Templates for Humanity
Last year I had the immense pleasure of meeting Nick Gill from the American Red Cross as the Microsoft Business Applications Summit. Nick is a fellow PowerApps champ and we were sharing our stories one night after dinner.
Nick told me a wonderful story about Cathy, who had been deployed to hurricane Harvey; Cathy created an app to capture the status of the ground staff. Cathy built the app while the storm was happening, deployed it and got results super quick, it blew my mind!
I was deep in thought for the rest of the night, really seemed we technologists were missing something simple.
When the worst of human events occur, what technology can be immediately deployed to support your staff on the ground or the public, not just charity workers but for everyone in your org caught up in life changing events.
What have we put in place as people in technology to provide an out of the box solution for when the worst happens, for supporting our people when things go really wrong? The templates for most software and solutions cover the mundane tasks or demo the applications capabilities. Could we then ensure that our templates from Excel to PowerApps to Azure, have a template structure that includes supporting humanitarian events. Why not demonstrate capabilities in helping the world, not just our businesses?
I could use a template to book a meeting room, do my accounts, even shout out when someone did something great, but nothing for when the building was on fire, flooded or collapsing in an earthquake…
That night, sat with Nick, I expressed my views, we need Templates for Humanity!
I headed back to London and life got busy again, life is pretty crazy with three kids and, well, I’m trying to be a good Dad first. I needed to get closer to a charity to understand what the problems were. I’d been Introduced to Merkeb Woldmichael at the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric Aids Foundation and started to help support them in building PowerApps and providing technical help.
Fast forward to Microsoft Ignite, I’m sat next to Paola Storch from UNICEF, watching the keynote, we started chatting and Paola made me think back to that evening with Nick, then Satya Nadella plays a video on AI for Humanitarian Action, it’s totally awesome, but all of a sudden there is something that had been absent from all of the previous videos and presentations in the keynote, Paper!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-for-humanitarian-action
It struck me right between the eyes, how were they going to do AI for Humanity when everyone on the ground was armed, not with a tablet, but a clipboard and infinite sheets of paper? It’s just like a business where the management want a ton of reports but the data behind it is never expanded.
Sameer Bhangar from the PowerApps customer success team told me if I wanted to follow it up don’t do it alone, that if I really wanted to make a difference then get a group of people to help!
I started to tell people I met about the idea, Chris Huntingford, William Dorrington and Lucy Muscat, all from TDG, were some of the first. They loved the idea, along with Bryony Wolf from Microsoft reaffirmed Sameer’s words. We all started talking about how we could get this out there…
Saturday 16th February 2019 saw TDG run a Hack4Good event in London, I really wanted to get Templates for Humanity in the mix but how, would it work, or would it just be some noise at the start of the hackathon? The night before I was chatting with the inspirational Sarah Critchley.
Every time I speak to Sarah, I end up out of my comfort zone pushing through my internal struggles. I see the screaming in the words as they appear on my screen Just do It!
A number of teams at the hackathon delivered tech that could be turned into a template, but to highlight a few: the Purple Team’s led by Jaafar Rammal (he’s 19 and a total inspiration!), build a platform for managing low blood stocks in Lebanon but this template could work anywhere! The Grey Team from KnK build a Flow that could be inserted into any company or individuals account and collect donations by rounding up digital receipts.
These are the first templates for humanity.
So how can you help? When you build a solution, can it be refactored or tweaked to be useful to a Charity. If you are a software maker, build out templates that feature Humanitarian options. Could you build templates for existing platforms such as PowerApps or Flow that have a charitable or social slant, like Cathy?
I asked a group of people at Hack4Good how it made them feel… but I won’t take that discovery away from you by describing it here.
