Pense-bête for humanitarians “exploring blockchain”
As you may have already heard, last November our team at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University organized an event called “Humanitarian Blockchain Summit.” Far from riding the crypto hype, our goal is to bring some clarity in a topic that is hard to understand also because of the buzz and noise that accompany every media-appealing tech phenomenon.
The event went quite well. Over 300 people (mostly invited experts) engaged in over 21 sessions running for the whole day. I won’t spend more words on this, together with the brilliant Angela Wells we already produced a short recap of the event. For the same reason, I won’t delve in explaining what blockchain is: Others already did it much better than I could possibly do.
During the Summit, some exciting external initiatives were announced or launched. After the Summit, we started developing the Blockchain for Humanity Initiative, starting from a thorough sector study project and the establishment of a Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP aims to vet those projects that we established as having a truly humanitarian nature and determine their current status. We hope that it will also facilitate a conducive environment for experts and actors to promote a constructive and informed discussion on the real capacity of these technologies.
While the Community of Practice is already being built as I write (reach out if interested in supporting it), the research project is still on paper. Not without some frustration, I noticed that most actors in this space are more interested in having long conversations about blockchain and then just trust a startup offering pro-bono services, than to support the development of the knowledge needed to increase the chances for their potential project to succeed.
I still continue hoping that someone will finally pick us up on the promise of more clarity leading to better value for money when time comes to actually develop a pilot. In the meantime, however, I decided to collect here what I see as the FAQ of humanitarian blockchain aficionados. At the very least, I can point this checklist to the growing number of people reaching out to “have a chat about this”, hoping that one of them will actually propose to go more into depth.
- Are You an Expert?
It depends. A humanitarian expert? By now, most definitely yes. A technical blockchain or DLT expert? Not even close. In the broad spectrum going from humanitarian crypto-noobs to Blockchain experts I am somewhere in between. That’s exactly right: I am the living proof that even in the blockchain world there is still need for middlemen.
I have been organizing workshops, meetings, events and conferences on this subject since early 2016, and I can affirm having (finally) got the gist of potential and challenges for this sector, beyond the hype. It goes without saying, I might be wrong in predictions and perceptions, and I most likely will be misusing some words or concepts here and there. I leave it to you to correct me, and to decide if you want to keep reading.
2. There is no “Humanitarian Blockchain”
Yes I know, our Summit was called almost like that. Call it esprit de synthèse. Call it pragmatism. Call it what you want, that’s beside the point. Distributed Ledger Technologies, the big family that includes blockchain, are neutral just like all other technologies. They are not inherently negative or automatically humanitarian, but inevitably tend towards one direction or the other because of deliberate or unconscious factors influencing their development. Even just the idea of “The Blockchain” is misleading, as there are potentially endless different versions of the same idea, conjugated in all sorts of shapes and nuances, sometimes even antithetical.
Whatever kind of DLT, if compatible with humanitarian rules and principles, could potentially be used or customized to be used in humanitarian action. The opposite of course also holds true: The mere fact of branding a blockchain system as “for good”or “humanitarian” doesn’t make it ready for use by humanitarians. Actually, most of the projects you might have seen throwing around the “for good” label actually target a commercially underserved customer audience, which is not necessarily the most vulnerable public.
The right question isn’t “Is blockchain good for my needs” but rather ”What kind of system and features I would need the most? Is this something I could possibly find in one of the blockchain platforms?”
3. You Don’t “Need” Blockchain
It may sound brutal, but let’s not beat around the bush: You don’t need blockchain, mostly because no organization can “need” something that has still not been completely developed. It took a decade to some humanitarian organizations just to concede that messaging apps could be actually useful, I am not sure the sector is ready to start crunching out the hundreds lines of code needed to set up a crypto minimum viable product, nor the complex developing and testing environment needed to ensure its safety. Just for the sake of keeping it real, Wall Street giants such as BNP just ditched multi-million, long-term investments and restarted from zero on some of their most promising blockchain ventures. Can humanitarians do better and faster?
If you’re looking for an urgent way to invest resources to develop more solid and distributed systems, there are other technologies — less buzzwordy but also cheaper and less unpredictable — that could do the trick. If you want to explore the thrill of a new, unproven and untested new way of doing things and you’re ready to go all-in, then DLTs might be a good choice. Even in this case though, most likely you won’t need — and wouldn’t want — a cryptocurrency, in the wildest scenario you could maybe consider developing a token (and even there, important caveats apply).
Just to be clear, I am not advising anyone to go full-DLT, nor to run away from it. Let’s just agree that it’s a risky and complex technology that requires sound long-term investment and the highest buy-in to have some chances to succeed.
