This is the story of a 1 year 2 month old boy born to an 18 year old mother on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. This report/plea for assistance came in recently from a Philippine Physician at one of the remote rural clinics HELP visited during "Needs Assessment" operations recently.

Learn how you can help at the end of this story.

Camron Assadi, Deputy Internet Director of Mercy Corps talks to us about why email still works, the awesomeness of Google Grants, and how Gmail makes it easy to check your email in Tajikistan.

Could assetmap.org/uganda be used as a transition tool for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs? 

While the United Nations is routinely assailed for bureaucratic clunkiness, inefficiency, or even corruption, its important to recognize the absolutely vital role that its offices play in "complex man-made emergencies" (also known as "wars") and natural disaster relief.

Payson, AZ 12/10/07 - HELP (www.disasterlogistics.org) is pleased to announce that it is a recipient of a 2007 Award of Excellence in the mobile media ca

Last month's Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Ephrat Bitton of iCare and Jonathan Thompson of Humanlink talking about how to use the Web for disaster relief.

You can hear recordings of their presentations and their interviews with our Net Tuesday Podcaster, David Collin of FI Space, on the NetSquared Podcast.

"What we have done is we've deployed and completed the first of what we're calling a "doc in a box". It's a 20 foot cargo container, shipping container, like you see on ships going overseas. On the outside, it looks pretty much like any other container. On the inside is a complete medical clinic, complete with a lot of different telemedicine equipment and satellite uplink gear that enables us to bring a patient wherever this is dropped off, anywhere in the world."

The BBC reported today in, Web Tool to Help Survivors Cope, about a disaster relief system that would connect survivors and donors directly using the Internet, and make delivery of supplies by truck more efficient:

In the iCare system survivors report what they need via web terminals in aid centres or using text messages sent via mobile phones. Their requests are then routed to the companies, organisations or individuals that can provide exactly what they need.

PLEASE HELP US HELP THEM

First, a round of virtual applause to NetSquared and their sponsors for launching this competition - a truly "cool experiment" as an earlier blogger rightly put it!

With apologies to Thomas Friedman, I would like to mention five proposals that recognize how "flat" the world is - meaning that distances and borders do not exist for these solutions - and which I believe clearly meet the six attributes in the Voters Guide.

The other criteria I applied are: (1) based on collaboration/partnership, and (2) a track record of doing projects like the one proposed.