse participation than earlier ICCM conferences, with students and academia from across Europe including the UK interacting with practitioners with years of field experience, social entrepreneurs, UN staff, European and Swiss based NGO representatives as well as media, in addition to the many familiar faces who flew in from across the Atlantic.

Sponsors for ICCM 2011 included ESRI, John Carroll University, and the World Bank, who were present at the event. The conference curators on behalf of JRC and ICT4Peace were Tom de Groeve, Barbara Weekes, Patrick Meier and Jen Ziemke.

The next ICCM is planned for Autumn/Fall 2012, in Washington DC.

Delilah H.A. Al Khudhairy B.Sc (Eng), PhD from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre delivered this keynote at VALgEO 2011, held from 18 – 19 October 2011. Daniel Stauffacher, Chairman of the ICT4Peace Foundation was also present and spoke on “The Role Of Validation In Information And Communication Technologies (Ict) For Crisis Management“.

###

Good Morning Dear friends and colleagues,

I see several familiar faces and several new ones too.

Welcome to the 3rd Valgeo workshop on Validation of geo-information products for crisis management’.

One of our initial aims of the first workshop was to create a community of interested organisations in sharing know-how, best-practices and needs in order to help to:

1. Improve the process of validation of information products derived not only from remotely sensed data but also from other sources.
2. Facilitate the exchange of developments and other initiatives addressing validation of crisis relevant information
3. Facilitate the exchange of needs between practitioners and the scientific research community

Validation of geo-information has several dimensions including relevance, reliability, and quality, which in turn address issues such as readability and usability of crisis relevant information.

At Valgeo, whilst we endeavor to cover all aspects, we have focused until now on the Quality dimension.

Why is it important to discuss Validation in crisis management in settings like the Valgeo workshop?

Well it is important because of the proliferation in the methods that are used by all sorts of actors for deriving, visualising, mapping, sharing and distributing information relevant to crisis management particularly during the preparedness and response phases. This is evident in:

• the growing use of ICT to support interventions in the field
• the accepted use of remote sensing derived emergency support products
• the use of Web-based platforms to support information sharing and collaborative initiatives
• the availability and use of crowd sourced and volunteered geo information in certain types of crises

The use of ICT in the field, through for example, the combined use of web-based platforms and mobile devices, implies that we are able to quickly and in NRT transmit geo-located photos, videos, data communications and text reports from the field to situation centres, to voluntary initiatives, and to also share between actors in the field. How do we build Validation in these developments, where time is an issue, so that their added-value of NRT field-based situational awareness can be taken up by practitioners, bearing in mind that information collected or volunteered will in the future no longer be expected or necessarily be only provided by practitioners in the field but they can also be potentially provided by ordinary citizens or even as we have seem in some disasters like Haiti non-expert or experts distributed around the world? We will hear several examples during the workshop on research and applications on these issues.

Remote sensing derived products are routinely used today in support to emergency preparedness and response. Routine validation is essential to ensure that data, methods and processes used are regularly reviewed and improved to assure delivery of usable, reliable and relevant information. During the workshop we will hear about experiences on the validation process established and used within the framework of activities such as the GMES SAFER project and others. My colleague, Torsten Redlinger, from the GMES Bureau may also touch upon this point. The question here is not so much do we have to have a harmonized validation process, but rather how do we regularly share know-how and best practices and build validation in our work flow to ensure that the beneficiary at the end of the day is the user of crisis relevant information.

Timeliness is essential in the emergency phase of any crisis. Today, in the civilian domain, for a number of reasons, there is limited improvement we can expect from satellite-derived information in terms of providing a situational awareness at time intervals more frequent than 24 hours on a daily basis over the same hot spot. Therefore, there is an expected strong interest in understanding the added value of the use of practitioner sensing and community sensing to address the information gaps and to complement satellite-derived situational awareness through providing NRT or RT field or on the-spot based situational awareness. Some initial validation work is already underway in initiatives such as Ushahidi. How much can this initial work be accommodated to address scenarios beyond the ones it was designed for? If we need to design a new validation process that can accommodate practitioner and community sensor information, what factors do we need to consider, bearing in mind that practitioner sensing is controlled up to a certain point, whereas community sensing is voluntary?

Natural Disasters, conflicts and other types of disasters are not reducing. In 2010, the global impact of natural disasters took a turn for the worse with an increase in fatalities and economic damage. There were 385 NDs worldwide that killed more than 297,000 people, affected over 217 million others and caused about $ 124 billion in economic damages (ref. Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2010).

