How To Be Part Of Disaster Response Without Being Sucked In
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Digital Humanitarian Disaster Response
Let's frame the issue: Willow worked on Disaster/humanitarian response with Aspiration starting in January. Response is paternalistic - we think we know what people want, but we don't. Solidarity not charity
Slow disaster (humanitarian crisis) vs. sudden onset (natural disaster)
People are usually fine - life expectancies are shorter Co-extensive: doesn't disrupt the existing system when a new one intercedes
FEMA: bring big trucks, not aware of communities' needs, vulnerability, humanity
Versus Occupy Sandy
- Mike: Also important for reconstruction phase. Food & water is fine, but what about afterward?
- How to be surge capacity, how to make use of surge capacity, A sudden surge of attention, needs, and offers
- Surge in offers is matched appropriately with the surge in needs
- Risk of being paternalistic
- Margot: If you want to get involved, what are the resources available right now?
- Humanitarian Open Street Map Tasker - aerial imagery
- Microtaskers - a project of Standby Task Force
- does data parsing
- breaking out large projects into various levels of expertise/knowledge
- Willow has some qualms about it because it's more top down (works with UN OSHA)
- Be aware of needs and required skill sets/levels
- Example: Inspection
- Devon: will do an afternoon session on Occupy Sandy -> NYC Prepare
- Architecture for Humanity: Open response - a site for people to go
- Participatory Aid Marketplace - would be clearinghouse, log in and take a quiz or complete a profile and be matched up
- Recovers.org - help people capture offers of aid, orgs can follow up when they are ready
- Resilience Co-Lab
- Generic matching platforms
- short attention span, hasn't been done well yet
- disaster hackathons
- Mike: What you're really doing is building capacity for the next disaster (money or relationships), e.g. Red Cross
- Mismatch between what orgs need (long-term) versus what fulfills people's needs/instincts
- Damien: Occupy Sandy happened because Occupy had just preceeded it.
- Successful because self-organized
- Curious about digital vs. scouting/recon on the ground - translating the analog need-gathering into a digital platform
- A couple of approaches:
- Asynchronicity - can still be used when power goes out and phone has a charge
- Data is going to be messy - have to be ok with that, deal with a margin of error
- Not going to invest in tracking accuracy - lossiness in data, assume a 10% loss
- A lot of disaster response: is keeping flows going - outflow of food/resources
- Josh: A lot of digital reponse is ad-hoc
- Reinvent wheel/start from scratch, nobody uses it
- Sahana - O/S project - good start, needs work (usability help)
- Response hackathons/crisis camps
- Another approaching:
- Larping (Live action role playing)
- Science Fiction study into action - themes about surviving change - first three days after disaster event vs. first few weeks vs. 150 years later
- Taking the Superman out of disaster response - replace it with
- Fracking causes earthquake that breaks the bridges in NYC - people are stuck on islands, end up gathering in the park, people are getting different sets of information
- Acted out 3 scenarios:
- Gathered resources - put them in Easter eggs and hid them around the park - gamified it
- Recipes -
- Random eggs - you get mugged or you find a bicycle
- Acted out 3 scenarios:
- Group processing - found a big cache of apples - staged a fight with different proposed uses for apples, surprise ambush
Hackathon outcomes:
- Corporate co-opting of hackathon volunteers' ideas
- On-boarding/education
- Open source
- App downloading limitations - can everyone connect to Apple App Store during a disaster
- Know how to use low-tech solutions - walkie-talkies
- Skill-share profiles
- Helping orgs know what they can and should ask for
- Figure out the actual need, know how to articulate them to other people
- Ushahidi - software forms a way to collect info, just by installation - workflows
- One of the big needs is on-the-ground knowledge
- Who goes in there & who reports out
- Book: A Paradise Built in Hell
- about mutual aid and disaster response & how people's local response is somewhat linked to their amount of distrust of gov't
- How do you actually collect the needs on the ground and broadcast them to people can help - communication of needs on the ground
- Use the channels that people already use
Amazon wishlists
- Just send cash - accept loss
- Coming up with a template - regardless of what communication format, capture needs through a questionnaire
- Then, a way to loop it back to people who can supply
- Transparency report - based on front-line communities assessment
- Codes of conduct for collaborative responses
- Paper vs. digital?
- Mesh networks are working pretty well
- Local info doesn't need to be digitized - flyers, post-its are fine
- Only need digitizing for shipping/logistics purposes
- Conference call
- bit.ly/digirespcall
- URL for disaster response LARP:
- There are preparedness card games, but not response card game yet!