When a large scale disaster strikes the world watches. Twitter gets flooded with reports, pictures and prayers. CNN, BBC, Sky News and Al Jazzera all break their regular programs to show us terrifying images of what is happening.

Thankfully only 2-3 large scale disasters strike every year. Depending on the magnitude and location of the disaster, the media and people loose interest within a few days or weeks. At the same time we have many medium scale disasters that happen around the world on almost a daily basis. If they strike US then we hear about them for a while, but if they happen in remote places of the world like Sri Lanka, Indonesia or Ghana then they at usually go un-noticed by most people. This is however usually not the case for the local media and the local population of the country affected.

In the last 2 years we have seen efforts being born around utilizing social media, social networks and digital volunteer groups to help deal with the explosion of information that we now get through mobile phones and social media. While these efforts are promising and do provide us with opportunities for gathering, processing, analyzing and disseminating information in ways we have not been able to do so far, then they do fall short in one important part and that is that they are not sustainable for the long-term and repeatable for the large number of disasters that occur every year.In my visits to disaster prone countries, where I have been speaking to them about the importance of preparedness, they all spoke of interest in all of these new technologies and efforts that have been getting so much attention in the press and at conferences around the world.

What they complain about is that nobody has reached out directly to them and shown them how they can make use of these tools. The reason is that we in the global humanitarian and technology community have been too focused on trying to figure out how to do things at a global scale that we have largely ignored the local perspective. Some might argue that the jet-setting trips of the leaders of the digital volunteer community to conferences around the world have been focusing on this effort, but I would like to argue that in most cases these have not necessarily resulted in more than short-term awareness building. Often these conferences have also been mainly attended by people who are not active in the disaster response community.One could also say that recent efforts of setting up crowd-maps following disasters in Pakistan, New Zealand and Japan, driven by local actors are samples of how things really work.

While I agree that great work has been done by those local actors, then I would also argue that much greater work could have been achieved if we had focused more on preparedness and building local capacity before these disasters struck. Then we could have ensured that the information gathered was actionable and relevant to the response. We could also have ensured that the response community was utilizing this new medium to the fullest.Over the last year we have put a lot of focus into building a global capacity to deal with crisis. We have established the Stand-by Volunteer Task Force, we have established connections with the global response community (UN, NGOs, Red Cross) and we have had great examples of how this effort can really provide information to the response community.A promising change to this was an effort lead by the US State Department that started last week in Indonesia under the name TechCamp Jakarta. There they brought together key people from the new technology community and some of the actors from the local response community. It was a great first step, but more is needed to follow up on this.

What we need to do is to put focus on building up local capacity in disaster prone countries, especially those in the developing world. We can then leverage the global capacity we have already built up to help support these local efforts when their capacity is overwhelmed. We can also leverage the technologies, processes and training we have already put together for these global efforts. So what is needed to build up that local capacity?

1) We need to bring together the various actors involved in disaster response in the country. This includes the government, the UN, the NGOs, etc. Often there may be existing forums that can be leveraged, but often these need to be extended to ensure inclusiveness of all the local actors.

2) We also need to bring in the local technology community. They are the ones who can help adapting the global solutions to the local needs. This includes members of the local open-source community, but also people from the private sector technology companies.

3) We also need to bring in the academic community. Students have in the past been the basis for any grass-root effort we have seen around crisis information management. Together these various actors from the different communities make up the local crisis information community.

4) We need to provide standardized & localized, on-line and in-person training to this community on how to utilize these technologies to achieve better information sharing during disasters.

5) We need to drive awareness of the potential of these efforts to the response community. Through that awareness building we can build the relationships needed between the volunteer community and the response community

6) We need to provide standardized yet flexible processes that the local community can utilize to ensure that their efforts are actually resulting in providing actionable and accurate information to the response community.

7) We need to work with the local mobile providers to establish short-codes for citizens to use for direct reporting into the systems.

8) We need to provide the local community with awareness building material (advertisements, banners, etc.) to build a volunteer community and to make citizens aware of short-codes.

9) We need to provide the local community with mentorship from the global community on establishing the community and running this effort.

10) We need to work with local web portals (newspaper, social networks, etc.) to get them to direct people towards the efforts of the local community instead of establishing their own.

