The ICCM 2014 conference in New York, which the ICT4Peace co-funded and co-curated, concluded successfully. The Foundation’s support of ICCM extends a number of years. In 2011, the Foundation organised ICCM in Geneva, the first time it was held outside the United States. Since then the Foundation has been part of the core team of organisers and as was the case in Nairobi in 2013, helped in the selection of sponsored fellowships for well over half a dozen individuals from around the world to attend ICCM.
Working with Google, the Foundation also led key revisions around the ICCM’s format for New York, allowing for more audience interaction and feedback during the conference, especially around the Ignite Talks and keynotes also through the use of the web based Google Moderator tool. These changes were extremely well received by the participants, making the Q&A sessions one of the most probative and lively they have been since the launch of ICCM.
The Foundation also helped select this year’s Ignite Talks. The speakers covered a number of important issues including gender, the importance of addressing PTSD and mental health (which the Foundation has flagged for a number of years), mapping initiatives and the use of UAV’s in crises. Hearteningly, this year’s ICCM also saw a specific rights focus dealing with political violence and crises anchored to ethno-political violence. A number of the Ignite Talks dealt with how crisis mapping, writ large, could help in human rights documentation and bearing witness.
The agenda of ICCM New York reflected the theme of the conference, which focussed on affected communities.
The Foundation facilitated the keynote of the UN’s Chief Information Technology Officer Ms. Atefeh Riazi, who joined Dr. Jemilah Mahmood, Chief of the World Humanitarian Summit and Rt. Hon. David Milliband, the Head of the International Rescue Committee in delivering some very thought provoking speeches around the use of technology in crises and to combat the abuse of rights.
Sanjana Hattotuwa, who took the lead on behalf of the Foundation in supporting ICCM, asked a number of questions from the keynote speakers, including,
- What the role could and should be for the UN in embracing innovation? What challenges there were in increasing engagements with the private sector around crisis information mapping?
- Despite early warning and increasing prevalence of technology, what really had changed regarding the political will to address violence?
- Whether institutions were really ready for accountability and public scrutiny afforded by increasing use of technology and the transparency resulting thereof. In moving from merely reactive to truly responsive institutions, whether the policymaking still lagged behind innovation and technological developments.
All of the tweets published during ICCM New York by the Foundation can be accessed here. These include retweets and conversations over Twitter around the issues debated at ICCM.
Archived videos of the keynotes and Ignite Talks, as they were streamed live, can be accessed here. Tweets around ICCM in New York were published under #iccmnyc. The Foundation’s Facebook page has some photos taken during ICCM.