United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID)

When the Port au Prince area of Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in 2010, I shifted focus to one of redeveloping ICT and particularly communications capabilities as a key component to any effective emergency response or recovery effort. Subsequent postings included from there and added here are based upon white papers and emails sent as part of a developing dialog and effort, primarily on the part of the networking community that exists around and supports UN-GAID – its Champions Network.

Here, the focus starts with the crisis in Haiti but extends beyond that to the larger issues of more effectively preparing for the next major disaster, and with a faster and more immediately effective coordinated response.

Note that the postings included here are works in progress, and that I have not updated any of them in light of after the fact insight. So for example when references are made as to the potential for setting up steering committees for the Haiti response and for developing emergency response and recovery systems in general that simply reflected one approach that looked like it would be feasible at the initial time of writing. Everything here represents work and its supporting thinking and discussions in progress.

1. An Open Letter to UN-GAID.
2. An open letter to UN-GAID regarding Haiti and its recent earthquake disaster.
3. Creating societal as well as personal value through social networking.
4. Interoperability, connectivity and cooperation agreements.
5. Charting a course for action and developing and sharing best practices for emergency responses.
6. Communications and coordination of shared effort.
7. How do you prepare for extreme societal dislocations?.
8. Ubiquitous computing and communications and the implications of always on.
9. Planning, scalability and flexibility in emergency and disaster response systems.
10. When no infrastructure is left standing.
11. Proactively facing crisis and change management as separate points on a single continuum.
12. Citizenship in an increasingly global context 1: shareholder value, stakeholder value, and openly-sourced social value.
13. Citizenship in an increasingly global context 2: membership, citizenship, loyalty and belonging.