The UN Foundation’s latest report, Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, has a great deal of quality data and information for the crisis preparedness community, but there are a few key takeaways with particular significance for the Sahana community.
If you haven’t read the report in its entirety, take a few minutes to do so. Here are a few points to whet your appetite:
- The report notes that Sahana “approach[es] problems in ways that challenge the status quo” while “struggling to attain financial sustainability.” As a community, we need to think through how to best meet the needs of our mission in a way that leads to the release of great code and sustained monetary support for key events like our annual meeting and development workshops. This item is on the agenda for our time in Lisbon, and we hope to make significant progress on this topic together.
- The report calls upon players in the crisis preparedness space to be trusted partners with traditional humanitarian relief and response agencies. Our community has done a wonderful job “playing well with others,” as shown in our development partnerships with the City of New York and beyond.
- The report repeatedly emphasizes the importance or open source and open standards, calling out the effectiveness of Sahana software’s in response to the Haiti crisis, specifically using the case study of our work to geo-locate hospitals in Haiti and making that data available via easy to access feeds in multiple data formats.
- Finally, the the report echoes our own efforts towards professionalization of our “industry” through devices such as a Humanitarian-FOSS code of conduct and a Maturity Model. We’re ahead of the curve in governance models, which is something of which our community should be tremendously proud.
What items in this report did you find particularly valuable or useful? What areas did it address that our community should be thinking about for our annual meeting and beyond? Bring your good ideas to Lisbon, or share them in the comments section.
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The report “Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies” does not exist or is no longer available. It is hard to judge the post “Sahana and the UN’s Disaster Relief 2.0 Report” without having proof of such report.
Any idea where the report might be available?
Best,
Hector
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Thanks for noticing this. Unfortunately, we can’t control when other sites reorganize, creating dead links on our site.
The report can now be found here: http://www.unfoundation.org/what-we-do/legacy-of-impact/technology/disaster-report.html and I’ve updated the links in this article.
We’ll also upload a copy to our wiki so it will always be available on our infrastructure here: http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org under publications and case studies.
Best regards,
Mark