The total number of disaster events is trending up: The first half of 2011 has already produced more events than most years before 2006. This increasing trend will ofcourse add a strain on practitioners engaged in emergency preparedness and response who have to save lives and improve the well being of survivors, particularly those practitioners who have a mandate to act in disasters and crises inside and outside the EU or widely outside the EU. They need information and tools that they can easily integrate in their work process and that will help them to respond faster. Therefore, we have two enormous challenges ahead of us:

• Building and maintaining validation as a regular feature in traditional satellite-based information products.
• Better understanding the challenges, the needs and design for validation of new sources of information coming from the field and other sources and originating from different types of actors (namely practitioner versus community sensing), and how best to utilize them in complement to traditional geo-information products.

In the validation process, especially with increasing use of non-traditional novel sources of information, trust will remain the largest challenge. What we wish to avoid, particularly for the practitioner, is to have more information at the expense of having less relevant and less trustworthy information.

These are the sort of challenges the Valgeo community can and should address so that we can make progress together on identifying follow-up actions and recommendations that can help to lead to benefits for the emergency response and post-disaster recovery communities as well as help those communities to uptake and mainstream technological advances in information with a practical form pf validation playing an integral part.

A warm Welcome once again to you my friends and colleagues and I look forward to a productive two days workshop.

I shall hand you over to Martino Pesaresi and leave you in his good pair for hands as the chair of the workshop.

Thank you.

This system is based on the principle of sending reports via SMS by the ISIE accredited observers to inform, for example on an offense or assault in a polling station.

This system allows ISIE to develop a dashboard of the conduct of the elections and to react in time to overcome any problems or offenses.

Through the platform every citizen will be informed in real time of the electoral process and election related violence incidents and he and the Government can react to the reports. The site does not include violations of the election campaign reported by the press and electronic media.

Adresse URL de la Carte : http://carte.isie.tn/fr/?l=fr_FR

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Dans le cadre de la réalisation de ses missions, l’Instance supérieure Indépendante pour les Elections ( ISIE ) a mis en place, grâce à la coopération avec la DCAF et avec le concours de la Fondation ICT4Peace , un système de contrôle de transparence et de régularité de l’organisation des élections et de sécurité du processus électoral.

Ce système est basé sur le principe d’envoi de rapports via sms pas les contrôleurs de l’ISIE pour dénoncer une infraction ou pour informer d’une agression dans un bureau de vote, les observateurs accrédités peuvent participer à ce système.

Ce système permet :

• à l’ISIE de dresser un tableau de bord de la marche des élections et de réagir à temps pour pallier à tout problème ou infraction,
• à tout citoyen d’être informé du déroulement du processus électoral et de réagir par rapport aux rapports qui figurent dans la carte ou de les commenter.

Le site ne comprend pas les violations de la campagne électorale enregistrée sur les médias.

Adresse URL de la Carte: http://carte.isie.tn/fr/?l=fr_FR

Download the report here. View full screen here.

Monitoring Tunisia’s first election: Rapport Preliminaire | Preliminary Report

Depuis la révolution populaire en Tunisie, “l’Instance Supérieure Indépendante pour les Elections” (ISIE) a invité la fondation Suisse ICT4Peace et Ushahidi pour appuyer les élections du 23 Octobre 2011 en mettent en ligne une plateforme de surveillance des élections (Carte de Contrôle du Processus Electoral; http://carte.isie.tn/fr/main). Le projet est financièrement et institutionnellement appuié par DCAF Genève.

Sous la Direction de Kamal Sedra d’Egypte, principal conseillier technique de la fondation ICT4Peace, Eya Lahmar et Khaled Koubaa de Tunisie, Imad Bazzi du Liban et Farid Boushra de l’Egypte, experts de la fondation ICT4Peace ont installé la plateforme Ushahidi et formé les cartographes et les vérificateurs au siège de l’ISIE.

Un réseau de 850 observateurs représentant l’ISIE sont employés sur le terrain partout en Tunisie a envoyer des observations et des rapports via sms vers le portail où ils sont validés par les cartographes et les vérificateurs avant d’être téléchargé en ligne sur le portail en ligne carte.isie.tn qui est disponible dans la langue Arabe et Française.

Vous pouvez aussi suivre les cartographes et les vérificateurs en direct à travers une vidéo en streaming en cliquant sur le lien ci-dessous.

In support of the first elections since the revolution in Tunisia on 23 October 2011, the Tunisian “Higher Independent Election Committee” or “Instance Supérieure Indépendante pour les Elections” (ISIE) has invited the ICT4Peace Foundation of Switzerland and Ushahidi to put in place the online election monitoring platform: “Carte de Controle du Processus Electorale“. The project is financially and institutionally supported by DCAF, Geneva.

Under the leadership of Kamal Sedra, ICT4Peace Senior Technical Advisor from Egypt, the ICT4Peace experts Eya Lahmar and Khaled Koubaa from Tunisia, Imad Bazzi from Lebanon and Farid Boushra from Egypt installed the Ushahidi platform and trained the mappers and verificators at ISIE headquarters.

