Blog Posts

A few years ago, under the great leadership of Eric Rasmussen the CEO of InSTEDD a set of exercises were run under the name StrongAngel. Those were a great success, but unfortunately with Eric’s move to InSTEDD they have not been repeated. We all know that trying out new technology during an actual crisis situation is bound to fail and often creates Read more

It was very interesting to attend the International Crisis Mappers Conference in Boston this weekend. It was especially great to see all the passion in the room, especially from the volunteer grassroots community, but also very important to see key players like UN, OCHA, World Bank, NATO send some key people there to get the conversation going Read more

The title of this blog post is taken from an IGNITE talk that Akiko Harayma gave at the International Crisis Mappers Conference 2010 in Boston. In her talk she used the analogy of the humanitarian workers and the crowd-based volunteers being from two different planets speaking two different languages. She pointed out in a great way how we need Read more

In this post I will discuss my mission to Haiti following the Haiti earthquake and the role technology played. Introduction Last January I was the team leader of the Icelandic Urban Search and Rescue team (ICE-SAR) that deployed to Haiti following the devastating earthquake that struck the island on the afternoon of January 12th. Our Read more

In this post I will discuss the need for closed collaboration groups for disaster coordination During a disaster the sharing of information is crucial. A large portion of that information is and should be publically available to everyone. Certain information, such as information about individual beneficiaries should however receive the appropriate privacy handling such sensitive Read more

In this post I will discuss ways to streamline information management in crowded yet occassionally connected environments. Introduction Crowdsourcing is rapidly becoming an important tool to use in disaster response as I described in my previous post. In that post I described how impromptu volunteer groups gathered to provide various forms of assistance to the Read more

This post describes a disruption that is under way in humanitarian related information management and processing. It describes the role that both crowds and clouds will play in this disruption that will lead to better ability to handle crisis. “There can be no deep innovation without an initial period of deep disruption” Introduction The January Read more