HOT

2Feb

How Digital Humanitarians Are Closing the Gaps In Worldwide Disaster Response

[Reposted from the Huffington Post, January 28, 2016]

It is now commonplace for people around the world to use social media during emergencies, and the volume of online information coupled with its rapid arrival is becoming increasingly overwhelming to humanitarian organizations. In response, digital humanitarians (individuals who participate in humanitarian relief online) have organized into skilled teams online to decipher the signals from the noise and thus provide accurate data. These teams work in partnership with formal humanitarian organizations using digital forensics, mapmaking, data mining, curation and open dialogue. Communication is now considered a crucial part of aid, and social media is part of this toolset. Even so, privacy, power and access are just some of the complex challenges that digital humanitarians must navigate when using these platforms in their work to help communities in need.

Introduction

Seeking a way to “do something,” more and more people are answering the call to action on social media after each emergency. Digital responders or “digital humanitarians” immediately log on when news breaks about a natural disaster or human-created catastrophe. Individuals and teams “activate” based on skill sets of volunteer and technical communities (VTCs). These digital responders use their time and technical skills, as well as their personal networks in an attempt to help mitigate information overload for formal humanitarian aid in the field. The terms often used to define these contributors in the humanitarian space are remote help, citizen engagement, citizen response, localized community, civil society and global civic technology. Some participants are new to online humanitarian response, but have found a topic or location that drives their passion to get involved.

This surge of action by participants is often just as chaotic as the actual physical emergency response. People are compelled to work, at a dizzying pace, by the fact that many parties involved in first response require valid, urgent and usable data. Focused on the needs of the citizens in affected areas, informal and formal networks collaborate and sometimes collide in an effort to make sense of and identify needs or stories from this user-generated content. With a combination of will and skill, they create updated maps, datasets, information products, and even communities (both online and offline). The global growth of these activities is based on access to information, connectivity and language skills as well as digital literacy levels. These groups are making efforts to become more inclusive while respecting local language, culture and knowledge. The mantra of most digital responders is “support” not “supplant” local citizens, humanitarians and emergency responders.

The role of digital communities in humanitarian response has been well documented in the past few years, from the UN Disaster 2.0 report to the rise of the CrisisMappers Network and beyond. A starting point might be the use of online bulletin boards (BBS) and mailing lists in response to the tsunami in Asia followed by a parallel timeline for most small and large humanitarian and conflict crises since 2004. The tools and volume have changed over time, but the propensity to connect and potentially help occurs after each incident. The fact is that every day there is a local or global emergency happening somewhere (slow onset or immediate), and there is a flood of online communications that follows immediately afterwards. The high volume of news and citizen data saturates online spaces with such speed that accurate reports and priority items can become a blur. This user-generated content (UGC) comes in many forms: texts, photos, aerial and satellite imagery, videos and more. Digital responders learn and refine techniques with each response.

Humanitarian organizations and the citizens they serve are overwhelmed by the speed of change and the onslaught of information. In the five years since the Haiti earthquake, there has been a steady progression of change. Humanitarian groups have sometimes resisted incorporating social media into their information workflows. Often this is due to process changes, a lack of trust, concerns about accuracy and fear of change. People who create user-generated content are often considered outliers and have not yet gained the trust of leaders within official institutions. And having people in affected regions use these tools to help each other or ask for help changes the information flow from one-way to two-way. Humanitarian institutions simply adapt to change at a slower pace. They also have a low capacity to review information outputs and seldom have the funds to incorporate UGC into their processes. Plus, they often do not understand the tools and techniques these online/offline communities use to connect. The conundrum is that UGC and citizens are simply changing faster. As a result, this gap between the two groups is being tested and often fulfilled in new ways.

Across the world there are branded hubs, labs, fellowships, meetings, conferences and research. Governments, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are all working on various projects. How can these new voices and communities become part of the humanitarian apparatus? From Unicef Innovation to Ihub Nairobi, Kathmandu Living Labs to UN Global Pulse Jakarta, there are many new spaces where solutions have been observed and created. There is a parallel stream with groups like the Code for All community and other civic technology or humanitarian technology/research communities who aim to connect software developers, data scientists and designers to solve hyperlocal issues with official organizations. Code for All has grown from its base in the United States to Japan and beyond. Their goal is to connect local communities and governments with digital technologies and problem solvers for all issues. The intersection of these two movements is inevitable in risk-prone areas.

