WSIS FORUM 2010


FINAL EXECUTIVE BRIEFING

DRAFT
(VERSION 1.1)

This document serves as a draft version 1.1 of the Final Executive Briefing on WSIS Forum 2010. Additions to this report will be made as and when submissions are received from session organizers and focal points.

Table of Contents

Content will be available soon.

Haiti is seen as a turning point in the use of ICTs in Crisis Management but many lessons remain unheeded from previous disasters such as the 2005 Tsunami. Indeed, there is an expectation that ICTs themselves can revolutionize crisis management and provide a "quick-fix" in solving intractable, complex situations often in politically unstable locations around the globe. However, the framework in which the ICTs operate is often just as critical, if not more so, than the technology itself. How can we improve interoperability between UN agencies and other aid agencies to ensure the quick, reliable sharing of information both in crisis situations and disaster mitigation? How can we properly assess the impact of ICTs in Crisis Management to date? What works? What doesn't? Are we investing in the right technologies that primarily need to function in very difficult environments? Is the humanitarian community setting the right priorities in the development of Crisis Information Management tools? What about capacity building in local communities?

Speakers:

• Lin Wells, Distinguished Research Professor & Force Transformation Chair National Defence University, USA (joining remotely)

• Nigel Snoad, Microsoft, USA

• Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder and Program Director, Ushahidi, Kenya

• Patrick Gordon, Deputy Chief a.i., Information Technology Section; Head, ITS Field Support Unit (FSU), OCHA, Geneva

• Bartel Van de Walle, Assistant Professor, Information Systems and ISCRAM Chair, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands

• Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation

Chaired by:

• Ed Girardet, Media21 Programme Coordinator & Author, Editor, The CROSSLINES Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan (1998, 2004 and 2006); Somalia, Rwanda and Beyond (1996) and Populations in Danger (1996), Switzerland

Managing the accelerating complexity of humanitarian response

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? (TS Eliot, 1937)
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (Sanjana Hattotuwa, 2010)

The new players: crowdsourcing platforms and social networks

The Haiti earthquake and ensuing relief efforts made the broader global community more aware of the "crowdsourcing" movement, which has been developing for some time, and social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Crowdsourcing platforms, such as Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.org), InSTEDD's RIFF (http://instedd.org/evolve) and Sahana (www.sahana.lk) provide unique tools which the local and international community can take advantage of in crisis response and recovery. Of particular importance is that these new platforms are not owned by one agency or government but rather constitute an open process, allowing for and encouraging broad participation. These new platforms also provide an opportunity to change outmoded views on established information sharing policies and practices by bringing new information and crisis management tools to the table. Platforms such as Ushahidi, RIFF and Sahana can empower communities by strengthening community resilience, preparedness and response potential without external intervention.

Ushahidi- background

Ushahidi provides a visual representation of "what's going on or needed where?". It is an open source platform, available for any organization or individual who wishes to use it. Ushahidi can be installed within 30 minutes and can be used with varying levels of connectivity. The key goal is to present information in a way that is useful for many actors. In a multi-polar, multi-player world it is better to work with open data and open platforms that are interoperable with other systems. Data in "silos" or data hugging is no longer an effective way to operate. As a result of the Haiti experience, Ushahidi has realized the importance of working with others in the humanitarian tech community (e.g. Sahana). In Haiti, Ushahidi received 80 000 text messages. A key challenge is how to deal with torrent of information? The public at large is also part of the Ushahidi solution via online communities (e.g. the Haitian diaspora living in Saskatoon, Canada who translated text messages from Creole to English). This also underlines that we are dealing with new systems, processes and actors in crisis response.

What are the key determinants in building bridges between the established formal disaster response communities and new informal communities?

