Speech to NetHui About 7 or so years ago I was the head of the UN's Humanitarian office in Jerusalem. Just as I arrived the number of checkpoints in the West Bank was increasing. Although the underlying issue was security for Israelis from Palestinian attacks, it was also part of a sophisticated lockdown to carve the West Bank into separate, discrete areas. More checkpoints made it harder for the Palestinian population to move around. Children couldn't get to schools, students to universities, or people to their work places. They couldn't even make it to hospital. In a number of cases it meant women were giving birth at the checkpoints while waiting to get through. The humanitarian tragedy worsened. We were failing to tell the story of how these checkpoints and roadblocks impacted on the ordinary lives of Palestinians. Our response was to adapt technology to serve a humanitarian purpose. It started when I sent staff out to take photos of checkpoints and collect GPS data of their locations. We then matched that data with aerial and satellite photography. With the help of some very clever people we combined this information with statistics to build a comprehensive set of interactive maps that we printed and made web-based. The numbers and maps told a humanitarian story with real authority that had previously been unknown. Our website received 200,000 hits a month. They became incredibly powerful tools that raised visibility across world of what was happening on a neighbourhood to neighbourhood basis. We