Mobile technology and satellites are now key to linking humanitarian organizations to operations on the ground in real time, initial findings of a United Nations-backed study reveal.
The United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership and U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are working with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to conduct consultations on the use of technology to improve humanitarian response. A report on these technology-based improvements in humanitarian and disaster efforts is due in March.
Initial consultations also reveal the importance of Web-based services in facilitating data and information exchange.
“This movement from the narration of ongoing events in long stretches of unstructured prose to streams of data in short, semi-structured formats require humanitarian staff to perform double duty. They are simultaneously working within an existing system based on the exchange of situation reports while filtering and analyzing high volumes of short reports arriving via SMS (short messaging system) and web services,” John Crowley, team leader at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, writes in UN Dispatch.
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