4. It’s Not an One-Off App
Technically it could be, but not in the sense that you are thinking. These are not tools you can design with communities, deploy for a pilot and forget about right afterwards (if ever such a tool makes sense at all it’s a different story). DLTs are extremely complex, expensive and demanding technologies that require an investment way beyond the pilot project pipeline to deliver some useful results.
Despite claims by some supposedly blockchain-powered private startup, there’s no easy way to move to a blockchain-based way of doing things. The reason is easy: If it can be done without changing the way you manage and transfer information and resources internally, then you didn’t need to use DLTs in the first place. DLTs are structural platforms made to reshape information, communication and financing at the deepest level.
5. No, DLTs Are NOT Going to Solve [Insert Problem Here]
Repetita juvant: DLTs are working tools, not a magic wand. Technologies such as the blockchain can have a positive impact in the way donors, humanitarians, and their partners face and deal with humanitarian crises. Unfortunately, the simple fact of using blockchain will not stop corruption, ensure self-sovereign global identity for refugees, provide protection and privacy safety to vulnerable populations, and open the world of credit to marginalized and homeless people.
For every dreamy outcome there is a shadow risk waiting to undermine the credibility of this technology. Incorruptibility? Fantastic, until you discover a million USD (or Bitcoin? Ether?) paid for last mile aid delivery has vanished in a fold of this supposedly incorruptible system, with the added complexity layer of built-in anonymity and “presumption of trust” (what would be the advantage of investing in a truth machine if you need to constantly audit it anyway?). Absolute security? Wonderful, unless you find out that half your staff is still keeping paper records of all your data as local backup “just in case.” Immutability of records? Awesome, until you discover that those data on the hard copy backup mentioned above do not actually match what’s in the system. Unless, of course, all your staff worldwide and at all levels suddenly become black belt in data-entering through a massive investment in training and capacity building.
Some DLT features, if developed in the right way and tested and debugged thoroughly, could significantly decrease the costs and time of operations, ensure participation and sharing of purpose in the organization, and eventually result in better services and reduce data vulnerabilities inherent to centralized systems. Of course, only if promoters manage to prove that DLTs can overcome most of the flaws that made our traditional systems so vulnerable and ineffective without adding unwanted headaches (I’m looking at you, Proof of Work and Proof of Stake).
6. Yes, Some Use Cases are Exciting
Most likely though, it’s not the ones you read about in some dodgy white paper or lazy tech review. I will just mention my favorites, as our findings see a fantastic opportunity to restructure the whole international humanitarian financing system (OCHA pooled funds and grant management platforms); improving distributed war and disaster-resilient health systems, on top of which building progressive levels of authentication for additional services; or moving away from the honeypot-based system (not the decoy strategy, the real centralized database) by destructuring and scattering unusable pieces of highly sensitive encrypted information across the network in a way that makes it the hardest possible to have undue access to potentially life-threatening data. In the end, DLTs could maybe turn out not to be the best option to achieve these objectives. Even in this case, they surely offer a variety of solutions and technical tricks that could help building a better system, even if eventually not a crypto platform.
7. Extreme Tech Calls for… Normal Data Protection Measures
It feels weird to state the obvious, but apparently some humanitarians feels comfortable radically pivoting from “don’t even write it on paper if you might get the notebook confiscated,” to “let’s just throw all of our sensitive data in an immutable distributed network that sprawls well beyond our capacity for control”. Our findings show that — as far as we were capable of verifying — no humanitarian organization currently developing a blockchain pilot started from designing an appropriate data protection framework. We are designing a tentative one based on our recent experiences and we are ready to join any effort in this direction (as we’re doing already). With or without us, be it for blockchain or for a messaging app, humanitarians need to get used to the data protection work in exactly the same way they’re finally getting familiar with the innovative tech fever.
A Technology in Search of a Problem — Or a Mindshift
So far, the discussion about DLTs and humanitarian action has been framed in terms of the potential to solve specific issues. This techno-positivism is misleading and will hurt the sector, as it did with 3D printing and UAVs in the recent past. As I mentioned above (point 5), DLTs can result in a series of positive effects for humanitarians if they change the way they manage governance, financing, and operations.
Little to no impact shall be expected by tailoring this technology to absolve a single function while preserving the existing, cumbersome, and ineffective infrastructure that is currently seen as the root cause of all evil. These technologies can operate in a meaningful way and have an added value over more established solutions only if they are allowed to reshape the nature itself of the organizations using them, and the nature of the connections among them.
I am working on a research paper on humanitarian governance models and crypto systems which is currently under way. I believe the discussion need to start from inside the humanitarian world, instead of becoming yet one more victim of the over-inflated hype of a sector desperate to be saved by a tech knight in its shiny armor.
Want to help? Feel free to reach out to me with concrete proposals at g.coppi@hey.com
