It is quite exciting to see that the United Nations and their different branch-organizations are slowly harnessing the potential of the web in innovative ways. I have previously blogged about the idea of a huge interesting UN aggregator project and the UNDP water wiki during the last web4dv conference. To offer openly information sources and especially to visualize information is essential to understand our complex word from different perspectives.
Gapminder is a great example for that. And another one is the tactical technology collective with this booklet: Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design.
It is promising to see that UN organizations such as UNEP follows the same steps and offers the Atlas of Our Changing Environment on Google Maps:
Through illustrations, satellite images, ground photographs and powered by Google Maps, this interactive media depicts and describes humanity’s past and present impact on the environment.
Today also UNHCR announced a mashup with Google Earth Outreach program, “which punveiled a powerful new online mapping programme that provides an up-close and multifaceted view of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.”
Here is the actual site, but you need Google Earth to load it.
Patrick Philippe Meier writes about it: “the next step for an iRevolution is to enable refugees to access this information on a regular basis. This need not require high-technology. The information could be broadcast by radio, for example.” I believe it will become even more effective when refugees themselves can add information and update those visualized contexts from their perspective.
One other excellent source was recently launched, UNdata, with over 55 million records and comprehensive statistics.
Related posts:
- From global to local: Mobile, mapping and action Location, mobile phones and the Internet, combined together, are becoming...
This blog explores worldwide social innovations and how people benefit from infor- mation and communication technologies. 
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Christian, thanks for the reference to my blog. You’re absolutely right, user-generated content is critical especially from refugees and other local at-risk communities. There is a wealth of local intelligence that could be shared between local communities on how to survive in conflict.
Not a visualisation as such, but a far more useful site is UnDemocracy.org. …
Tagchen Christian, as usual a really helpful and informative blog. Thanks a lot for writing this. I support the note on “user created content” or less technological “citizen created content”. On a different note: Do you see that the map layers in the future might be combined to avoid single agency or (I)NGO perspectives but rather comprehensive maps on issues? While techynology allows this, question remains if agencies are ready for it (true collaboration). Cheers, M
So what do you think of the new searchengine silobreaker.com? It does something comparable with search terms. This is quite interesting, because with the amount of citizen created content ever going up how are you going to find relevant content?
Thank you all for your comments. @Tom L Yes, I agree undemocracy.org is a great website and these UN websites could be much better. It is pretty much top-down again. I will write another post citizen challenging institutions soon.
@Matthias yes these information shall be offered jointly by all organization and shall have open channels for citizen to participate. But it is not easy to bring all organizations of the UN family together. But I am sure data-wise this will change in the future.
@Brendan interesting website. Do you know this one? http://www.managingnews.com/index.html But filter seems a key to me as well. I experiment the last days with yahoo pipes to get more relevant information. Quite tricky. But aiderss.com can be helpful. There is an interesting blog post by Chris Brogan: We Still Need Better Filters http://www.chrisbrogan.com/we-still-need-better-filters/