ICT for peaceful purposes
Since 2004, the ICT4Peace Foundation has championed the strategic, sustainable and meaningful use of ICTs for crisis management, disaster risk reduction, peacebuilding and protection of human dignity. The Foundation’s sustained and strategic input, stocktaking exercises, evaluations, briefings, workshops and ideation has contributed to the strengthening of humanitarian aid structures, as well as the peacekeeping and peacebuilding – at the United Nations, and beyond. Uniquely, we work at and are called upon by the highest levels of government and inter-governmental bodies and also have deep, trusted, multi-stakeholder connections to grassroots activist, civil society and rights movements.
Pioneering output includes working with the UN on crisis information management platforms, developing the Crisis Information Management Strategy of the UN Secretary General (A/65/491), technical evaluations of key humanitarian platforms, contributing to the development of path-breaking information exchange protocols, the hosting of information sharing and collaboration platforms, creation of mission and disaster specific wikis, training on situational awareness and open source intelligence gathering including social media verification, strategizing the use of Big Data around peacekeeping and peacebuilding, the development of a rights based approach to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in support of peacekeeping and curation of an annual, high-level UN meeting on crisis information management from 2008 – 2015.
Since 2017, we have pioneered the conversations around the ethics, rights and use of Artificial Intelligence and related fields in peacebuilding, including the laws around the use of autonomous weapons in peacetime. We are also actively contributing to the thinking and research around frontier technologies that will increasingly define the information, peace and conflict landscapes.