updated April 9, 2011: news that matter
- Author?!??! I am not the author for anything on this site. There are thousands of authors for all the articles.
- Call me « The Collector ». Although that makes me think of a mafia movie where legs and arms are broken to extort money.
- « Collecting » is really my role for « Humanitarian News »: I collect information. I select news sources, process them through a whole series of tools to make them presentable in this site … //
- … Thank you for traveling this road with me. Peter. – (full text Author).
Homepage and links to all articles;
Articles by Issues: Aid news; AidWorkerBlogs; NonProfitNews; NonProfitBlogs; Green News;
Personal blog; What’s new? Sponsoring;
Contact.
About: A lot is published about aid, humanitarian work, and the nonprofit world as a whole. It fascinates me, both in the quantity of information and in the way it is dispersed. Few social aggregators, bookmarking and social media sites have categories specifically for the nonprofit sector, or offer selected news for the « soft » sector.
Stuff is scattered everywhere. Searches via Google News on criteria like « aid » or « development » return too much noise. If you google « aid » you’ll probably get an article about « financial aid to a US bank » rather than a publication about « development aid to Africa »…
For a year, I have been experimenting with different means to get the relevant information automatically collected in a simple, low bandwidth and searchable site. Not only would it give those working in the nonprofit sector an easier overview, but it would also help in broadcasting humanitarian news to the « general public ». Call it « advocacy through information » … And that’s the purpose of « Humanitarian News ».
- « Humanitarian News » is a personal initiative, started in August 2009. So the site is still pretty much in a construction phase while I add features and fine-tune the layout.
- I publish about 19,000 articles per month: summaries of the latest updates of about 700 sources: blogs, websites or news bulletins, all covering the subjects we are interested in: aid, development, humanitarian issues, poverty relief, news from the nonprofit sector, the environment. All sources are carefully handpicked to keep the information relevant. The updates are automated.
« Humanitarian News » is split into different sections, sorted by source rather than subject:
- AidNews contains only aid news articles and press releases from humanitarian agencies. There are about 30 different news sources in this stream, in addition to articles I select manually via my Google Reader.
- AidWorker Blogs is a collection from 70 different blogs by individual aidworkers spread all over the world. These people are « one the ground », working on development and aid projects.
- NonProfit News contains the most recent updates from about 60 different sources in the soft sector: websites from individual organisations and sites specializing in nonprofit news.
- NonProfit Blogs has by far the largest set of sites: over 450 blogs are automatically monitored for updates. The full blog list is available via my NonProfitBlogs Delicious bookmarks.
- These sites are all blogs – not websites – either from organisations, individuals, project teams, magazines and a few companies who provide specific services for the nonprofit sector.
- Green News covers articles about the environment and nature conservation, retrieved from 100 sources.
I optimized this site for low bandwidth (there are as few graphics as possible), and to post updates as fast and frequent as possible.
At the same time, I keep all my input sources updated, deleting sites which are no longer updated or have become irrelevant and adding new ones continously … (full text about).