Some time ago I co-authored a report (for the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation) with Patrick Meier on the use of mobiles in emergencies and disasters. Patrick has just released a whole book on this subject, going much wider than the original report, [amazon_link id=”1482248395″ target=”_blank” ]Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response[/amazon_link].

The technology has already moved on considerably – the Big Data phenomenon, for one thing. Importantly, there’s a chapter covering verification techniques; while we found in the original work that crowd-sourced data (as it wasn’t yet called when we first wrote about this) was often more accurate than ‘official’ information, the more verification the better. There’s also a chapter on digital activism – the book’s website sets out all the chapters with brief summaries.

Digital Humanitarians looks like it has lots of examples and it certainly covers some very important and timely questions. Patrick blogs at iRevolution and his latest post talks about the book.

[amazon_image id=”1482248395″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response[/amazon_image]