[HOT] Call for papers on Humanitarian Information Management

[Marc van den Homberg]

The fourth World Conference on Humanitarian Studies is taking place in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 5 to 8 March 2016, and the panel on *Humanitarian
information management: towards exploiting the new data and information
environment for a more effective response is *welcoming papers that provide
both academic and practitioner’s perspectives. The Call for Papers will be
open until December 25.

Managing information during humanitarian crises is crucial for an effective
and timely humanitarian response. Adequate processes have to be in place
within and between organizations on how to collect and collate data on the
affected communities and areas, on how to analyze the data so that it
becomes actionable information and on how to share it with the appropriate
decision makers. It is obvious that establishing well-functioning
information management processes is a daunting task given the multitude of
actors, the lack of resources and systems and the time pressure in a
humanitarian crisis. In addition, recent advances in among others mobile
services, social media, big data, biometrics, drones and the internet of
things have led to an increasing amount of data that is available in a
crisis. This new data and information environment offers both opportunities
and challenges in terms of information management. Responders can engage in
new and faster ways with communities. And the other way around: communities
can more easily organize themselves through online social networks and
create bottom-up solutions, such as community mapping with Open Street Map.
The flipside is that professional responders have to find ways to make
properly use of these grassroots initiatives, to scale them up and to
integrate them into their existing processes. They also have to deal with a
resulting data and information overload, where sense making of this
overload is an imperative for increasing situational awareness and
improving decision making.

Most NGOs and IOs acknowledge the importance of information management as a
separate discipline if they want to be able to deal with this new data and
information environment adequately. But they are not always sure yet how to
embed it in their operations. Who should they appoint as part-time or
full-time Information Management Officers? Should they train data
scientists to become humanitarians or the other way around? Should they
become social computing organizations themselves with for example social
media monitoring skills? Or should they develop only a basic social
computing understanding in-house so that they can leverage digital
volunteering and community initiatives better and/or outsource
cost-effectively to data science companies during relief efforts? And how
to do this across organisations? Coordinated Data Scrambling is an
interesting innovation in this direction.

This panel will explore these questions with representatives from academia,
IOs, NGOs, private sector and social enterprises.

More information:
http://www.humanitarianstudiesconference.org/index.php?id=9&tx_ptconference_pi4[showPapers]=30&cHash=52d37651beb4eb669459bc9099232a2d












*Marc van den HombergSenior expert disaster
managementhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/marcvandenhomberg
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcvandenhomberg> Mobile: +33 6 5
8840547Skype: Marcvandenhomberg         Twitter: MarcvdHomberg*
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