Great news via email from Asim Khwaja, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University:

RISE-PAK has just won the award Stockholm Challenge Award 2006 in the public administration category.

Also known as the Nobel Prize of IT, the award is divided into six categories: Culture, Economic Development, Education, Environment, Health, and Public Administration - we have won in the Public Administration. More than 1,100 projects were in competition, out of which 151 were selected as finalists from 53 countries. We were one of the 6 winners.

Others finalists in our category are given at the bottom of the page at http://event.stockholmchallenge.se/finalists.php - they include include FirstGov.gov - The U.S. Government's Official Web Portal!

Khwaja, along with Jishnu Das of the World Bank, founded RISE-PAK as a rapid response to the Pakistan earthquake. The goal of their project was to set up databases and systems of reporting to try to make sure that aid got to rural villages and was not just concentrated in the cities. My contribution to this was to put RISE-PAK in touch with the Global Connection Project, and that we could offer help with maps through the use of Google Earth. The Global Connection Project also interceded with Google Earth on behalf of The Citizens Foundation and RISE-PAK to arrange for Google Earth to acquire up-to-date satellite imagery of the affected area from Digital Globe.

I've written a bit about this in the past. My previous RISE-PAK posts are HERE.