The Digital Humanitarian Dilemma
Play the Long Game: Thoughts for the #Techfugees
Hello and congratulations on sparking a global movement of volunteers who want to use tech to help Syrian refugees. Like you, I have seen the photos of families crossing the sea to flee their war torn homes. Like you, I cried when I saw Aylan Kurdi washed ashore in Greece. It is truly horrific. As a digital humanitarian myself, I want to know what I can do to help. However, I’d like to share something that you might experience, the larger challenge is how will your goodwill be best used by the humanitarian relief community?
Institutions who execute the day-to-day work of crisis management and humanitarian relief, whether your local emergency management office or a large scale NGO, have little ability to leverage all your great ideas and prototypes right now. Don’t feel too bad about that. That’s pretty normal. They are in response mode. Some institutions might be able to participate, but what you do in your forums may not make it to the field. That’s okay. What you are doing is valuable a little further down the road. Right now, getting the attention for the issue, growing your community and documenting your code and projects is pretty important.
As a co-founder of a digital humanitarian community (retired January 2012), I’d offer that you might want to move beyond ideation and prototyping. How do you get those “alpha” projects and ideas into the field where they are actually helping on the frontline? Even before you do that, how will the community know what is needed “on the ground” and be able to ideate/prototype around these requirements?
Here lies the Digital Humanitarian Dilemma: Are the efforts of the “Crisis Crowd” (technology volunteers who rise up to help in times of crisis) able to innovate/impact the existing humanitarian relief system? More importantly help those in need within the local affected populations during the crisis? The impact you might have is not today, but will occur a year from now. I know, probably not what you thought. Probably something you don’t want to hear. Right now, you are in the short game.
The long game is where change happens. It is well beyond today’s crisis. That seems like a terrible thing to say, but its true. You can impact the edges but systemic, impactful change takes a long time. So I’d really love to see you plan for the long game.
A few elements you might want to think about now are ways to curate the community to be able to work well beyond the crisis at hand. Set up a core team. Have a dedicated community person. Have a dedicated project documentation person. They will wrangle all the good efforts so people can find them later. Document the projects and code. This stuff is not sexy but vital to the memory of what is happening right now. Write an After Action Report of the community’s efforts to share lessons learned for future communities and the humanitarian response system. Select representatives who will liaison with the humanitarian institutions not just right now, but a year from now.
As the year unfolds, be prepared to see your community contract. Volunteers will float back to their own lives and over time will spend less of their free cycles with the community. This is completely normal and it will happen. I would argue that this is the time when the core team will need to kick into gear to move the community’s ideation and prototypes forward. This is when humanitarian institutions are ready to collaborate.
While not sexy suggestions, I do hope that you can move the ball further. Everyone contributes in their own way. Communities exisit in different states, usually not like they started.
I do have a slight bone to pick. I read Monty Munford’s article “Technology is a better fix than donations and aid” — just the title alone is very first world opinion. While Munford might not respect the current response system, there are a lot of people trying to work for the greater good. Hard problems are that, they are hard. Institutions aren’t good at working on hard problems but they are excellent on scale. It would be great to see humanitarian relief institutions seeding fellows/executives/entreprenuers to work — years at a time — on really hard problems. Don’t leave it up to an entrepreneur who has never worked in a crisis to figure out what is needed. The humanitarian response system needs to tell the public what they need and if its a volunteer capacity or a business opportunity. While a weekend barcamp or hackathon is great to ignite change, it takes time (and resources) for change to move from ideation to the frontlines of humanitarian relief efforts. The worse thing that can (and sometimes does) happen is that volunteers are being used to work on innovation projects which the agency should assign resources. Not every problem can be solved in a hackathon, nor should it.
If you actually start to explore how humanitarian response systems leverage technology (and data), you find yourself in the middle of vendors, contracts and terms of service. Lawyers. People saying no (and for probably good reason). You have problems with HQ not listening to the field. You have the field bootstrapping whatever they have to make things work, sometimes at risking their own safety. You have digital humanitarians offering help in ways which can be useful and sometimes are just creating a new shiny toy.
Humanitarian relief systems often have the inability to evaluate new technologies. They aren’t at TechCrunch, they aren’t asking for use cases. There isn’t an In-Q-Tel for the crisis management and humanitarian relief system (although, you can argue there should be). Like many industries, the technology that humanitarian relief organizations use often isn’t developed with the field or HQ use case in mind.
Sharing isn’t incentivized. NGOs delivering aid for donors don’t like to share data. A donor could be funding millions of dollars of aid in a crisis and there is little ability to have a meta view of what’s happening so to avoid duplication of efforts (at the very least). Literally there is a product the UN does called the Three W’s — Who’s Doing What Where. This product exists because the very people delivering aid on the ground in a crisis won’t talk to each other. I digress.
The most important people are the affected population who is in the middle of and experiencing the crisis. You can’t tell them to use technology they haven’t used before or to download an app that you think would help them. Affected communities are using what they used before the crisis and in their own language. If it was Facebook, they are using Facebook. If it was What’s App, then they will be talking to their friends and family on the system which they use all the time.
Ask any startup founder who is stressed about user acquistion. The ability to adopt in peacetime nevermind in the middle of a crisis is a challenge. In the middle of a crisis, adoption can add more friction to an already stressful situation. Probably not the best time to deploy an app that isn’t fully baked. I won’t even get into assumption that they have connectivity and the fragmentation of mobile.
Adding to the challenge is that the public wants accountability and transparency of humanitarian systems. This resource allocation behaviors which don’t support ideation or prototyping. I wonder how much R&D is in humanitarian relief? Venture (nope — no exit). So how do these organizations modernize and attract technology talent? Giving nonprofits technology doesn’t help either. You have the same people problem on how will people use it and the other challenge that it sometimes is a foot in the door for business development for the company giving the technology away.
Crises and how we respond to them, both in manmade or natural disasters, have everything to do with people. Technology allows us to transcend borders but the affected population and the people who are serving those populations should be in the center of the response — not technology for technology’s sake.
Every crisis is an opportunity to help and change the world. Just remember, its when the cameras are off and the crisis crowd has returned back to their lives the sweet spot will emerge to move the ball ahead further than past communities. I encourage you to plan for and seize that moment. Its coming soon.
Heather
