 Sam, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Can you tell us a bit about what's happening in Mindanao? Mindanao has an ongoing conflict right now. Every few years we see a huge number of people being displaced from their homes. The last time was 2008 when we actually produced the highest number of displaced people among all conflicts around the world. Unfortunately, there was about 750,000. This conflict is also beginning to call the attention of the international community and that is why you'll see also a lot of OS aid projects in Mindanao. You're here at this conference talking about the importance of information and the power of information in maintaining peace. Can you talk a bit about that? Obviously, you said this is now coming to the attention of the international community. Has that taken a lot of effort to get the information out there? What we would like to see, what everyone should hope to see is that all this help coming from both the national level as well as from the international community should reach the people, the communities that it's supposed to reach. And information then becomes a huge factor because for bilateral or multilateral it needs to be able to get the resources towards need that they need to know which communities are affected, what does this community need as opposed to another community. And that's where information plays a very, very important role. You need to be able to get information from the grassroots to the institutions and to the people that make the decisions that affect the lives of the people in the conflict affected communities. Has that been challenging in a place like Mindanao? Is it very difficult to get accurate information in a timely way? It has been difficult for several reasons. Setting up the system has been difficult. For one, the geography. We're talking about most of the violence that occurred in remote villages. Villages that you'll find in the Mars or in some tiny island or up there in the mountains, villages that are not accessible by four-wheel vehicles. So the question then is how do we get information, timely information from these villages to whoever needs it and who needs to respond to this information. And that's what we have been working on for the past couple of years on basic concepts on human rights and humanitarian law. And we've managed to convince them to accept the importance of them giving information to those who are in a position to decide over their welfare. But it took a lot of convincing to do that because normally the residents of these villages are reluctant to share information about their day-to-day lives. The other challenge here besides that is the challenge of prodding the institutions that make the decisions to pay attention or to recognize this information. It would be useless for the residents of conflict-affected villages to give us information if no one acts on those information. If there's fighting between two armed groups and civilians in this particular village, in a particular village is caught in the crossfire, and we forward that information to both the rebels and to the government forces, they need to act upon that information and tell their respective forces to stop fighting. That is the sort of response that we would like to see. For the aid community, for the donor community, what we would like the challenges been to tell them to come to our areas and ask the people what they really need. Sometimes some of our friends from the donor community forget that the ones who need to decide, who really need to decide on what projects will work and what projects won't work, are the people who will be the ultimate beneficiaries of these projects. Because sometimes when an agency goes into conflict-affected area, he or she, that institution brings with it some knowledge that it got from other countries where it operated on. Some of that experience may be applicable to Minda now. Some of that may not be applicable and the best people to ask what would work would be the locals. You mentioned that it's important not just to gather the information and have accurate information, but also to make sure that information is acted on. What lessons have you learned from your experience at Minda now that you might share with the rest of the world on how to make sure, what tools can you use to make sure the information is not only available but acted on? On getting information, you need to make sure that the information that you're getting is reliable. That can be, it's not that easy in a conflict-affected area because a lot of groups, a lot of people would volunteer for information and you wouldn't know which one to believe. Some are pushing their own agendas? Pushing their own agendas, exactly. What you need to do is get information from as many different sources as possible and not just from one source. So then it makes it easier for you to triangulate your information, to double-check the information that you earlier received. For example, if the soldiers say one thing and the rebels say another thing, the best person, the third person or third group that you can talk to or ask, your question would be the civilians who are caught in the middle. What tools would you say are useful in making sure that information is not only disseminated but acted on? We see it in two bodies set up by the humanitarian community in Mindanao. During these meetings, we always share with them the information but we don't stop there. We follow through. We ask them, yesterday we gave you this particular information that this particular village was displaced and they need rice, food and shelter. One or two days later, we go back to them and ask them. So we don't leave it, we don't leave the information, we don't stop giving the information, we actually follow through with them. Donor accountability, donor transparency is one of our advocacies here. Our advocacy, the audience for advocacy are both the beneficiary communities as well as the members of the donor community. What other processes do you foresee using in the next, say, five to ten years in maintaining the peace process? Two things. First is greater international attention. The experience in many internal conflicts around the world is that for the larger part, the international community has played a positive role in ending internal conflicts. I consider the international community as a referee. If you have a football match with no referees, then you will end up with a riot during the game, during the match. But if somebody steps in with an impartial mindset, then you have a greater chance that the peace process will move forward. For the past ten years, that's what actually has happened. The substantive negotiations between the government and rebel panels has made leaps precisely because you have the international community, including the Australian government, backing up the peace process. The other thing that we need to see would be, we need to show to the people the fruits of the peace process. The peace process must not be down to the benefit of the elites, either on the rebel side or on the government side. Because if the peace process only benefits the elites, then you will have a peace agreement that's respect only by those that belong to the elite. And you will still have a conflict, probably a new rebel group will emerge. So in the coming years, I'm hoping to see that the peace process produces a peace dividend for the ordinary man or woman in the remote conflict areas. And I guess that this comes back to something you mentioned earlier, that if you want to get real, accurate information, those are the people you need to speak to, the people that live in these communities and are living through the conflict as a source of accurate information, but ultimately as a measure of whether you've been successful in maintaining peace. Exactly, exactly. It's if you want to measure how successful, how effective you have been, whether you're the government or whether you're the rebel group or you're with the International Monetary Agency. You ask your client, in this particular case, the client would be the civilians living in the conflict affected communities. You don't ask yourself. I mean, it's good to do some self-assessment, but self-assessment alone, without the beneficiary communities putting in their own assessment of how you perform, then you won't get an accurate idea of whether the money, the money that you've invested in this area actually produce positive results. I've seen institutions that claim, we've done this or that for this particular community, but when you go down to the community, they're perplexed because, and then they tell me, look at us, look at how I'm living right now, I'm still living in a grass hut. So what did all the assistance that they're talking about, where is it, where did it go? So yes, hopefully, the work that we're doing in Mindanao is we'll help, not just these communities, but it will help the donor community. I still believe that there's a lot of sincerity, both at the national institutions as well as bilateral, multilateral institutions that say sincere desire to be helpful, and what we're doing here is providing them the information so that they can do, they can achieve what they set out to achieve, and that is to be helpful to the local communities, and by doing so, the local communities are helping themselves also. Zan, thank you very much for your time today. Thank you, Jonathan.