Digital Response Communities, Their Scope and Effectiveness

The Digital Humanitarian Network consists of many groups, from those that create maps, like Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and those who curate social information like Humanity Road and Standby Task Force, to those bridging language skills like Translators without Borders. Digital responders coalesce during an emergency to tackle tasks that can be large or small. For instance, over 2,800 people contributed to the Nepal earthquake response by doing small tasks such as using MicroMappers to make quick decisions about text or images. These curated information insights were used by over 250 organizations to make decisions about various needs for their response, including damage assessments and aid distribution. This example shows that UGC can be created by anyone, but someone still needs to parse the data, find the crucial points and match these items to needs and actions. After reviewing the IP addresses of contributors, Qatar Computing Research Institute observed that the majority of these digital MicroMapper helpers were from northern countries.

For the Nepal earthquake response, over 7,500 people contributed to improve OpenStreetMap in a short span of time. OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps, creating a large free and open dataset that anyone can use. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (a VTC) creates tools and training to support mapping for humanitarian response and economic development. The Nepal Earthquake response was co-lead by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and Kathmandu Living Labs. Kathmandu Living Labs, started in 2013, creates local data and map solutions and partnerships for Nepal. They have steadily built a local community of mappers trained to use OpenStreetMap, and they have mapped the country. Over the years, they have also built relationships with a range of local partners, from emergency responders to universities. When the Nepal earthquake struck, they lost their office and a day’s worth of work. Meanwhile, remote digital responders in the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) community activated. HOT, with the generous support of partners, obtained both pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery to determine the regions of Nepal that might be affected.

While they are informal, these networks are all driven by the common vision of UGC for humanitarian response. Simply put, they move fast and have the initiative to do what is most needful. For example, the OpenStreetMap Japan Foundation community translated the Guide to Mapping Buildings in Nepal from the Kathmandu Living Labs. Thus one former disaster-affected civic technology community activated to aid another, transferring skills and supporting digital needs. No government or formal institution advised that this was required; people simply self-organized based on digital responder knowledge and the desire to help their digital neighbours. While these processes are not yet seamless, the gap between official and informal is closing with each response.

Three Challenges

1. At the moment, the vast majority of social media is available via public posts. But with huge growth in private messaging tools like WhatsApp, how will digital response incorporate data from platforms like this?

2. In times of crisis, data becomes the lifeblood of managing humanitarian operations. But as access to data increases, how will people safeguard the privacy and security of those who need help?

3. What role should the main social platforms play during disasters? Can these social networks work together more closely to coordinate their responses?

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and The World Economic Forum sharing insights gained from surveying 5,000 digital media users from Brazil, China, Germany, South Africa and the U.S on the impact of digital media on society. The series is developed in conjunction with the Forum’s Shaping the Future Implications of Digital Media for Society project and the Forum’s Impact of Digital Content: Opportunities and Risks of Creating and Sharing Information Online white paper. The series is running during the Forum’s Annual Meeting 2016 (in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, Jan. 20-23). Read all the posts in the series here.

31Jan

Mini-Project: Open Source in ICT and Humanitarian Response

What is the impact of Open Source in ICT and HFOSS? How can we share our overall story better? Often this larger topic is buried in reports from individual organizations and in delivery of those who produce or consume outputs using Open Source. The “Economic Impact of Open Source on Small Business: A Case Study” (report) from O’Reilly is an example of the type of report this document intends to start writing. A few days ago an article was written “The Revolution will not be Open Source”. This spurred some discussion as to the potential gap in this literature. This topic may well have research literature or reports. Great! Please add these to the bibliography so that we can all share widely.

How can we measure the impact of Open Source in this area? Can we collect a common bibliography and showcase these stories better? As a wider community, we can collaboratively share insights, collect data and a bibliography. At the moment, this is just a running shared document, but if there is potential to make this more formal, I would be happy to keep on this important topic flowing with a github account and trello board. (I also think we could remix the the Sunlight and the wider Open Data Community on “Reasons (not) to Release Data” to a framework “Reasons to (Not) use Open Source in ICT/HFOSS.” This might be a side-topic and happy to do another time.)

Add your Comments and Citations here.

