23 Things: Thoughts about Web 2.0

In general, I would say that most organizations within the forced migration community still have only a limited awareness of or familiarity with Web 2.0 technologies. But adoption of these technologies is definitely happening, slowly but surely. Witness the posts that I have written for the 23 Things program. Many of them provide examples of how various forced migration and humanitarian organizations are using blogs, RSS, Flickr, YouTube, social bookmarking, etc. to get their messages across and further their reach.

What is unclear is what impact these developments have had on their fundamental missions. To what extent does Web 2.0 help raise awareness and funds, increase advocacy efforts, influence policy, and ultimately effect positive change in the lives of the people these organizations are mandated to assist and protect? It would be interesting to know whether this relationship has been investigated or not by the individual organizations who have adopted Web 2.0.

On a related note, this series of posts on humanitarian.info delves into the question of technology innovation within the humanitarian context.