11) We need to help the local community run simulation exercises where they can train their volunteers and first responders in utilizing the technologies.

12) We need funding from the donor community to help drive these efforts in 20 of the top disaster prone countries in the world.

In my discussions with the response community in Indonesia, then the recent TechCamp event generated an interest that we should leverage to pilot a local capacity building effort for one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. I know the interest within the response community is high and that the BNPB (Indonesia’s version of FEMA) would welcome better information sharing amongst the various responders. Big question is if we can leverage that interest to find donors who are willing to fund a crisis information management “revolution” one disaster prone country at a time.

Did Facebook really fuel the revolutions: (Photo credit: Harvester Solution)

On May 5th at American University, a group of international scholars and Internet governance policymakers engaged in informed dialogue on current Internet issues at the Giganet conference.

One panel entitled “Revolution 2.0” featured two Middle Eastern Internet experts from Egypt and Tunisia arguing that social media was an aid in helping citizens topple the dictatorships, not it’s catalyst.

Khaled Koubba of the Arab World Internet Institute in Tunisia shared his experience in the revolution where 20,000 cyberactivists and opponents of the regime gathered in front of the Ministry of Interior on January 14, 2011.

“It is true that we used the 2.0 tools but it is not for sure that [it was] the 2.0 revolution or the Facebook revolution,” he stated, “it has been made by people who fight for their dignity, for their life…”

He acknowledged the message reiterated in the press that Twitter and Facebook were used to mobilize people and share information; but pressed that these social media tools also helped citizen’s regain confidence in their liberties, freedoms, and abilities to make change.

“Even after Ben Ali left, we are continuing even today to put pressure on the government [in] many ways using the 2.0 tools to make change to attain what we want to attain,” Khaled asserted.

He cited two controversial videos, currently circulating on Facebook, of Farhat Rajh, Tunisia’s current interior minister, speaking about some very contentious issues of the ex-ruling party and the elections to be held on July 24.

Nivien Saleh, an Egyptian and professor of International Studies in Texas, echoed Khaled’s sentiments that technology does not necessarily liberate.

It is the people who liberate themselves from an authoritarian government onto democracy. Social media is only one of the communication avenues that drive the mass outlook.

She maintained alternate forms of communication, such as strategies for non-violent resistance through targeted outreach, coupled the latent feeling of dissatisfaction, are the real central pillars for a population to mobilize change.

Professor Shaleh also questioned the future role that Internet governance will take in regulating the content of social media

“What standard [do] providers of social media such as Facebook decide [in terms of] what kind of content can make it onto their media platforms and what cannot,” she wondered outloud to the crowd.

She referenced the Khaled Said group on Facebook, where the government asked Facebook to remove disturbing pictures of the deceased Alexandrian martyr posted by activists.

“Facebook forced the activists to take the pictures down, even though [they were there] in the first place to protest and show that stuff like this actually happens,” Shaleh said.

It is blazingly clear from these two Middle Eastern scholars that this was not a Facebook revolution, it was a citizen’s revolution and social media was merely a channel to funnel change.

Please view the video below of the Giganet conference’s panel “Revolution 2.0: the Internet and the Middle East and North Africa” and the panelists viewpoints on the role that social media played in the Middle East’s uprisings:

Last week the World Bank published a new book titled “Protecting Mobile Money Against Financial Crimes: Global Policy Challenges and Solutions” which serves as a practical guideline for relevant industries and governments to regulate mobile money transfers.

Banking services on mobile phones for both domestic and international transfers in developing regions has become a huge industry. Companies and project such as Global GCASH and SmartMoney in the Philippines América Móvil in Mexico; Wizzit in South Africa; Celpay in Zambia/Tanzania/DRC; and Safaricom’s infamous M-Pesa in Kenya, have emerged with viable banking solutions for the world’s poor. According to GSMA, over 1 billion customers have access to a mobile phone but no access to formal financial services and over 80% of mobile banking services are taking place in developing markets.

However, the demand for guidance and technical assistance in creating a legal framework to make these transfers secure is equally profound. Regulatory regimes consistent with the international anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) in new mobile money phone financial services have remained vague.

