We’ve been thinking of what makes a good team and came up with three ingredients. Good teams are (1) diverse, (2) supportive,  and (3) love what they do! There are many ways a team can be diverse. For example the Humanitarian ID team has members with very different cultural backgrounds, experiences and ages. Our interns have been… Read more

Do you remember what you did exactly a year ago? Where you were and whom you were with? What made you happy, sad, angry or excited? We remember very well. A year ago the Humanitarian ID team was working on the launch of Version 2.0. We had been working for many months gathering feedback from the… Read more

The humanitarian response to the Rohingya Refugee Crisis has been building up over the past six months, with hundreds of thousands Rohingya people crossing the border into Bangladesh. Last week we heard from a health expert working in a field hospital in Cox’s Bazar, who received an email from a colleague from another international NGO:… Read more

At a time when the news is full of online security threats, from small-scale internet fraud to global vulnerabilities like ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’, it is important to remember that each one of us is the first barrier to those threats. In other words, if you lock your car, there’s less chance it will get stolen.… Read more

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on another year of progress with Humanitarian ID. Since January around 10.000 humanitarian responders added their profiles, bringing the total to 17.000. We expanded the authentication service to 20 platforms and now provide authentication for nearly 30.000 users. Based on feedback from Humanitarian ID early… Read more

Have you ever deployed to a sudden-onset emergency and noticed 2-3 people sitting in the back of a tent, eyes glued to a laptop screen? That’s us, information management officers, also known as IMOs. We assemble baseline data, estimate the number of affected people, create maps and monitor the humanitarian response. And yes, we also… Read more

There are a lot of acronyms to learn in the humanitarian sector, like CBPF. Country-Based Pooled Funds  allow donors to pool contributions into single, unearmarked funds to support local humanitarian efforts in new and deteriorating crises. They are managed by OCHA under the leadership of the Humanitarian Coordinator and in consultation with the humanitarian community.… Read more

Most of us own at least two email addresses – one for work and one personal – but it’s not unusual to have many more than that, especially for responders moving frequently between operations or organisations. A few weeks ago, OCHA’s Online Project System (OPS) switched to Humanitarian ID to ‘authenticate’ users logging onto their website (see… Read more

Where do you go to find and share humanitarian information? Perhaps some of the sites you visit include ReliefWeb, HumanitarianResponse.info, the IASC website, or ACAPS? Most websites ask you to create an account to access all their features, and each new account means new IDs and passwords to remember. It’s like carrying a big key-chain… Read more

Sometimes the most basic things are the hardest to do, especially in emergencies. Have you ever had to manage a humanitarian contact list in a disaster setting or a protracted crisis? We asked humanitarian responders at the UNDAC Induction Course in Switzerland how they manage their own contact lists. Find out what they had to… Read more