Copyright: MSF/H.J. Burkard

If you want to know how hard it is to save a life you should definitely tune in for this event on January 31, 2012. From the site:

Humanitarian negotiations are life-and-death issues for people in need, but they also raise troubling political and ethical dilemmas for the organizations that are engaged in them. In the forthcoming book Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, published by Columbia University Press, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) takes a critical look at how its teams have negotiated to gain access to people in urgent need of lifesaving medical assistance in the 40 years since MSF was founded, including recent case studies from Somalia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.

Please join us for a live online discussion of these issues featuring several experienced MSF aid workers, who will share their first-hand experiences from past assignments. They will describe the often complicated process of negotiating with governments, armed groups, public health officials, international actors, community leaders, and local officials; as well as the struggle to define what compromises are acceptable in order to run programs in crisis zones.

You can register here. The schedule is as follows:

8:00 PM Eastern
7:00 PM Central
6:00 PM Mountain
5:00 PM Pacific

It is nice to see that MSF is trying so hard to help people understand what is for most an opaque industry.

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Photo Adventure in Vietnam with William Thompson

by Jon Thompson on December 22, 2011

For over 40 years my uncle, William Thompson, has been shooting photos for in some of the world’s most remote locations. He has shot throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, North South and Central America. He is well know for his work with National Geographic, the Marlboro cowboy and Wells Fargo. He even shot Bill Gates in his early 20′s when Microsoft was still a small company.

Bill will lead a small group of individuals through northern Vietnam for 14 days where he will teach them the art of fine photography. If you would like to join this adventure, stay in the mountaintop Topas Ecolodge and learn how to take beautiful pictures please contact him via his site: Photo Adventure Vietnam

Copyright: Topas Eco Lodge

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Slowy App – A Great New App For Testing Your Sites In Low Bandwidth / High Latency Environments

December 2, 2011

I just came across this great little app on Y Combinator’s Hacker News site. Slowy markets itself as a “real-world connection simulator and bandwidth limiter” and it seems to work quite well. I am running it on a Mac and it was easy to install and switch on and off. I can test my sites in [...]

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Tips For Finding A Job With A Humanitarian Aid Organization

June 23, 2011

I’ll update this post with more thoughts but, for now, please ask questions in the comments section. Be sure to take a look at my Humanitarian Job Info page for links to organizations. Don’t overlook the importance of an internship/volunteer position Internships and volunteer positions may not pay a lot but they are worth their [...]

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WSJ – Scientists Find an Achilles’ Heel in AIDS Virus

June 20, 2011

The Wall Street Journal has an article detailing the efforts of researchers at the Ragon Institute, a joint enterprise of Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University: Scientists using a powerful mathematical tool previously applied to the stock market have identified an Achilles heel in HIV that could be a prime [...]

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Is Syria next?

June 10, 2011

I apologize for the slightly melodramatic title, and I know that some of you will point out that events have been unfolding for some time, but I am seriously wondering if those organized camps will soon swell with refugees. The Turks are well prepared for a large influx of refugees from Syria but those camps [...]

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International Medical Corps Promo Video

June 8, 2011

Nicely done.

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BitMate – BitTorrent For the Less Privileged

March 6, 2011

Dritte‘s BitMate may solve the problems I touched in my last post and may serve as a solution for the mapping crowd including OSM HOT. Schuyler ran into this problem in Haiti as did Jeff and I in Indo. By circulating data locally it eliminates the need to burn up costly bandwidth. I am sure Aptivate [...]

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Jeff, Go and some chicken and biscuits

February 9, 2011

In 2006 I founded an NGO called Humanlink. (There is no hyperlink because the site is down but it will be back up soon.) I started the organization because I wanted to help aid agencies better utilize technology. One of the first missions we ever undertook was in West Sumatra, Indonesia following the March 2007 [...]

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The New York Times – Diagram of the Battle for Tahrir Square

February 3, 2011

The New York Times has a great looking info-graphic titled ‘Diagram of the Battle for Tahrir Square‘.

Related Posts with Thumbnails

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