Last Post...

After over a year of providing information on humanitarian security incidents and topics, this will be the last post for the NGO Security Blog. Other responsibilities and time commitments are cutting into the task of scanning a variety of news sources each day, looking for relevant and interesting things and then summarizing and adding the content to the blog.

Thirteen months ago the blog started out as an experiment in providing information about humanitarian safety and security incidents from public and open sources. The methodology was to consult a number of different online news sources each day, select articles of interest, and then summarize them including a link to the original source. The information would be made available in a public Internet forum that anyone with an interest in humanitarian security issues could access.

I personally consider the experiment a success. Around 100 people a day currently read the blog (sometimes a little more, other times a little less) with repeated visits from UN and government agencies, large and small NGOs, educational institutions and news organizations. There's also been a considerable amount of positive feedback from readers on how the blog helps them stay current on what's happening in the world and exposes them to concepts and tools outside the traditional NGO security box.

I hope that since the concept has been proven, similar projects will spring up elsewhere. Using Google's Blogger or other blogging tools is extremely simple and I'd encourage humanitarian organizations to consider using this technology to internally publicize safety and security incidents and provide information (either on their intranets or with non-public Internet blogs that can only be viewed by selected people).

I believe that humanitarian organizations as a whole generally don't do a good job of sharing security information with each other (especially at the field level) and it would be nice to one day see InterAction or a collective of large NGOs get together and host something like the NGO Security Blog for their members to contribute to and use. The technology is available, the readers are out there, and from running this blog I think the benefit is apparent.

Although the NGO Security Blog will be going away, the blog archives and other humanitarian security resources will still be available on the companion NGO Security Page. If you're looking for safety and security reference material, I encourage you to visit that site. I plan on keeping it updated as time permits.

To all the readers and contributors, I'd like to express my appreciation. Take care, stay safe and keep up the good work.

JM