Humanitarian and Relief Blogging on the Rise
“Most exciting of all we’re also starting to use weblogs internally for team reporting, replacing more traditional after-the-event reports. Early days at the moment as we’re still rolling out our SharePoint system but the signs are encouraging.”
The ODI Blog from the good folks at the Overseas Development Institute in the UK have been blogging for a while and posted a review of their experience to date.Today, we recognise it is, at least, a useful communication tool and enjoys significant support. At its best, blogs can filter information from previously inaccessible sources; can convene different groups around a single issue providing a menu of opinions and links to further resources that conventional media finds it difficult to deal with; may offer the basis of a tightly knitted community of practice or interest group; and constitutes a cost-effective platform for individuals and organisations to join the global development debate.
I particularly appreciate their observations about how blogs can combine with other online tools such as flickr, Dgroups, Wikicities, etc. In my experience, the blog is a great outward facing tool, but there usually is additional need for smaller group and often private work and "meaning making" spaces. I see this like my family. There are some conversations we have in public, some in private.
Paul Currion, a great NPO blogger himself, has posted both about the Christian Aid blog, but also more generally about transparency and how blogging might help relief organizations and the public more fully understand each other. Like Paul, I believe that many non profits and NGOs have presented an unrealistic picture of themselves thinking that will enhance fundraising, only to find when the gap between reality and image is revealed, a huge drop in trust. Agencies and the public have to work together and I believe transparency is a huge asset. That said, it may take a while to get comfortable with it. (See also this post from ODI and this from Currion regarding a UK story on this issue. An important read if you are an NGO/NPO or the media covering the sector.)
At a meta level, people are starting to look carefully at the practice of humanitarian and relief blogging. Last week a group of high profile bloggers had an IRC chat (transcript) and started a wiki about it, hosted by Global Voices. (Looks like a great chat. Wish I had been paying better attention to my listserv messages!)
If you have other examples of NPO blogging, humanitarian relief or otherwise, please post a comment. It is time to start thinking about how this manifests as a network as well as individual efforts.
A few other relief/NPO blogs and posts, many culled from the above stories - thanks guys!:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=60
http://passionofthepresent.org/ (Sudan)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4720453.stm (Niger)
http://psdblog.worldbank.org/ (World Bank on private sector development)
http://peruexilio.civiblog.org/ (Peru, politics)
http://www.mobileactive.org/ (activism)
http://fundraising.blogspirit.com/ (fundraising and philanthropy, in Spanish)
http://www.culiuc.com/ (Moldovia)
Cross posted at BlogHer NPO Section on the newly launched BlogHer site. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: nptech, humanitarian, relief_blogging, blogging, NPO, NGO
posted by Nancy White at 8:35 AM
5 Comments:
Great Post. Check out the Interplast blogs at http://interplast.blogs.com. Interplast has been blogging for over year about our work empowering doctors and providing free reconstructive surgery in developing countries. We started blogging with only our surgical team trips, but we have since expanded the blogs to now cover visiting educator trips, a site evaluation trip currenlty going on in Africa, and our anesthesia conference in Guayaquil, Ecuador later this week.
Check out our controversial song. It's like Eminem and Fiona Apple wrote about Hurricane Katrina with a razor blade on the apathetic arms of America. Is She too numb to notice? You can't pick up the cd at your local Mega-Mart. This song is to mainstream radio what blogs are to mainstream media. Few will hear it and even fewer will understand it. Will you? www.HearTheRevolution.com
About humanitarian activities and Internet, I would like to mention a new non-profit NGO totally "net-oriented" called Donationpixel. Their goal is to collect money for different humanitarian projects around the world.
Their website offers the visibility of the donor - this could be interesting for many companies - the choice of the project and the country, and also the visibility of the work done in the field. They also give answers to different questions, like "Where goes my money?" or "what do they do with it?".
It seems to be an interesting new approach to encourage donations for vulnerables in poor countries. The URL is
http://www.donationpixel.org/index.php
Maybe a new way to attract more donation.
Thanks for your attention.
Robert
robertmauron@inbox.com
Hello
Allow me to bring to you attention of a new powerful intiative to address the landmine issue that we have in the world. There are an estimated 100 million landmines and people are being effected daily. This issue has been lost since the death of Princess Diana, but a needs urgently to be brought to the forefront again.
How many people were aware that the 4th April 2007 was International landmine awareness day ? Yet on that day people were dying or maimed by these horrific man made devices.
The “Sole of Africa” campaign ( http://www.thesoleofafrica.org.za ) has been created Mineseeker Foundation to address these issues and also the futures of those affected.
Our campaign is to use new technology using airships to scan the
ground. This technology has been tested and proven in the killing fields of Kosovo. We are able to scan the land at 100m2 and detect the presence of landmines and Unexploded Ordnance. By doing so we can quickly identify where and where not the landmines are. However, this solves is just one part of the problem, once we have identified and declared land safe from landmines, what then? This is why we
have partner with other NGO’s to form a program that’s vision is ‘Africa
feeding Africa’…
We are currently at the start of our global awareness campaign and we
are focussed on raising the landmine issue to the highest levels.
We have the backing of Nelson Mandela and high level patrons,
so we are confident that we will succeed.
Mineseeker Foundation (http://www.mineseeker.com) aims “to raise sufficient funds from Governments, commercial concerns and funding agencies to survey and map mine affected areas and through it’s initiative “The Sole of Africa”, to return liberated land back to food production.”
Put your foot down with us and get involved.
Best
Kai Von Pannier
Managing Director
Mineseeker SA
We are actually working on efforts to help support organizations such as these and we look forward to developing programs that will bring them greater global awareness.
karim ghachem
www.karimghachem.com
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