Disaster Response

submitted by Tim Siftar

ecbproject.org

The Project

Disasters and humanitarian emergencies are increasing in magnitude and complexity*. This presents a major challenge to NGOs that respond to these emergencies.

In order to address this challenge, emergency directors from 7 agencies - CARE International, Catholic Relief Services, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Oxfam GB, Save the Children and World Vision International- came together in 2003 to discuss the most persistent obstacles in humanitarian aid delivery. The Inter-Agency Working Group (IWG) on Emergency Capacity that emerged from this meeting launched a systematic analysis, resulting in the publication of a Report on Emergency Capacity in 2004.

Phase II - launched in 2008

submitted by Samuel Bendett

We've saw about 10,000 English tweets in the first hour and 23,000 in the second. Third hour is down, will be about half the rate of the second hour if sustained.

Recurring themes include words like rattle, suffer, long slow roller, hard, saddened, worried, awful, hate, bad.

I'm seeing a fair bit of "help us report" tweets, which is coming from a tweet that said "earthquake preparedness helps us report none to minor damage and no victims so far," from Mexico City.

English-language tweets from Mexico are making up 8 percent of the total. 55 percent are from the U.S.

Spanish tweets - 488 in the first hour, 1,400 in the second and current rate will product about 1,000 in the third hour.

Most common words in the Spanish tweets are disfrutar and malo.

Spanish tweets are coming almost 50/50 from Mexico and the U.S.

Almost 75 percent of the Spanish tweets were from men, v. a close to 50/50 split for English.