Last week, the Institute of Medicine convened a 2-day workshop in Washington, DC to explore how new technologies, like the internet and mobile devices, can help to close knowledge management gaps to accelerate violence prevention in low and middle income countries.

The workshop was facilitated by an ad hoc committee to examine:

1. The use of traditional and new media to communicate evidence-based information for violence prevention.
2. New applications of social media and other ICTs to prevent violence.

Experts from the public and private sectors as well as academic organizations were invited for presentations and panel discussions. The keynote speech was delivered by Erik Hersman of Kenya. Hersman co-founded Ushahidi, the ground-breaking nonprofit company that initially formed to map reports of violence in post-election Kenya in 2008, as well as Nairobi’s iHub, which has served as a space for cultivating some of the most innovative ICT inventions in the world. During the speech, Hersman discussed how live reporting of violence, through the use of ICTs, can help researchers see geographic trends of violence. Representatives from USAID, Deloitte, and Harvard also joined in the workshop.

Attendees, either at the workshop or watching from the live webcast, kept a vibrant Twitter discussion going during the event. They tweeted about interesting projects and apps that address violence in different forms, such as takethislollipop.com, a site that gives you a “stalker” point of view of your facebook profile. Tweeters discussed how crowdsourcing has become a great way to create new online approaches to prevent violence. Hersman lists examples of technology making an impact on violence prevention, several of them employing crowdsourcing techniques, in an excerpt from his keynote speech.

Some ideas that came out of the workshop were that to bring technology and domestic violence prevention together, it is important to plan, ask good questions, act, monitor, and mobilize.

The workshop was well-timed, taking place during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign (which ran from November 25 to December 10) and right before Human Rights Day. It also comes at the end of a year when social media played a critical role in driving social movements that demanded an end to violent repression.