A network of 850 trained reporters representing ISIE are deployed on field all over Tunisia sending reports and observations via sms to the portal where it will be validated by the mapping and verification center before it makes it to the online front-end of the portal carte.isie.tn which is available in Arabic & French.

You can also check the live video streaming page below showing the mapping and verification centre. You can also view this live stream directly here.

The ICT4Peace Foundation once again taught at the first of its kind Master of Advanced Studies in Humanitarian Logistics and Management Programme (MAS HLM) at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Sanjana Hattotuwa was the lead trainer from the Foundation, and collaborated with Andrew Alspach from UN OCHA who taught the fundamentals of crisis information management.

In addition to UN OCHA’s content, the Foundation did three sessions on the use, dangers and role of web, Internet and mobile technologies, tools and platforms in crisis information management. This included a comprehensive overnight simulation exercise that involved using around 35 of the leading crisis information management platforms in use today.

The Foundation and OCHA first taught this Masters level programme in 2010. Overall, the course aims to,

• Increase the capabilities and capacity of information management amongst staff involved in humanitarian affairs
• Begin steps towards professionalization and mainstreaming of Information Management in humanitarian responses
• Expose participants to cutting-edge information and communications technologies and new media tools
• Provide hands-on experience in the use of some of these tools, using simulations that mirror ground realities
• Promote the understanding of information management as a core skill in crisis response, preparedness and recovery.

…It is now a given that ICTs are front and centre in relief and aid work, irrespective of the nature of the disaster and where it occurs. Several significant challenges remain. Issues of sustainability, clear relationships with the United Nations, Governments, the role of crisis mapping in complex political emergencies, ownership and use of data, data architecture, and stakeholder management are some of these. The variance in the response—some disasters are seemingly more telegenic than others—is another challenge. Currently, for example, the Horn of Africa famine and the associated crises gravely affecting millions of people has not animated the crisis-mapping community and its online platforms to the extent of post-Haiti or, more recently, following the 2011 earthquake in Japan. Unfortunately, there are still “silent disasters” for which ICT can be used, but are often not to the extent possible or desirable.

Today, the CiMs process is well recognized within the UN system, and has moved from championing the use of ICT in relief work to championing a more robust framework for their adoption and use. Senior leadership in many agencies are embracing social networking and web-based tools, but this is still haphazard, with little or no organizational vision. Interoperability is still an issue—data created in some platforms, no matter how good they are, are still difficult to export and use in other systems. Financial and knowledge resources to train information management workers, especially at the field level, remain scarce. The Foundation’s engagement with UN agencies over the years on CIM suggests, enduring challenges over data sharing between the crisis mapping community, which is itself fractured, and United Nations agencies.

With ICT constantly evolving, the UN system needs to remain agile and aware of how these technologies can help prevent, mitigate, and respond to crises. The UN system is the international community’s “long-tail”—present in disaster areas long after global media attention and the swarm of NGOs have moved on. It is vital, therefore, to support the CiMS process as a means through which, in the future, the UN system can respond more efficiently and effectively to the plethora of challenges that beset us.

Read the article in full here.

Image courtesy The Lede, New York Times

Together with its partners, the Cairo Regional Center for Training  on Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa (CCCPA), the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) Sweden, Zentrum für Internationalen Friedensdienst (ZIF), Germany, The Center for Crisis Management (CMC), Finland and the African Peace Support Trainers’ Association,  (APSTA), the ICT4Peace Foundation will conduct from 9 to 13 October 2011 a pilot JMAC–Crisis Information Management Course, which  aims to strengthen the skills and capabilities of present and future senior level staff of  UN, African Union or other Peacekeeping and Peace-building Mission Analysis Centres, be they civilian, military or police, in collecting, analysing, assessing and producing information for better crisis management and decision making at UN peace mission level involving a wide range of stakeholders. It also aims at developing African capacities for peace operations. The Course will also demonstrate the opportunities and challenges of these new ICTs and social media tools and provide some reality based simulation exercises. The Swiss Government financially supports the contribution of ICT4Peace.

Efficient and timely provision of shared situational awareness (SSA) and professional crisis information management are essential to enable decision-making in Multi-dimensional Peace Operations and are a prerequisite for effective action and integrated approach, founding principles of the United Nations and African Union integrated missions.

Ultimately, successful integration and coordination requires a high degree of sensitivity to the interest and operating cultures of a broad set of actors, and efficient and appropriate Information Management (IM). For this purpose, for instance, the UN has established Joint Mission Analysis Centres (JMAC) in peace missions that are staffed by civilian, military and police peacekeeping personnel. JMAC’s role is the provision of reliable information to decision-makers to make accurate and appropriate decisions in crisis situations – whether humanitarian or conflict based – using openly collected information from a variety of uniformed and civilian sources. These include modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) using social media, crisis mapping, and crowd sourcing as essential tools already used by the international community in crises.

