The first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009)

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post introducing ICCM 2009, a conference organized by Patrick Meier, inspired in part by his experience at Lift09.

The purpose of ICCM 2009 is to formalize the field of crisis mapping by bringing together seasoned humanitarian and human rights practitioners, leading scholars, technology developers, designers and donors to craft the cutting edge of crisis mapping. Crisis mapping seeks to leverage mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies and visual analytics to power rapid effective response to complex humanitarian emergencies.

The co-organizers of ICCM—Patrick Meier at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and Jen Ziemke at John Carroll University (JCU)—seek to foster a vibrant community of crisis mappers to create multiple synergies important for applied innovation in the humanitarian space.

To this end, over 50 organizations are participating in ICCM 2009, including multiple UN agencies such as UNDP Sudan, OCHA Colombia and UNOSAT in CERN; NGOs such as Ushahidi, MercyCorps and Amnesty International; technology developers including Development Seed, Avencia and UniversalMind; and multiple research institutes such as the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, the EU’s Joint Research Center and the National Visual Analysis Center in addition to prominent scholars working in the area of conflict research.

The conference will include Ignite Talks, self-organized roundtables and a tech fair in addition to roundtables on mobile and automated crisis mapping, crisis mapping analytics and crisis mapping response. ICCM’s co-organizers were inspired by Lift09 and are drawing on Laurent’s advice to design the first of what they hope will be the world’s go-to conference series on crisis mapping.