THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF CRISIS MAPPERS
On the Humanitarian-Technology Divide and What to Do About It
It was Larry Brilliant's TED talk over four years ago that first got me hooked. He spoke about the technology used by the Global Public Health Information Network (GPHIN) which had detected the outbreak of SARS months before the WHO by crawling the web (including blogs) for key words (symptoms) in multiple languages. “I envision a kid (in Africa) getting online and finding that there is an outbreak of cholera down the street. I envision someone in Cambodia finding out that there is leprosy across the street,” Brilliant said.
I was teaching a full semester course on Disaster and Conflict Early Warning Systems that Spring and watching the TED talk made me realize how far behind we were as a community. And by community I mean those of us working on conflict prevention and rapid response to complex emergencies. I've been trying to close this gap ever since by actively cross-pollinating innovative thinking and best practices as well as reality-checks. I've done this through consulting projects in the field like the Sudan and Timor Leste, applied research with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), the publication of policy reports, extensive blogging, joining Ushahidi, presenting at numerous conferences, co-founding and curating a new conference series on Crisis Mapping, co-launching the Crisis Mappers Network, etc.
I think both communities have come a long way but we need more bridge builders, as Ethan Zuckerman recently emphasized in his 2010 TED Talk in Oxford when he referred to my colleague Erik Hersman. We need builders who are comfortable in both communities, who are bilingual in both humanitarian and tech languages. I can only think of a handful of these individuals. This means the majority of technologists who respond to crises have little to no experience in disaster response or how to communicate with humanitarians let alone the disaster affected communities. At the same time, this also means that many seasoned disaster response experts and policy types ignore technology innovation altogether, largely because they don't understand it. This is also an issues in the human rights community.
The 2009 Crisis Mapping conference brought these two communities together and the added value to both was immense:
http://www.crisismappers.net/video/iccm-2009-conference
I'm planning to repeat this with the 2010 Crisis Mapping conference, which is also why we've decided to host it in Boston—the city with the most universities in the world. We need more students, both undergraduates and graduates, to realize there are career opportunities in this field and help them select appropriate courses and internships so they can become future bridge builders. Recall that the Ushahidi deployments in Haiti and Chile were both student-run. We also need to find ways to send techies to the field, like Ethan's Geek Corps idea. Better yet, humanitarian organizations should actively seek such interns.
Those are my two cents but I'd love to get more ideas from readers on what to do about this divide.
Tags: Collaboration, Community, Humanitarian, Learning, Tech
Comment
-
Comment by Max Richman on August 15, 2010 at 1:39pm -
From both DC and the field I have been introducing, implementing, and inculcating the use of GIS during complex emergency response for the last four years at USAID. Every day my team and I (we've grown from a wolfpack of 1 to soon 5!) make steady progress against this persistent and pervasive digital divide within the humanitarian ranks.
I like Jose's idea of shadowing but I also think a properly equipped mapping person with the right training and personality can really help build these bridges and be value-added. Here is how we have approached it. Some observations on bridge-building from within a small operating unit of a large government agency:
-implementing GIS is a human process far more than a technological acquisition. it's really about building relationships and rapport with non-technical program managers and country directors.
-the people I support are knowledge rich, but data poor. few people have ever effectively witnessed the power of tabularized information in the form of data. desktop mapping helps encourage that.
-being able to quickly produce high quality cartographic products for development/humanitarian professionals who spend a large portion of their time focused on reporting and presenting to audiences internal and external, helps GIS/mapping and spatial analysis get a foot in the door
-the rapid and flexible production of this type of desktop mapping helps incentivise information management. i.e. if you take one minute to push the knowledge from your head on to this spreadsheet instead of that e-mail, we'll be able to generate a powerful visual to help you make your case.
-iterative. to be successful, you build on these small wins. if the previous interaction was deemed worthy by your colleague, the next time around you might get two minutes of their time and your map will be twice a powerful.
-incremental. bring in another group and get another column of data in your spreadsheet. soon folks want more: can you integrate photos? can you build in validations so we can dummy proof this and send it around for more folks to fill in where they are working? what started as a spreadsheet evolves into a database with an organic data model driven by the end user. which brings me to ...
-all of this must be development/humanitarian professional led. they need to see the immediate value of taking the time to plug in the data, it is your job as the bridge builder to identify the fastest and most flexibility technology toolkit to do so.
-This can be a long process so you really want to piggy back where you can on existing information infrastructure. what databases exist? how does information flow in your organization? what do the managers/leaders want to see on a regular basis?
-also learn to rely on your more forward-leaning humanitarian professionals. let your work speak for itself through them. their word of mouth is often better than yours.
I hope this conversation happens at the October meetings. Its one that as this community continues to evolve and professionalize, will be increasingly important to share lessons learned of effective bridge building through the implementation of geospatial tools and common-sense information management practices in complex crises.
-
Comment by Jose Ravano on July 26, 2010 at 4:22pm
-
hi patrick,
thanks for your encouraging words on my blog post and i look forward to participating in the conference in october.
your blog about the humanitarian-tech divide is quite spot on. we do need more bridge builders. and from what i've seen so far of this network, i think you've got quite a growing bunch of good ones out there. so i'm encouraged.
and i do completely agree that some mechanism needs to be developed to get techies to the field. i think it's only from there that they can really get a sense of what the information needs, flow and capacities to process are on the ground, in often chaotic situations. one possible way to help bridge this divide is to just send a group of technologist-bridge builders to the field. to just study the response. attend the cluster meetings at the central and district levels. follow the logistics and procurement chain. shadow a fieldworker for several days. talk to affected populations and really, really understand the critical pieces of information that responders need on a daily basis to make their work more effective. if a tech group just had a better sense of what it's like and what is needed, they'd for sure create some new technology to make things work better. they always do. and if it organizes their work better, humanitarian organizations will embrace it. so maybe it's just a matter of organizing and getting the techie-bridge builders out there.
© 2010 Created by Patrick Meier.
Powered by 
.
You need to be a member of Crisis Mappers Net to add comments!
Join Crisis Mappers Net