Led by the UN’s Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) and organised by the ICT4Peace Foundation, the 2013 Crisis Information Management Advisory Group (CiMAG) meeting was held on 2nd and 3rd May in Glen Cove, New York. Representatives from UNOCC, UNITAR, UNDP BCPR, UNICEF, OHCHR, OICT, OCHA, DFS/DPKO, UNHCR and UNOSAT participated along with, on the second day, representatives from Google Crisis Response, Human Rights Watch, Sahana Software Foundation, Standby Volunteer Task Force, World Bank OpenDRI. Representatives from the New Media Task Force were invited but due to unavoidable circumstances, could not attend. Overall observations It was the best-attended CiMAG retreat thus far, with...

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Dutch Red Cross worker Meike Groen, working for the ICRC in Haiti, helps people use the satellite phone to reassure relatives that they are alive, via Flickr. © ICRC / Marko Kokic / ht-e-00459 / www.icrc.org ICRC and InterAction: Consultation on “Protection in violent situations – standards for managing sensitive information” Date and Location: 23 August 2012, Washington DC Participants: Civilians in Conflict, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, ICRC, ICT4Peace Foundation, IMMAP, InterAction, International Rescue Committee, Sahana Foundation, Standby Task Force, Ushahidi, World Vision, Contact at ICRC: Guilhelm Ravier, gravier@icric.org ICT4Peace Foundation represented and this note penned by ...

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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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The ICT4Peace Foundation recognises UN OCHA's new publication Humanitarianism in the Network Age as a significant contribution to our understanding of how new technologies including new web based social media, are reshaping our fundamental understanding as well as the design and delivery of humanitarian aid and relief work across the world, and indeed, beyond the UN. The report cites our publication Peacebuilding in the Information Age: Sifting Hype from Reality. As far back as 2011, the Foundation's paper looked at difficult questions and provided concrete recommendations concerning: the effectiveness of current systems of crisis information management; the need for a comprehensive assessment of the effect...

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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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