We are very excited to announce "Giving Voice to the Vulnerable Through Data and Design," a 6-week challenge with Visualizing.org, to visualize results from an SMS survey on how people are coping with the economic downturn in 5 countries.
Last year we worked with MobileActive.org to implement a mobile phone based survey gathering bottom-up information from everyday citizens in order to gain a...
One of the biggest challenges of responding to fast-moving global crises on a human level, is that by the time governments figure out what is happening via surveys, reports and censuses -- the damage has already been done. Families fall into poverty, children are pulled from school, and the lives of the poorest are put into jeopardy.
But due to the explosion of online and mobile data (often...
How do you find indicators for changes human well-being in “big data”? How do you know which “digital signals” are relevant enough to warrant further investigation? These questions are at the core of Global Pulse’s research.
The video below, from Global Pulse’s 8 November briefing to the UN General Assembly, provides a succinct overview of five research projects we completed with our partners (...
On 19 November, 2011 United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon met with Indonesia’s Minister for National Development Planning / Head of BAPPENAS Prof. Dr. Armida S. Alisjahbana and other Government officials, in Nusa Dua, Bali, to discuss the establishment of "Pulse Lab Jakarta", a real-time data analysis centre to enable timely and informed policy action to protect vulnerable populations...
View the story "Global Pulse briefs the UN General Assembly" on Storify]
The Global Pulse team is briefing the United Nations General Assembly this afternoon at 2:45 pm EST on its Research Projects, Technology Toolkit, country-based Pulse Labs and its plans for the coming year. The briefing will also feature a keynote address by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The briefing is being webcast live at www.un.org/webcast on channel 2.
The briefing will feature the...
Global Pulse is excited to announce its contribution to a unique new iPad app, called “PopTech: World Rebalancing,” which is available now from the Apple app store. The interactive app was developed by PopTech, and incorporates some of the preliminary results from Global Pulse’s Global Snapshot of Wellbeing project, a collaboration with Jana to experiment with replicating the standards of...
I’m a crisismapper, and I work for the UN. Crisismappers are people who provide online information to responders and communities affected by humanitarian crises. We use social media to do this, and we are very connected and very fast to respond when a crisis happens. A year ago, very few people would have understood what crisismapping is, and 6 months ago few people in the UN would admit to...
By Jonathan Stray
In a crisis situation, my journalist colleagues and I are charged with witnessing, documenting, and rapidly publicizing the events on the ground. This has been the journalist's role since the invention of the news periodical centuries ago. But the speed and scope of this work are undergoing a massive transformation: journalism must now be real-time, and often depends hugely...