The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11, 2011 brought unprecedented devastation and sufferings to the people in North East Japan. Massive support efforts have been undertaken to provide relief and recovery to the people in devastated areas.

We, the people working in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), believe that we need to build and operate an open and diverse information platform that connects the real needs of the affected people in the devastated areas and those relief activities.

With this belief, we launch “Information Support pro bono Platform (iSPP)”. We will build and operate this information platform by utilizing our professional knowledge, skills, expertise and resources.

We will focus on activities to help mitigate the burden of the devastated people. In parallel, we will engage in surveying and recording the destruction and damages, as well as researching how people sought for information during the catastrophe and aftermath. We also plan to extract lessons and compare them with those learned from previous great earthquakes in Japan, such as the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 and the Niigata Chuetsu earthquake in 2004. Having mid- and long-term challenges in mind, we plan to promote cooperation with international relief and rescue activities along with examining the Japanese ways of thinking that could improve the social systems. We propose to build and manage new systems that will work in the emergency situations to come.

We will carry out our activities as “pro bono”, a relatively new idea in Japan. We will welcome working together with central and local governments, businesses, institutions and not-for-profit organizations, and will coordinate and cooperate with the victims in the devastated areas, to contribute to the earliest possible recovery and reconstruction works.

We appreciate your kind support and cooperation to our ideas and activities.

(To be adopted on May 24, 2011 by more than 400 individuals as signatories)

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<Related Information>
The role of ICT during the disaster (381KB)
– A story of how Internet and other information and communication services could or could not help relief operations at the Great East Japan Earthquake
by Izumi Aizu

ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) challenges for post‐disaster activities in Japan (1.56MB)
Presentation by Izumi Aizu for PMI Webinar on 24, 25 July 2011