Conflict prevention and early warning

 

 

Summary

 

"Although the central analytical capacity will always be human, ICT can assist in building early warning systems."

 

Excerpt from The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict, published by the ICT4Peace Foundation.

 

 

Resources

 

OCHA Early Warning Unit

http://ochaonline.un.org/webpage.asp?Page=966 collaborates with other UN bodies, international NGOs, think tanks, and regional organizations in order to aggregate information and monitor and assess trends and events world-wide that may give rise to humanitarian crises. The Unit monitors developments in around thirty countries and shares its information with country teams on the ground and its other partners. In addition, the Early Warning Unit has assembled a compendium of case studies that are made available to practitioners world-wide via the Internet Forum on Crisis Prevention (IFCP) http://ochaonline.un.org/webpage.asp?Page=1327

 

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Crisis Prevention and Peace Building area

http://www.undp.org/bcpr/

 

 

The Humanitarian Early Warning Service (HEWSWeb)

http://www.hewsweb.org/home_page/default.asp provides a “global multi-hazard watch to support humanitarian preparedness”; at present it covers only natural disasters and not complex emergencies, but it presents

an interesting model for aggregating multiple information sources into an easy-to-use format.

 

 

SwissPeace

http://www.swisspeace.org, as well as hosting the KOFF Center for Peacebuilding (to strengthen Switzerland’s capacity to address violent conflicts) and the Afghan Civil Society Forum, has also established Frühanalyse von Spannungen und Tatsachenermittlung (FAST) International http://www.swisspeace.org/fast. FAST was created in 1998 for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) as an evolution from earlier

early warning systems developed in the wake of the crises in Rwanda and the Balkans. Today, FAST International is also supported by the Austrian, Canadian, Swedish and American governments’ respective development organizations. The system is focused on twenty countries or regions in Africa, Europe and Asia.

 

 

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) “Early Warning Indicators for Preventive Policy”

http://www.sipri.org/contents/it/ewi.html. Launched in 2002, SIPRI’s project makes heavy use of the possibilities provided by new technology. As with the FAST system, the project seeks to break new ground by using a sophisticated quantitative methodology that is complemented by expert analysis. The former relies on the statistical analysis of a database comprising more than 1200 structural and event indicators culled from a wide range of different sources, including a monthly expert survey. Trends are graphically displayed, a predictive model and ‘crisis index’ are employed, and the results of the current test phase will be made publicly available on the Internet. The geographic focus is on West Africa, and SIPRI has developed a network of experts in the region that not only provide analysis and data, but also participate in the development of the methodology and indicators. SIPRI is also developing an Integrating Fact Databases as part of its International Relations and Security Project, creating a federated system of databases at different geographical locations, accessible through a single user platform.

 

 

Rwanda Project of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland at College Park

http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/rwanda/index.htm. The project seeks to help advance reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi; to assist in this effort, the scholars involved are developing an Africa-focused interactive tool to assist development managers, implementers, and architects in integrating ICT into peace building efforts. Building on an index of forty conflict drivers, the tool will provide a web-based multi-layered matrix linking ICT program results and lessons learned to reduce the conflict potential of each driver and identify strategies for conflict sensitive development. After undergoing an extensive period of prototype testing, the tool will be fully operational by the end of 2005.

 

INA-TEWS: Indonesia Tsunami Early Warning System

As reported in the Asia News Network, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Tuesday launched the Rp 1.4 trillion (US$133 million) Indonesia Tsunami Early Warning System (InaTEWS), despite inadequacies that may cause a significant time lapse in its forecast. As of October 2008, the system comprised of 116 broadband seismometers, 45 tidal gauges and 3 buoys. The government initially planned to operate 160 broadband seismometers, 500 accelerographs, 40 GPS units, 80 tidal gauges and 23 Dart buoys. More information on the system and its capabilities on Deutsche Welle here.

 

Tunisian Prison Map

http://www.kitab.nl/tunisianprisonersmap/ and http://www.kitab.nl/2006/09/29/en-tunisian-prisons-map/

 

The map consists of a mashup work. This map displays:

 

• An approximate listing of Tunisian prisons indicated on a Google Maps API + GMapEZ. In order to elaborate the list, I have pulled data from Human Rights NGOs report as well as a temporary list of Tunisian prisons prepared by Tsar Boris on TUNeZINE website. Similarly, I am intending to completed and improve this work. It is to be noted that only the markers pointing to Tunis 9th April prison, Gorjani detention center, Borj Erroumi, Nadhor and Bizerte city prisons are exact. All others indicate an approximate positioning, generally the main town of a district that bears the name of the prison.
• Video/audio files hosted on YouTube related to Tunisian political prisoners.
• Flash animations that I have realized and put online on my Blog [fikra] or on nawaat.org.
• Some photos of individual cases.

 

Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert System (GIVAS)

http://www.voicesofthevulnerable.net

 

GIVAS stands for Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert System. Why do we need another new system, for what purpose and what will it look like once operational? The rationale for this initiative is based on two realizations : global crises have been changing, becoming more complex and interconnected. But we are not adequately equipped to respond, operating with 20th century tools and thinking in the new Millennium. 

 

Emergency Preparedness Information Center (EPIC)

http://emergencycenter.dc.gov/eic/site/default.asp

 

Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS)

http://www.gdacs.org

 

The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System provides near real-time alerts about natural disasters around the world and tools to facilitate response coordination, including media monitoring, map catalogues and Virtual On-Site Operations Coordination Centre.

 

InSTEDD RIFF

http://instedd.org/evolve

 

Over the last decade, the majority of the designs, analyses and evaluations of early detection (or biosurveillance) systems have been geared towards specific data sources and detection algorithms. Much less effort has been focused on how these systems will "interact" with humans. For example, consider multiple domain experts working at different levels across different organizations in an environment where numerous biosurveillance algorithms may provide contradictory interpretations of ongoing events. Riff enables detection, prediction and response to health-related events (such as disease outbreaks or pandemics) through a collaborative environment that combines data exploration, integration, search and inferencing – providing more complex analysis and deeper insight.

 

Although development of Riff has initially been focused on health-related detection scenarios, the underlying system is a general collaboration environment for content creation, social metadata annotation, and automated analysis with potential applicability in a wide range of areas.  Several organizations are exploring the use of Riff in areas as wide ranging as humanitarian crisis reporting and conflict early warning.  One organization, for example, has recently begun training Riff's integrated SVM machine learning engine to identify hate speech and other potential indicators of geopolitical deterioration in news reports.

 

Features:

• Create collaborative workspaces, invite colleagues, subscribe to data sources you choose to monitor
• Interact securely with your team to sift through the data stream for emerging events
• Annotate items with tags, comments, ratings, links, locations, files, alerts, and other social metadata
• Autonomous agents perform data fusion, feature extraction, classification, tagging,  geo-coding
• Integrated hypothesis formation, visualization, machine learning