The World Bank is sponsoring a conference on disaster risk management and the most innovative new technologies that are addressing this problem. The Understanding Risk Conference will take place in the atrium of the World Bank Main Complex in Washington, D.C. from June 1-6. The event aims to apply new and innovative approaches and technologies to the questions: What is risk?; Can we measure it?; If we understand it, can we manage it better?
There is an impressive list of partners and sponsors that are supporting this effort, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, as well as OpenGeo. The program features a session on “Open Source Spatial Web and Open Data,” as well as many sessions on risk modeling, extracting information from earth observation, and community-based risk assessments (crowdsourcing).
The event has an online community site where separate moderated dialogues are occurring between those that are interested in this subject. You can become a member of this discussion community whether you attend the event or not, and there are some interesting conversations taking place.
A lot of the content of the event and in the dialogues is geospatial in nature, and much is tied to the successful mapping efforts that took place for the response to Haiti. The audience of roughly 500 attendees will gather from around the world for this event, and the location in the central atrium of the bank will expose this work to the employees of the organization as well as to the general public.
The event will host a full-day Crisis Camp to bring together those that actively map event details and provide other tools and volunteer efforts to improve efficiency of disaster responses. There will also be a day devoted to the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), an effort founded by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA and The World Bank. The #RHoK initiative brings together subject matter experts and technical programmers to develop technological solutions to disaster risk management issues with “codejams” (24 hours of hacking or programming).
There are three significant changes in approach from days past that are notable at the event:
- the use of open data and open software
- the importance of social networking for citizens
- a more collaborative approach by responders that is enabled through technology
