What's the problem we're trying to solve seems to be the topic of the day here. It is a question almost everyone who works at a company, foundation, or association (the funders) seems to be asking (including me), and it has been hard for the NGO participants to come to any agreement on the answer.
So, thankfully, Mitul and Claire (representing the UN Foundation's Technology Partnership) worked with the facilitators to restructure our agenda, break into smaller working groups and try a project-based approach to answer that question. By focusing the conversation on how you use technology to tackle problems related to community health or what the end goal of better data collection is or how to take projects to scale, we now have four excited and re-energized groups (instead of one larger, slightly cranky one).
Each group worked together for about two hours today and will work together again tomorrow before reporting back to the larger group about the problem they're addressing, the technology solution, and then how they involve others (including the United Nations) in their work.
I think two things they heard today will also help them focus their plans. Dave Sessions of Microsoft walked everyone through the basic elements of a successful business plan (including know your audience, know what you're trying to do, know how you're unique or bring value to the solution, etc.).
Thanks, Matt, for following this thread.
On the definition issue, at risk of stating the obvious, the distinction between "terrorists" and "freedom fighters" is given weight it doesn't deserve because of the inherently political nature of any discussion of who is and who isn't a terrorist. The fact that the US only recently took Nelson Mandela off of its terrorist list is a reminder of this.
Like Mediterranean food? So do people in Mediterranean countries. More and more of it these days. And, increasingly, according to a recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization study, lots of other, not-so-healthy foods as well. From the UN News Centre:
People on the shores of the Mediterranean have used higher incomes to add a large number of calories from meat and fats to a diet that was traditionally light on animal proteins. What they now eat is "too fat, too salty and too sweet," [FAO Senior Economist Josef] Schmidhuber reports. In the 40 years to 2002, daily intake in 15 European nations increased from 2,960 kilocalories to 3,340 kilocalories - about 20 per cent. But Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta, who started out poorer than the northerners, upped their calorie count by 30 per cent.Improving economies certainly explain part of this story, as the tendency of people with more disposable income to want to eat more meat is part of a global trend -- one that, particularly in China, is contributing to rising food prices and environmental degradation. As the study soberly points out, though, high levels of obesity are also caused by people eating more and exercising less. Go figure. (Photo by Flickr user hazy jenius used under a Creative Commons license.)
This morning Kate Sheppard posted a great succinct analysis on what the U.S. Congress may do on energy legislation before recess:
The "biggest opportunity" to pass energy legislation, Bingaman said, is the tax-credit extensions for renewable energy that have stalled repeatedly in the Senate, despite passing in the House on multiple occasions. GOP senators haven't liked the Democrats' proposals to pay for the tax credits by closing what Democrats consider to be tax loopholes for business, but moderate Democrats have insisted that so-called "pay-fors" are necessary to prevent the bill from adding to the budget deficit. A new compromise version of the bill, proposed by Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.), would pay for the extension of tax credits by setting limits on the ability of hedge-fund managers to defer taxes on their income held offshore and by putting off until 2019 a tax credit for multinational corporations. Baucus also added a number of unrelated provisions meant to make the bill more attractive to Republicans. It's unclear how many Republicans might be willing to back Baucus' proposal. Renewable-energy companies have been howling that failure to extend the tax credits is crippling them.Kate's got it right, particularly the last line. Boom/bust cycles in the tax code have been truly damaging to the renewables sector and are one of the reasons why the U.S. lags behind its European counterparts and why most of these companies are headquartered abroad.
Eric raises excellent points. I'll just add that on top of the question of whether the existing treaties do in fact cover the full waterfront on possible terrorist offenses, the lack of a common definition of terrorism has several other implications. Among them:
First, much of the debate over terrorism still focuses on the groups themselves and their underlying grievances or political objectives, not the actual acts of terrorism - the criminal terrorist offenses - they carry out. As such, the "terrorism v resistance" argument is given weight it does not deserve since the legal issue at hand is not why one carries out a criminal act of terrorism like a suicide bombing but the fact that such an act was carried out at all.
By Katherine Miller, Executive Director of Communications at the UN Foundation
The United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Group Foundation, in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation, is hosting a four-day conference to explore an emerging trend, mHealth, that harnesses mobile communications technologies to tackle global health care issues. Around the table are many of the world's recognized leaders in this field (along with some of the biggest funders) and if this first day of conversation is any indication of what's to come, it's going to be an interesting and informative discussion.
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Since one of the questions in the prompt asked whether "our laws - or international law" [emphasis added] are capable of addressing the threat, I thought I would weigh in the international law side of the question.
What do you do if you're a "blue helmet" without a blue helmet? Some enterprising members of the UNAMID force have had to resort to wrapping their helmets in blue plastic bags, according to a report released by the Darfur Consortium (hat tip FP Passport).
The lack of helmets is just the tip of the iceberg. The Consortium:
The failure of world leaders to keep their promises on peacekeeping has condemned millions of Darfurians to more fear and suffering, without protection from violence.Need I say more?