• Interoperability

• Validation

• Pragmatism

• Evaluation

• the development of a "Code of Conduct" for the informal sector (there are often unpredicted implications of providing tools to people in conflict and crisis zones including ethical issues which need to be explored in more detail)

Crisis response, management and information overload: we need to move away from a concept of tools and products and toward a concept of services

There are a growing number of tools that can help the humanitarian community respond to crises. How can this entire process best be managed? Is there a danger of focusing on the individual elements and neglecting the big picture? How can we move toward a comprehensive and harmonised services concept? How can we develop a meaningful "rapid needs assessment process"? How to manage information overload? How to coordinate all the different actors?

Although Haiti was not a typical disaster, and should not be uncritically used as a model or basis for future disaster planning and crisis management, there are many lessons that can be learned from the earthquake:

• Recognize importance of imaging, crowd-sourcing and new media in crisis response (new media played a critical role in implementing the emergency number for the Haiti response)

• Risk management reviews have to be realistic

• Get to 1st day capability as quickly as possible through maintaining social networks on ongoing basis

• Emphasis on civil-military collaboration and coordination: How willing is the military to actually share information? There is currently a paradigm shift in US Military and a recognition that the information flow has to be a two-way street (in preparation for Aghanistan the military held unclassified phone call every 2 weeks with people outside the military)

• Work with local populations is key to success

• An extraordinary interest in helping out was evident after the Haiti earthquake. It is uncertain whether this will be duplicated everywhere but the importance of tapping into a well-spring of goodwill and volunteerism should not be underestimated.

What are the key challenges facing the humanitarian crisis response community?

In the mid-1990s, the humanitarian community relied on coded cables to communicate. Key questions were: Where is the information? How do we capture it? How do we disseminate it? How do we make contact lists??

In 2010, the same problems still exist despite the rapid rise of ICT and new tools to gather and exchange information. In parallel to the rise of ICT platforms, there has also been an explosion of actors who respond to disasters and crises around the globe, including humanitarian response organizations, businesses, civil society actors, governments, NGOs and private individuals. As a result, the challenges in implementing a coordinated response have also grown.

Despite the changing dynamics of disaster response, the humanitarian community is essentially using the same paradigms as 10-20 years ago. How can this community be better prepared and trained to deal with innovation?

Challenges still remaining:

• Still can't deliver in real time a contact list of who is doing what where; there are a lot of inaccuracies and exceptions in contact lists and data

• Accurate datasets prior to the disaster often unavailable or don't exist

• Varying levels of comprehension of complex situations and tools used to respond

• In complex situations, like Haiti, 90% of information is noise. How to sort out important data? (during the Tsunami the OCHA team received 100 emails per day; during Nargis- 3000-4000 and in Haiti, one email per minute)

• Coordination of massive number of actors on-site

• How to manage the risk of too much information? Linda Stone, Microsoft coined the phrase "continuous partial attention"; the more we are connected the less we are aware of what is happening.

• How to sustain interest beyond initial crisis phase?

• How to develop systems that are sustainable, repeatable and predictable?

• How to deal with new tech in areas where humanitarian workers don't have access to internet and have to deal with high latency connectivity to the web?

In many crises, the most effective response is still "walking the beat with a white board" due to complete breakdown in communication.

What role for the academic community?

How useful can research be for what is happening in reality? How to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners? There are some basic things that don't work very well in crisis response including contact lists, coordination and making sense of data. How can researchers help?

• Analysis of the response to a given crisis (all old messages and data should be archived (US Congress and Google are currently archiving Twitter))

• Assess how to align ICT with business processes

• Work on technology acceptance issues, drawing from research to date on how people use computers, information technology, new media tools

• Examine and analyze complex systems

• Examine how data can be used later during reconstruction

ICT of the future: how to improve crisis response?

• The new systems often work outside traditional mechanisms and don't necessarily support member states and humanitarian actors. There needs to be work done to integrate ICT solutions into existing processes and systems.
  

• Much more also needs to be done to improve data preparedness.
  

• The technology community needs to examine the possible misuse of their platforms (e.g. Radio Milles Collines in pre-genocide Rwanda) and develop a "do no harm" policy (like the humanitarian community). More robust accountability and monitoring mechanisms should also be considered.
  