(Image Credit: Open Source nametag via OpenSource.com ccby)

9Dec

Delivering, Still Waiting

Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is hosting a Data and Technology Humanitarian Response Workshop this week. I’m delighted to attend on behalf of Qatar Computing Research Institute. This occasion gives me pause to reflect: Where is humanitarian technology going, what are the gaps, what are the new research questions, what is innovative, what needs remixing, what have we learned and what does implementation look like? Certainly, this burst of questions are not something a blog post can address. But, it is my expectation that smart people are working on these items and syncing up to collaborate is essential.

Humanitarian Innovation: Where is the parallel stream

In October, the World Humanitarian Summit held a Global Consultation in Geneva. There was an Innovation Marketplace with small NGOs, large NGOs, technology companies and Digital Humanitarians. Representing OpenAerialMap (OAM) on behalf of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, along with my colleague Nate Smith from Development Seed, I spent the day talking with our fellow presenters and some of the participants. A conference and marketplace/demonstration hall is never fully representative of what is happening globally in the field, but it was a snapshot of a certain view. Humanitarian Innovation Fund had a few of their successful projects demonstrating their work on exciting projects like 3D printing and our OAM (aerial imagery platform). There was a virtual reality space and some demonstrations. Catching up with Bob Marsh from Inveneo lit up this idea that parallel systems matter. I mention these small highlights because there was a distinct gap.

The Innovation Marketplace was not enough to actually represent or connect people doing true innovation in the field, including Humanitarian technology. Early summaries from the WHS cite more localized support and even digital training (the WHS Youth agenda). Where will the real work happen to 1. identify which innovations (specifically humanitarian technology) that need to be supported 2. build a plan to implement them. This is still super unclear for me. Innovators don’t wait for conferences or research papers to deliver. Sure, there is a keen eye on the high level conversations and a hope that there will be increased support for the various streams of activities. Negotiations will happen. People will write more reports. Yet, the world keeps turning. Simply put: some of the priorities, activities and innovations cannot wait for large NGOs and the UN to get on board. It is the hallways and community centers in small local spaces that will really do the shining.

If the observations and suggestions truly mean to deliver, it needs more strong support from business, NGOs, donors and you. Sitting in Geneva made me again realize that we need stronger parallel systems to succeed. We need a humanitarian technology roadmap. It would help to have local, multi-lingual side events online and in person focused on doing instead of more writing more reports. If we are really going to ReShapeAid, then it is time to dig in and build some true lightweight infrastructure to actually implement things that are needed. There are many activity streams which are truly critical with Transforming through Innovation is one small corner, but it is the corner I know well. Technology is not always the answer. But people use the internet, they create things and use their mobile phones. We need to reclaim “innovation” and “disruptive innovation“. In all the reports, bylines and marketing campaigns, it has gotten buried as a punchline rather than true grit. As Panathea Lee pointed out with User Centered Design, we need to be careful to not lose track of implementation and delivery.

Some of the research and implementation areas that I am excited about include: mobile (messaging), imagery (aerial, satellite), translation, citizen participation, edtech, citizen science, web of things, civic technology, open hardware, blockchain, and, of course, location. There are pockets of amazing innovation and technology coming from the UN and other organizations. But, we can do more with collaborative spaces. There is much to learn from the Open Source and Agile Startup models to really knock it out of the park on humtech (humanitarian technology). I am not stating that we hackathon our way to change, but the chasm between the technology communities, affected communities and humanitarians needs some strong coordinated planning and more delivering. How can we get more technology companies supporting the growth of humanitarian technology? If the humanitarian spaces and research institutes are slower, what are other ways to get things moving?

Example: Digital Technology & Digital Humanitarians (Responders)

Digital, volunteer/technology communities and civic technology communities are consistently delivering during emergencies. Some recent efforts include the Nepal earthquake, collaboration on the Ebola response and now the refugee crisis. There were many efforts that shine in this space of digital participation and response, but to name a bias few: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Standby Task Force, Missing Maps, NetHope (Tableau collaboration), PeaceGeeks (Service Advisor) and Kathmandu Living Labs.

Impact examples:

Kathmandu Living Labs – Nepal Earthquake
Ebola response with Doctors without Borders (MSF), Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Missing Maps
PeaceGeeks Service Advisor for Refugee Support

There are many more articles, reports, research articles and the like on the impact of digital humanitarians. However, what is missing is the bridge between proof of concept and real concrete sustainable support.

