Subject: [Ieprep] IAA follow-up

From: Eric Brunner-Williams at a VSAT somewhere (or in Portland Maine) <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 16:58:53 -0400

Oki all,

Off list someone was kind enough to provide a pointer to the original IAA
contributor to the WG. Thanks.

A Fench blogger (one of Le Monde's contributors) was kind enough to point
out that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies  (IFRCRC) just published (5 October) the 13th edition (2005) of
the World Disasters Report.

	People need information as much as water, food, medicine or shelter.
	Information can save lives, livelihoods and resources. It may be the
	only form of disaster preparedness that the most vulnerable can
	afford. The right kind of information leads to a deeper
	understanding of needs and ways to respond. The wrong information can
	lead to inappropriate, even dangerous interventions.

	Information bestows power. Lack of information can make people
	victims of disaster. Do aid organizations use information to
	accumulate power for themselves or to empower others? The report
	calls on agencies to focus less on gathering information for their
	own needs and more on exchanging information with the people they
	seek to support.

The quote from the blub is spot-on, we're observing "accumulation of power"
by governmental and non-governmental organizations (the Eastern Regional
BIA is an interesting exception to this, being an effective aid provider),
and the importance of information to people usually conceptualized as
"post-data-and-voice".

So I'll pursue this item, but it has nothing to do with transport (any
useful spec should be transport-independent), as someone noted, and
nothing to do with ETS or priority mechanisms for particular kinds of
transport, as others have noted, on ieprep.

Eric

P.S. Anyone with discretionary budget ($30) can order this reference and
save themselves the bother of reading it by having it delivered to me.
The URL is http://www.ifrc.org/publicat/wdr2005/order.asp (english).

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