Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, tweeted over 80 times on @ict4peace during the course of the first day of the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) held in Nairobi, Kenya at the United Nations office. The feed includes retweets from the organisers as well as other participants physically present at the venue, or virtually following proceedings over the live webcast or Twitter feed, with the hashtag #iccm.
The Foundation’s tweets flagged important points made by the organisers in their opening remarks, ignite presentations, questions to panellists and more broadly, observations about the use of technology for crisis prevention, mitigation, management and recovery.
Over the course of the day, the feed highlighted,
- The need for ethical frameworks to be incorporated more fully into apps, platforms and services for crisis information management and crisis-mapping
- Echoed the need for low-tech approaches (pen and paper, photocopies etc) to complement high-tech crisis-mapping
- Reminded participants that so-called first-mile and last-mile information generation using pen and paper was flagged as need as far back as the Strong Angel III exercise, a year after the devastating Asian tsunami
- Problematised the assumption that data on the cloud was inherently better than data stored locally, and questioned what happened to mission critical services, apps and platforms when the cloud went down
- Stressed the importance of including emergent technology like Brck in the Humanitarian Data Toolkit pioneered by Internews
- Noted that the interest of big corporate brands in crisis-mapping was in part a reflection of how important a field it had become, and how far it has matured
- Flagged two key resources around social media verification during emergencies
- Flagged an idea for telcos to alert first responders or next of kin whenever a customer was located close to an emergency or disaster area (see separate blog post on this, Telcos in emergencies: Using the mobile network to locate customers in distress)
- Flagged presentations that championed new tools, platforms and apps, questioning the sustainability of these initiatives and asking how many maps was too many
- Given the significant problems around connectivity during the keynote address with OCHA’s Andrej Verity, noting that it was a timely reminder of real field conditions around communications and bandwidth availability