Written by Pierre-Laurent Chatain, Andrew Zerzan, Wameek Noor, Najah Dannaoui and Louis de Koker, the book’s provides sensible guidance for jurisdictions and internal systems to draft regulations and guidelines in order to comply with the AML/CFT standards with the mobile money transfers. The guidelines are flexible enough for their mobile money to continue to grow.

In particular the paper aims to :

1. Assesses the new AML/CFT regulations and practices and their relation to mobile money;
2. Cultivate guidelines for drafting AML/CFT regulations that cover mobile money, and:
3. Provides examples of best practices within the industry to include AML/CFT in their own business models

This is a great resource for anyone in the mobile banking industry, or government agencies, who want to include the standardized measures of AML and CFT in their business models, or in their regulations, for customer’s transfers.

During the 1970s, missionaries would walk around the towns in Haiti distributing radios to spread the message of the church. Haitians would accept them freely—not for the religious messages, but so they could tune into the Creole news services. Forty years later, a new wireless tool allows them to access news but with one fundamental difference: now they can participate in the conversation through their mobile phone.

Last week during World Press Freedom Day in Washington D.C., the sentiment that mobile phones serve as a catalyst for a two way flow of information between governments and citizens in the developing world was continuously echoed.

For the 77% of the world’s population who own cell phones, it is like a modern printing press in the palm of their hands.

Michèle Montas (Photo Credit: Richard Patterson for NY Times)

Michèle Montas, Senior Advisor to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Haiti, United Nations Stabilization Mission, Haiti, observed that the widespread availability of cell phones began with a heavy push from the private sector but has resulted with an increased demand from the people. “We could find them (mobiles) in the countryside, in the slums of Port au Prince, in the hands of a street market woman, in the hands of a small shop owner.” she commented.

This extensive accessibility paves the way for citizens to use mobile phones as a tool to contribute information and express their opinions to the public sphere.

Ms. Montas alluded that although cell phones aided in humanitarian assistance after the earthquakes, mobile phones have also altered the way Haitians can now lend their relevant perspectives, notably by calling into radio talk shows they play an active role in public discourse.

“There has been an explosion of meshing of media, of journalists, and of people that just want to speak out,” she stated, “If you gave them a microphone they would just speak out on the microphone, today they would do it on a cell phone.”

Mobile phones are dramatically changing the landscape of how citizens can actively access and contribute information to the public sphere; they boost the morale of citizens in societies where the voiceless can finally be heard by the majority and inform governments of what their citizens need.

Please view the video of Ms. Montas during the past World Press Freedom Day on the Panel “Accessing the Digit Benefit”:

In my trip to Pakistan earlier this year, I learned first hand about the power of preparedness at the community level. I visited a small “displaced” village on the banks of the Indus River. I asked them if there had been any early warning system in place for the floods. What they told me was that they had listened to radios to hear news about the flooding as it made its way down south. They had also received phone calls from relatives and friends up north telling them about the scale of the flooding.

But what really caught my interest was the fact that earlier in the year, one of the local NGOs that worked as an implementation for our NetHope member had visited this village to provide disaster risk reduction training to the people. They had explained the basics of disaster preparedness by showing a video on a laptop computer.

The local NGO then told me that they could see a dramatic difference between the villages that had received the training versus the ones that had not. In the ones that had received the training, people had brought their valuables to higher ground before the flood waters started rising. They had also in some cases harvested their crops before they were ruined by the floods.

Just providing this short and simple awareness building at the local level can really make a difference in how people prepare for the floods. And technology can help in this as the story shows. It is much more effective to be able to show a video than to bring leaflets or simply speak to people. Having the ability to bring something like a laptop with a pre-loaded video allows for even remote villages to be visited.

Of course we can say that the early warning system was very limited in Pakistan, but as always people find ways if they are aware of the danger. They reach out to their friends and relatives living up-stream to form their own little advisory network.

Way too many early warning systems are based on the pre-tense that there needs to be large investment by the government and that the government needs to warn everyone.

But as social networks such as Twitter and FaceBook are showing us then it is about the community of people you know and the community you live in. We must find simple and cost-effective ways of helping people connect to those around them through the technologies they have and thereby amplify these people-based networks of early warning.

This week I will be attending the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction and I look forward to meeting people from around the world and from organizations working on preparedness activities. For updates from the conference follow the Twitter tag #gpdrr2011