ReliefWeb

I spoke this afternoon to Sarah Telford, who has moved from DFID to take up the post of Managing Editor at ReliefWeb, the ‘world’s leading on-line gateway to information on humanitarian emergencies and disasters’. Despite an occasionally clunky interface, ReliefWeb is an important source for much of the humanitarian community and beyond, with up to 3 million hits a day during high-profile emergencies. It also provides the ‘real-time’ humanitarian headlines on our own dear Sharepoint (just above the blog.

One of Sarah’s priorities is to increase the presence of NGOs in the ReliefWeb mix, and she is keen to work with the ECB Project to disseminate more widely in the sector the work of the IWG agencies in developing their emergency capacity.

As a result of our conversation, ECB will be featured shortly in the ‘From Our Partners’ section on the ReliefWeb homepage, and we will be increasing the number of documents and updates we submit to their ‘Policies and Issues’ database. Some niggles with their search system make it tricky to pin down exactly what of ours they have already, but it is clear that many important ECB documents are not yet available through this channel, and we will be putting that right over the coming weeks. We will also include ReliefWeb in the launch strategy for all future ECB publications.

If there are ECB documents and reports you consider should take priority as we increase our presence on ReliefWeb, please let me know.
Cheers, Matt