For the past 5 years, many digital humanitarians/digital responders have worked/volunteered alongside humanitarians and the NGO machine. Truly it is a gift that all these people volunteer their time, energy and skills to assist on the information overload and citizen engagement gaps that new technology like social media opens. Reading all the World Humanitarian Summit reports on the goals, needs and suggestions, I keep asking the question around Humanitarian Innovations – What will implementation look like?

We are not looking for a free ride, but what is going to take to open this door?

Volunteer and Technical Organizations have proven their impact and considered essential to the humanitarian information workflow. Some of those organizations setup small NGOs to support the large volunteer bases with lightweight documentation, staff and servers. The collaborative spaces are organically growing. Civic technology communities globally are connecting inside the digital humanitarian communities. One of my favourite examples was the support from the Japanese civic technology community of the Nepal civic technology community after the Nepal Earthquake. The Nepal OpenStreetMap guide for identifying buildings was translated into Japanese to support remote mapping efforts.

Considering the small corner of potential that humanitarian technology can deliver for affected communities and humanitarians, it is time to rethink how we can collaborate using the best of minds, best of technology and some sheer grit. We need spaces like the Digital Humanitarian Network in many parts of the world with local language, local knowledge and local culture. While digital humanitarians is one example, there are many other humanitarian innovations that do not get the financial support they need to really succeed. The donor model is set up for traditional NGOs. Some of these digital organizations don’t completely qualify as social technology companies/social entrepreneur startups. Fortunately, there are some bright spots like the Humanitarian Innovation Fund or the various NGO supported Hubs/Labs that are supporting some local humanitarian technology. But how do we get more concentrated humtech accelerators and donors for bright innovations? If digital humanitarians are not NGOs and not social entrepreneurship businesses, what is the long term sustainability?

[Disclosure: I am on the Board for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and PeaceGeeks. Previously, I worked at Open Knowledge and Ushahidi. For Crisis Commons in 2010, I did a short research project about the innovation community. And, I am part of the event team at CrisisMappers. Currently I work at Qatar Computing Research Institute]

24Nov

Mapmaking for Good in Qatar

Maps are critical for logistics in humanitarian response. We are excited to invite you to the second Digital Humanitarians in Qatar event on Sunday, November 29, 2015. In this session, we will talk about the power of maps and location data using examples from various Humanitarian Emergencies. We will introduce you some basic components of mapping share how you can even add social media data to maps. Qatar Computing Research and Qatar Red Crescent are co-hosts of this event. Our special guest is Sajjad Anwar of Mapbox and the OpenStreetMap community.

To learn more and register, click here Event is Sunday, November 29, 2015.

Event Details

Dates and times: November 29, 2015 16:30 – 18:30pm AST
Location: Qatar Red Crescent Headquarters, 1st floor, Al Salata (Doha)
(Parking is near the old Movenpick Hotel)

Digital Humanitarians and CrisisMapping Agenda

How Qatar Red Crescent uses Maps – Qatar Red Crescent
Introduction to Map tools and Remote Mapping – Heather Leson, QCRI
Overview of Mapbox and OSM – Sajjad Anwar, Mapbox
Introduction to MicroMappers and Leaflet – Ji Lucas, QCRI
Map exercises (in Arabic and English)

7Nov

Map the Difference: Calling Global Supporters

Every edit, every contribution maps the difference. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) launched our largest ever fundraising effort and we ask for your help. HOT uses principles of open source and open data sharing for humanitarian response and economic development. We create spaces, support and tools to assist people to map.

Thousands of people map during emergencies. Many of you are supporters of HOT, but we have never asked you for help outside outreach. Some of you use the results of HOT’s and OSM’s contributions, maps and tools for your communities and projects. Believe me, we are so very thankful for all your support. HOT has always been very understated in our requests for donation. We are set to change this: Help HOT become a community and supporter funded project.

I want to support HOT: Click Here!

Why HOT matters

What can a Map do? What can you with a map? Learn about HOT’s impact around the world:

Business Supporters and Sponsors

Mapbox has agreed to match up to $10, 000.00 for this campaign. Thanks!

HOT has proven that technical skills and tools can make a difference around the world. We call on business friends and allies to help HOT continue to flourish. Often, when I talk with funders I find that HOT is really a hybrid – we are not only an NGO, we are a social tech organization. How can other companies help in the short or long term? Do you run a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme? Perhaps you and your team are keen to support an NGO in your next year’s budget?

