Last week I was lucky enough to get invited on a training course run by the UN Foundation and the World Food Programme (WFP) aimed to train UN ICT staff to become field managers in some of the most hostile conflict zones and disaster areas in the world.

Along with the initial security teams, the UN ICT staff are the first people on the ground when a disaster hits – such as the current crisis in Burma – so have to know how to handle themselves.

One of the exercises I witnessed, held on a military base just outside Pisa, involved the participants – from agencies such as UNICEF and the WFP – having to take cover from paint bullets fired from automatic weapons by Italian paratroopers.

The aim of the exercise was to find out how the trainees cope under pressure as well as teaching them how to react if they find themselves under attack or ambushed.

In this clip, the paratroopers put on a mock ambush for the participants:



Next up, a group of three of four participants are told to walk through a fake town and after finding themselves under fire, from paint bullets, find a way back to their starting point using all the cover available.



The troops also demonstrated how to react if your convoy comes under attack:

The current crisis in Burma and China mean that the invaluable work of humanitarian and aid organisations is even more in the public eye than normal – with normal being the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur and the multitude of other international hostpots.

The importance of providing clean water, medical supplies and food aid to disaster and war zones is obvious but as I have been finding out over the last couple of days, an even more important resource in such situations is ICT. Without the VHF networks and portable V-Sat uplinks to allow the aid agencies to communicate and coordinate, providing aid on the ground becomes infinitely more complex and dangerous.

I was lucky enough this week to take part in one day of a two week intensive training course for ICT staff from a variety of UN organisations including the World Food Programme, and the UNICEF, designed to prepare the IT staff with the skills to survive in the hostile situations they could experience in the field.

One of the exercises I witnessed involved trainees having to dodge automatic fire (paint bullets) from Italian paratroopers. This might seem a pretty extreme way to train people whose main role is to set up Lans and radio networks, but what most people don't realise, including me before embarking on this trip, is that ICT specialists, along with the security teams, form the first wave of most aid agencies disaster response groups.

This training I witnessed, is aimed at assessing whether the ICT participants are capable of being promoted to become managers in the field, with the lives of up a dozen or more colleagues in there hands not to mention a $25m budget on the biggest projects. Funding for organisations such as WFP comes from donations, including cash from tech companies such as the charitable wing of Vodafone, The Vodafone Foundation.

There is an in-depth photo story in the works, but for now here's a taster of some of the tests the participants were put through in a military training ground just outside Pisa this week. The bullets might have been filled with paint – but they still hurt!



The practical training of the UN ICT field staff was overseen by Italian paratroops, the Folgore Airborne Brigade.



The first test involved a walk through a forest trail – pleasant enough apart from the hand grenades. Participants were asked to spot as many decommissioned mines and other explosives as possible, including some wired to very small charges – just to keep things interesting.



The next part of the practical tests involved the would-be UN ICT managers dodging paint bullets from automatic weapons fired by the paratroopers. Even if you know the bullets aren't real, it's still a great test of how people react under pressure.

You have probably already seen the video of Steve Ballmer getting egged in Budapest - but trying to work out what the egger was saying to the eggee isn't too easy - especially if you don't speak Hungarian.



Luckily, I know someone who speaks Hungarian, so if any of you are wondering what the guy said to Ballmer shortly before being escorted from the lecture hall, here you go: (You can work out the English bits for yourselves)

EGG CHUCKER: Hey you, Microsoft has caused Hungary 25 Billion Hungarian Forints in (unintelligible) to the Hungarian people – give that money back right now.

OTHER VOICE (presumable security/lecturer): Could you please leave the room? (In very polite Hungarian)

EGG CHUCKER: Ok.

OTHER VOICE: What were you thinking? (Again, in very polite Hungarian)

EGG CHUCKER: our country is going to pay a lot more for letting him doing a ‘parade’ (circus) here…

OTHER VOICE: This way, this way so we can see you leaving the room.

I have just arrived in a damp yet picturesque Pisa to observe, and maybe even take part in an ICT Emergency response training day hosted by the World Food Programme, The United Nations Foundation and Vodafone's charitable wing Vodafone Group Foundation.

I am not sure what the next day or so is going to offer but if it's anything like the journey here – then it should make for some good copy. Yep, the gods have chosen to play their irony card today in a very unsubtle fashion by visiting a full scale fire alarm and evacuation of Gatwick airport – a scant 20 minutes before I was supposed to board my flight to go and see an emergency response event in Italy.

Why bother leaving when I could see it al in Gatwick? Well, let's just hope that the scenes I witness tomorrow are better orchestrated than the BAA run shambles I witnessed in Gatwick with the staff clearly not sure if the event was real or a test – flitting between despondence and aggression when passengers followed their lead and failed to show any enthusiasm in believing their random calls to leave the building. They knew it was a test, we knew it was test, why couldn't we just leave it at that, rather than going through the half-arsed charade of shuffling 5000 people outside the terminal over a period of about 20 minutes – if it had been a real fire we would have been toast.

Anyway, I pretty excited about what tomorrow has to offer. Its all pretty relevant given the awful situation in Burma, and China (although the latter seems in danger of overshadowing the former thanks to the Chinese governments new found information dissemination skills – well actually they have always been ok with letting information out, it’s the letting it in which has been the problem). I am not sure what exactly the day will consist of but its basically all around setting up the communications infrastructure in a disaster zone – food, water and medicine obvious necessities but if, as in Burma, there is no way for aid groups to talk to each other, then relief efforts are made many times more difficult. I am promised that there will be some re-enactments of kidnapping attempts – a very real risk for the technical staff working in some of the world's hotspots.

Right – off to gather some more intelligence/dinner. More tomorrow when the actual details should become clearer.

I got an interesting invite last night to the media launch of a dedicated gaming centre housed in an HMV store in central London. Resplendent with around 80 Quad core PCs and Dual Core notebooks, Gamebase is every school-boy's dream, and actually most fully-grown-should-have-better-things-to-do-with-their-time-big-boys dream too. With a little help from some beer and sandwiches, the event was basically a chance for some IT hacks to take their professional enmity out on each other courtesy of the latest shoot-fest Call of Duty 4. Networking company D-Link bank-rolled the evening as they provided all the switches and routers that makes the whole virtual war-mongering experience possible.

The other vendors involved in Gamebase are Dell, which provided the high-spec XPS PCs, and Microsoft which provided the high spec operating system for the machines. Now given the Vista branding on all the XPS machines we assumed that the OS in question was Vista – after all a state of the art facility such as Gamebase surely deserves Microsoft's latest operating system? But closer investigation revealed that the OS on the machines we were playing tuned out to be not Vista at all but XP Pro. It seems that Vista had just not performed as well as good old reliable XP – but for some reason, no one was motivated to remove the Vista branding from the Gamebase centre or the machines themselves. Funny that - guess those darn stickers must be just too hard to remove...