The Folke Bernadotte Academy has carried out the Information and Intelligence Cooperation in Multifunctional International Operations Course, and contributed to the Development of the Nordcaps United Nations Joint Mission Analysis Centres Course. The Cairo Regional Center for Training on Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa (CCCPA) and the ICT4Peace Foundation have cooperated in the past, in organizing Training Programs for Multidisciplinary Integrated Missions in Africa and a Training Programme for Integrated Missions to Overcome the Lack of Shared Situational Awareness in Peacekeeping Operations. ICT4Peace has supported the Kofi Annan International Peace-keeping Training Center (KAIPTC) in Ghana to develop a Crisis Information Management Course and carried out a Crisis Information Management Training Course at the Master Programme on Humanitarian Logistics and Management of the University of Lugano USI), together with OCHA.

At the Conference of the International Association od Peacekeeping Training Centers, IAPTC 2010 in Dhaka, ICT4Peace organized a workshop on a potential JMAC-CiM course, which was well received. Following that conference, FBA, CMC, ZIF, CCCPA and ICT4Peace agreed to jointly develop a Senior JMAC-CiM training course, building on the experiences of the above-mentioned courses and organisations, and in coordination with UN and the African Union. Subsequently ICT4Peace and its partners organized a one day workshop – kindly hosted at and by ZIF in Berlin, to discuss and develop the content of a new training course, under the leadership of Jacques Baud, Director of the course in Cairo, a former Head of the JMAC in Sudan and a Senior Advisor of the ICT4Peace Foundation. The course in Cairo is an integral part of and supports the implementation of UN Secretary General’s Crisis Information Management Strategy (CiMS), developed by the UN ASG Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO), Dr. Soon-hong Choi, in cooperation with the ICT4Peace Foundation.

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 expression, freedom of the press and information, as well as the independence, pluralism and diversity of media of the UN World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 (Geneva Declaration of Principles).

Nine important Africa media organisations have co-signed in Cape Town the following certificate to honour Alain Modoux:

“The Working-Group Windhoek + 20 Coalition salutes Alain Modoux for his seminal role in initiating the 1991 Windhoek conference on free, independent and pluralistic journalism and for championing the Windhoek Declaration through the United Nations General Assembly and UNESCO. Your sterling efforts helped produce a conference resolution that continues to resonate today, particularly in the form of World Press Freedom Day – a benefit for both journalists and the global public. In this way, you Alain Modoux have helped to give life to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that everyone shall enjoy the right to freedom of expression which includes the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas.”

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 management and peace-building. In addition, the two partners will cooperate in the exchange of facilitators, experts, participants, training materials, and other relevant information. To that aim ZIF and ICT4Peace together with the Cairo Regional Center for Training on Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa (CCCPA), Egypt, The African Peace Support Trainers’ Association (APSTA), The Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA), Sweden, The Center for Crisis Management (CMC), Finland have developed and will pilot a new training programme on crisis information management for Senior personnel for Joint Mission Analysis Centers (JMAC) and similar units in UN, African Union Peace operations. This course has been developed to strengthen and improving situational awareness and information management in crisis.

The ultimate goal is that this course will also given by African Peace-keeping and Peace-building Training Institutions, along with European Training Institutions, to cover the increasing need of qualified information managers in crisis operations.

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 the success of this implementation, the Matrix Analysis plugin as outlined on ICT4peace website (http://ict4peace.org/publications/the-matrix-plugin-for-ushahidi-platform) and as provided on Ushahidi plugin repository (http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/analysis/page/Analysis-Plugin/) will be further developed as part of the main Ushahidi platform.

The ICT4Peace Foundation was and is supporting the design and development of this core functionality that is vital to any bounded crowd sourcing model such as election monitoring and early warning on genocide. The new functionality will embrace the following features:

• Multiple groups plugin for several separate “bound” and “non bound”-reporting reporting communities on the same platform. This keeps data centralized while allowing each of the groups to keep reports and messages private until they decide to make them public. This can allow for collaboration of different agencies that have varying levels of comfort with sharing data publicly.
• Groups can white list phone numbers so that messages are forwarded to their group.
• Each group can have a logo and html about page for themselves, where they can relay their responses/data gathering activities
• Each group can manage its approved and unapproved reports with their administration interface.

Several screenshots of the first avatar of the functionality, as used in the Egyptian elections, follow.

For further details, please contact Mr. Daniel Stauffacher, Chairman, ICT4Peace Foundation on danielstauffacherict4peaceorg.