• ICT systems and responses have to be kept simple; the more complicated the system the more that can go wrong.
  

• ICT systems have to be developed by, or in cooperation with, local communities and the end users, which include victims of trauma and disasters.
  

• The importance of political processes should not be underestimated; in Haiti the borders were open to foreign aid and the humanitarian community whereas in many other crises this may not be the case.
  

• Datasets must be shared on the ground by senior management on all sides (except situations where security issues take priority, with more efficient and effective measures on how best to judge this)
  

• Improve interoperability. Often with very good intentions, ICT platforms are developed that cannot be sustained, contributing to "information islands".
  

• The private sector needs to be engaged constructively.
  

• Reserve short codes that would allow victims to send SMS messages out of disaster zones.
  

• Improve training of crisis responders in the use of ICT, complex systems and innovation.

Names of Panelists:

• Jody R. Westby, Co-Chair, WFS Permanent Monitoring Panel on Information Security & CEO, Global Cyber Risk LLC

• Marco Gercke, Director, Cybercrime Research Institute

• Amb. Henning Wegener, Co-Chair, WFS Permanent Monitoring Panel on Information Security

Workshop Summary & Outcomes

This workshop discussed the need for a harmonized legal framework to counter global cybercrime and to facilitate international cooperation. Henning Wegener provided some legal background on the harmonization of legal frameworks and the need for public-private information sharing and collaboration to counter cyber threats. An overview of the current state of cybercrime laws around the world was provided in conjunction with an explanation of the types of cybercriminal activity being encountered. Marco Gercke provided a description of the ITU publication, Understanding Cybercrime: A Guide for Developing Countries ("Guide"). The purpose of the ITU Toolkit on Cybercrime Legislation ("Toolkit") was explained by Jody Westby, who also described the various types provisions (definitions, substantive, procedural, jurisdictional, and international cooperation).

The workshop participants were quite engaged about the use of the Toolkit and Guide and had questions concerning various provisions. They also questioned whether the Toolkit should contain provisions for child pornography. Jody Westby explained that the Toolkit Committee felt that child pornography was a heinous crime and feared that developing countries would enact a child pornography provision in their cybercrime laws but not enact a broader law that would criminalize the actual exploitation of children and development of child pornography. The need for additional countries to be involved in the investigation of cyber criminal activities was also discussed.

Outcomes:

Jody Westby agreed to revisit the issue of providing sample language provisions regarding child pornography. Minister Samassékou attended the session and stated that he felt it was time to work on multilateral agreement on a code of ethics pertaining to cyberspace. He said he had raised this issue at the first WSIS and believed that the time may now be right to begin work on this.

The two- day Meeting on “e-Government and New Technologies: Towards better citizen engagement for development.”, organized jointly by the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the International Telecommunication Union, as co-facilitators for WSIS Action Line C7 on e-Government, took place 13 and 14 of May 2010, in room K, Montbrillant Building, in ITU. The agenda included the plenary and five thematic sessions over the two days on selected topics on citizen engagement for good governance. Each session covered presentations followed by general discussions.

The goal of the Meeting was to further the thinking of the United Nations and multiple stakeholders on how citizen engagement and ministry capacity building for e-government in developing and developed countries can help accelerate economic growth and citizen satisfaction leading to good governance. The Meeting explored and identified issues and challenges facing governments and citizens, civil society and the private sector in their quest for greater citizen engagement and MDGs implementation through the utilization of the latest technologies.

Moreover, the Meeting identified the major issues and trends in citizen engagement within e-government that can help in improving effective and efficient planning, decision making, implementing, monitoring and evaluation process of all levels of government. During the meeting the different ways of citizen engagement to invigorate accountability, transparency and the delivery of services as well as the role of social media networks by reviewing existing approaches worldwide have been analyzed. The experts presented papers on the themes outlined above, as well as participated in the discussions at the Meeting.

