ict4peace

I went to a 2-day retreat to discuss Crisis Information Management. I participated in discussions the first day, before leaving on Friday.

I thought halfway through the morning that there were some strong trends in the presentations: Need to visualize, summarize, cut through the information overload, and the need to have a quick toolkit up fast. There was a mix of actors there, so conversation was decent even if not groundbreaking. I created the displayed good but not groundbreaking theoretical slopes.

The general sense I got from the discussion was that there were some ratios involved: the closer you got the the crisis, both in space, time, and in responsibility, the more real-time and more detail one needed to respond to the crisis. The further away, and less hands-on involved, the more aggregation was required and more delay tolerable.

You could roughly map this, it seemed, to levels of organizational responsibility: tactical/line manager all the way to strategic. However, on further thought, wouldn't the strategists also want real-time detailed information in a crisis? As in other forms of organic organization, things crystallize very quickly at the point of state change. Maybe a point to explore further.