The ICT4Peace Foundation organised and facilitated a closed door roundtable meeting in Geneva, on 13 May 2010, to discuss the Crisis Information Management (CiM) strategy in general and how the response to the Haitian earthquake earlier this year informs progress on issues such as the creation and availability of core datasets and interoperability.
Participants included experts, academics and leading practitioners from Ushahidi, Microsoft, UN OCHA, UNHCR, WHO, Crisis Management Initiative, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, the University of Lugarno in Switzerland, the key architect of Ericsson Response and Media21, in addition to those from the ICT4Peace Foundation.The roundtable discussions were anchored to red Haiti and Beyond: Getting it Right in Crisis Information Management and the UN’s Crisis Information Management strategy. The Crisis Information Management Strategy (CiMS) is based on the recognition that governments, the UN, IFIs, non-governmental organisations, business and media have significant experience in crisis response. Yet, no single agency, department or actor has the capacity or sole mandate to address these crises. This makes it vital that everyone involved in disaster prevention and response harmonise the use tools and systems to produce, disseminate and archive information in a manner that can be scaled up or rapidly focused to deal with any type of crisis. The CiM strategy will help all actors, including the UN’s member states and agencies, to deal with all stages of a crisis lifecycle more efficiently and effectively.