Participants at the Meeting included senior policy makers, experts on citizen engagement and e-government initiatives and representatives from academia, civil society, social media networks, private sector and international organizations.

All documents, including the agenda, list of speakers and presentations from the Meeting are available at: http://www.unpan.org, as well as at: www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2010/forum/geneva/tw/tw_12.html.
 

The objective of the workshop was to bring together NGO representatives to share views and experiences on the ICT's evolution so far, current use, technical knowledge, practices, new ideas and further development.
 

The workshop panellists raised issues related to the development of networking, in the context of WSIS processes, in the African and African Diaspora societies; its benefits and gaps in particular with regard to bridging the digital divide; the importance of promoting and preserving languages and cultures by using ICT; human rights tools addressing new mechanisms, such as the Universal Periodic Review, and a new civil society initiative to close the information gap between providers and users of UN information.

The workshop panellists and participants highlighted the need to build a more structured working arrangement between NGO networks to achieve concerted collaboration, and thus to contribute better to national, regional and international decision-making structures, in particular the UN system.
CoNGO is committed to strengthening the partnership with ITU to promote good practices of ICT use in all regions and to contribute to the WSIS processes by facilitating increasing NGO participation.

Speakers

Moderator: Beatriz Schulthess, Senior Associate - Advocacy, Finance and Administration, CoNGO

Derek Marshall
Derek Marshall is co-founder of "Making Commitments Matter", an international research and development initiative founded in 2007. It is tasked with working to close the information gap between providers and users of UN information. His organization is currently organizing the first UN 'user' conference, which will take place on 20 and 21 May 2010 at the CICG here in Geneva. In the research conducted by his organization over the past few years, it has come up with two new information tools, which will be presented at that conference.

Biro Diawaraa
Biro Diawara is the UN representative of Interfaith International and in the context of WSIS the « Centre des commerce international pour les Development ». He has coordinated, since the WSIS Africa Regional PrepCom Conference, Bamako, in 2002, various African and African Diaspora networks to enable the effective participation of the African society in the WSIS process. He is also member of the Commission of Science and Technologies for Development of UNCTAD.

Vita de Waal
Vita de Waal is the founder and director of the Foundation for GAIA (UK), co-founder of the Network for Social Change (UK) and Earthfund (Canada). She is Chair of the CoNGO NGO Committee on the Environment and represents a worldwide scientific network, the Planetary Association for Clean Energy (Canada) at the UN in New York, Geneva and Vienna.

Roland Chauville
Roland Chauville is the co-founder and Director of UPR Info, an NGO promoting the Universal Periodic Review, a new human rights mechanism of the United Nations. To this aim, the organization set up a website containing documents, analysis, news and a database in five UN languages directed at NGOs, States, academics and media. Prior to this, Roland was working for Geneva for Human Rights, an NGO organizing training on human rights.

Community media means media that is of, for and by communities. It values community members as the most important actors in the spread of knowledge and information within their own communities. It encompasses efforts in radio, video, internet and social networking such as twitter and facebook. It values the creative expression, the articulation skills, and the voice of the poor as key to making a better world.

This session explored how the poor can not just be INFORMED by ICTs but also INFORM. It asked, how can we enable communities to be creators of content and knowledge? How can we empower the poor to voice their issues, and create new platforms for dialog and discussion at both a local and national level?

Video Volunteers (www.videovolunteers.org), the organizers of this thematic session, have built a network of over 140 full-time, salaried community media producers working in India and Brazil who use video, radio and the internet. These community members, many of whom used to be diamond polishers, rickshaw drivers and day labourers, produce regular content that has been seen by over 250,000 people in community screenings on wide screen projectors, in 300 different slums and villages.

The session was led by Video Volunteers' partnership director, Dina Madhani. She showed examples of community media from India, and shared experiences on how community media can provide a livelihood and voice to community members and how it can be used to encourage community action-taking. She discussed the possibilities and challenges for community media around scalability, financial sustainability and working with the mainstream media. She gave an overview of VV's two flagship programs - Community Video Units and the India Unheard Community News Network -and how they use community media deeply and intensely in a rural area, while facing severe challenges of lack of internet penetration.

There was a lively discussion afterwards about concrete project ideas, and what's possible in the different countries and communities where WSIS attendees work. Participants agreed this is the way forward - empowering the poor to be in control of ICT's, so they can devise solutions to their own challenges!

If you have ideas for creative community ICT projects, VV would love to hear from you: please contact Dina Madhani at dina@videovolunteers.org or info@videovolunteers.org

Various entities from Bangladesh have been closely involved in the WSIS summit process since its very inception. The process which started in PrepCom is being actively pursued by various practitioners, policy makers and other stakeholders. Having traveled halfway through to the 2015 goals, there is no better time than this to do a stock-taking exercise in order to assess how different actions lines are being implemented in Bangladesh. In addition to that this session takes an additional step to focus on showcasing benefit of the intended target groups through different ICT initiatives. The initiatives showcased in this session fall under Action line C3 and C7. Reza Salim (Director, Amader Gram ICT for development Program of BFES) firstly opened the session by stressing how Bangladesh has been involved in the WSIS process and welcomed the moderator, H. E. Md. Abdul Hannan, Ambassador, Bangladesh. The first speaker Dr Kashfia Ahmed, CEO, WIN Inc. elaborated on development of agriculture content that is delivered through different ICT platforms i.e. telecentres and mobile telephone. This presentation took a close look at the existing content development process, the partners involved in it and their roles. It also shed light on how government is involved in the process and how partnership with the public sector can be strengthened further. The second speaker for the session was Shahiduddin Akbar, CEO, Bangladesh Institute of ICT in Development (BIID). Akbar shared his experience of trying to ensure last mile coverage of the telecentre based initiative so that farmers avail solutions pertaining to their agriculture problems and thereby benefit from it. Having been involved in the process of establishing telecentre in Bangladesh, with a proper business model, Akbar was faced with the challenge to bring the farmers into these telecentre and use it as a means to solve their livelihood related problems. So, to address this issue an awareness building campaign was designed to demonstrate to the farmers the benefit of using this alternative source of information. This experience was crucial in establishing the fact that through such hand holding exercise the benefits of ICT can be demonstrated to the rural community. The next presenter Mirza Farzana Halim, Business Consultant, Katalyst, focused on a mobile telephony based initiative providing agriculture information to farmers. This is a multi-stakeholder partnership that adds new dimension by introducing a revenue model for all parties involved. In order to ensure sustainability of any such project, it is imperative to make sure that there is a business interest of the private sector in offering such value added service. This presentation also focused on some of the facts and figures of impact on the end users. This service has also received recognition at home and abroad for the outstanding results it has brought. The last speaker of the session was Sabbir Ahmed of Swisscontact. His presentation focused on an emerging working model of public-private partnership and some of the early signs of impact. This model shows how public and private sector can work together by capitalizing on the complementary resources or strengths of these organizations. It talks about a PPP model in Bangladesh, where fertilizer dosage is provided to farmers through different ICT platforms (private sector) by using database developed by the public sector. These platforms complement the existing government extension work by creating alternatives sources for the farmers and being endorsed by the government adds to the credibility of these private sector owned channels. Another thing that comes out quite clearly is the facilitation roles a development agency can play in the partnership building process. While this service holds immense potential, as evident from the early impact, it still faces some challenges which need to be overcome in order to ensure its sustainability. Such initiatives while shows a lot of promise in achieving the 2015 goals, there need to be constant evolvement and evaluation of the process so that they can cater to the needs of the intended target group in the ever changing environment. The session ended with these discussions from various group of audiences, remarks from Gitanjali Sah from ITU and a vote of thanks from H.E. Md. Abdul Hannan, Ambassador, Bangladesh.

Content will be available soon.

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