If you are interested in discussing, please contact me: Heather.Leson AT hotosm DOT org.

7Nov

Mozfest Report Back: Community Toolkit

What happened to the Community Toolkit project? Last year many community leaders at Mozfest hacked the table of contents for a Community Handbook. Our goal was to take all the content, divide up the chapters and start writing on Github.

About the project:

Open wins when we share tools, tips and cheats to build community. This remixable toolkit aims to help communities and community builders learn best practises and remix tools, guidelines and resources. The emphasis is on practical, “grab-and-go” templates, worksheets and modules anyone can use quickly!
Contains:

Remixable toolkits
Best practises, use cases and examples
Cheatsheets, recipes and templates

The team set up a trello board, Hackpad and a github account. Then, while it would be simple to say life and work happened for the leaders, there is much more to this story for me.

The Missing Chapters

Perhaps this Toolkit needed some missing chapters:

Hiring a new Executive Director
Onboarding your Executive Director
Guiding your community through a the largest event they have done (7500 mappers for Nepal)
Negotiating, navigating and transitioning the community and organization through big changes
Crowdfunding must be your friend
Board management and call a friend/Advisor

As volunteer who started a job in a new country, I only had 10-20 hours a week to contribute to a project this year. I really did not anticipate that I would be working countless extra hours to help on the above big items. But, as the president of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team‘s Board it was absolutely what had to be the priority. While every community leader is a master of all trades, these were some big lessons for me and for our community. One thing I will be doing soon is open sourcing all the templates for how we handled the transitions, search/outreach, evaluation, and hiring. We had some excellent help from Allen Gunn (Gunner of Aspiration Tech). I looked long and hard for guides and resources on how to do this. There were just few documents for open source communities, so we created them. We will share these back with you because at some point your community will need to do this. (All the personal info will be removed.)

What’s next

This project needs to live, but we need a few more hands and someone else to be lead dancer for awhile.

If you and your team ever have these types of big items happen in your community, contact me. We are in this together to build open. I am your resource and support.

Ode to Mozfest

For my Mozfest allies: This year for the first time ever I am missing Mozfest. I was there at Drumbeat and then all the next iterations. Living in Doha makes for a long trip and work has me head down on tasks. I miss the creative interactions and wonderment of hanging out with my open soulsisters and brothers. Truly, I can’t wait to see what you create. Happy Mozfest!

29Oct

How will Qatar prepare for Information Overload?

We are neighbours, no matter where we live. Being a new resident to Doha, I am grappling with a number of questions. These stem from working with humanitarian and crisis information for a number of years. Plus, it is part of my mandate at Qatar Computing Research Institute to help apply research and software to support local needs. We have learned much globally about emergencies. I’d like to learn more about how to help locally and who is keen to collaborate.

How will Doha and Qatar prepare for the upcoming information overload? What are the communications plans during an emergency? How will the public use or not use social media or new technology during an emergency? What are the information and technology needs in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)? How does preparedness compare to other regions? How can citizens and communities prepare? How can Digital Humanitarians be of service? How would Digital Humanitarian community in Qatar differ? What are the training and technology needs of digital humanitarians locally? How can the local Digital Humanitarian community get more involved in the global community? How would Qatar Computing Research Institute’s work apply or not apply for emergencies in the region? What other types of research and/or software would serve the local responders and communities?

In September I attended the GCC Government Social Media Summit in Dubai. There were a number of presentations about preparedness and communications. I was interested to learn that in Dubai, every neighbourhood has a #hashtag. It is used for community activities but my colleague Ali Rebaie advised that this practice is also used for emergencies or resilience. This is something that happens around the world. Neighbours online are networks and information ambassadors locally (offline). This is invaluable. How can we apply this to Doha? Maybe because we are a smaller city and country, we organize primarily around #Doha or #Qatar. There should be tags for all social media platforms in multiple languages by districts and cities. By doing this, we can plan and share for communications.

The Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp in April 2015 provided great insights into how communication flows among responders. My observations found that people use WhatsApp to organize but are keen to investigate how social media might also be a communications channel. This participation has provided an impetus and goal to host a local social media and emergency meetups. Bringing responders and local enterpreneurs into the same space has started with the joint QCRI and Qatar Red Crescent Digital Humanitarian workshops. But, we do need to talk more about how social media will or won’t be a factor in Doha. How will people communicate during an emergency? How will responders work with them? At minimum, there needs to be local ‘information ambassador’ programme setup on WhatsApp. The more training the more ready we are for emergencies. The Qatar Red Crescent has been doing preparedness and resilience training in communities and with schools. Businesses may be thinking about text messages (SMS) during emergencies. But as a new resident working in these spaces, I do see opportunities to help.

Civil Defense Exhibition and Conference is hosting preworkshops on preparedness, community risk reduction, evacuation and infrastructure planning. All week for 5 hours a night I have joined about 60 people to learn from experts in the field. Participants are from across emergency response, civil defense, business and research. Questions have been fascinating. The earnestness to plan for all the stakeholders is very evident. While the mandate was not about ‘how communities will communicate’, it is very much on the minds of organizers and participants. All of this highlights the need for a more research on how will responders and communities work together.

(Map presented by the Professor Zare of the International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology, IIEES (Tehran, Iran))

There is a large multilingual and high-volume mobile telephone penetration. I’ve found some success in building informal alliances and finding allies. In talking with many stakeholders, there is an enthusiasm to build more plans around communications and citizen engagement for preparedness. Who should I talk with who is interested in communications and emergencies in Doha, Qatar or the GCC?

4Oct

Sold out – Digital Responders in Qatar

On October 7th, Qatar Computing Research Institute and Qatar Red Crescent Society will co-host the first ever Digital Humanitarian meetup in Doha, Qatar. We are sold out! The room holds 100 people and that is how many free tickets we made available. If you reserved a ticket and can no longer attend please email me asap so that I can open up a ticket for the waiting list. IF you are looking for a ticket, please do contact me.

The Digital Humanitarians in Qatar registration page

Digital Humanitarians are people who use their technical, social, community and storytelling power to help support humanitarians in their work. We aim to use maps, data, and social media to provide information and insights. While this is the first event of its kind in Doha, we join a growing global civic technology community.

About the Digital Humanitarians in Qatar event

Technical preparedness supports a resilient city and country. Qatar has a highly technical and young population. Digital Humanitarians use their social media savvy, create maps, conduct data analysis and use new media tools to provide insights to support humanitarians and affected communities. How can we get young people more engaged in their world, region and country? This is an opportunity to be globally responsible while potentially using the acquired digital skills for your work. We will work in partnership with humanitarians locally and globally to help you contribute.

What will you learn in this session?
In this session, we will provide an overview of the basic digital skills for humanitarian response online. Our guests will share real humanitarian scenarios for us to do some hands on learning.

Topics include:

Overview of Humanitarian response – context for emergencies
Introduction to Crisismapping and Digital Humanitarians
Social media curation, analysis and verification
Hands on exercises

We will provide more details on how you can learn between sessions and answer questions based on real world experiences.  

Who should attend:

Digital Humanitarians come from all walks of life. All you need is a willingness to learn and a technical device (mobile, tablet or laptop). There are many different types of contributions that people can make – large and small in terms of time and activities. In the global community, there are teachers, students, business people, creative people, humanitarians, researchers, analysts, data science, GIS experts and more. We will provide introductions to each of the various communities and skillsets to help your learning journey. It starts with us.  

23Sep

How to: A Digital Humanitarian Handbook

The Digital Humanitarian community is growing. In the Digital Humanitarian Network, there are many communities and organizations. Each of them have a specific set of skills to offer. While there are some guides for each of the groups, there is no free, online and translated course or introduction guide to help people get involved.

The purpose of this community driven project is to create a community sourced guide on github to help people learn from each other. This online handbook builds on the work of 1000s of community members who use their technical skills for good. Earlier this year, my colleague, Patrick Meier published his book about Digital Humanitarians. How can we widen the circle of participation and reach new areas to support resilience. For example, during the Nepal Earthquake response, the Japanese community created a translated version of the Nepal building guide for how to map in OpenStreetMap with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. The Qatar Computing Research Institute and Standby Task Force response to the Nepal Earthquake had over 2800 participants from around the world. Our IP address report highlighted a participation gap in some regions of the world. At the recent World Humanitarian Youth Summit, I presented on why I think these digital skills are essential for the youth communities. Participants expressed an interest in learning and evolving this for their regions of the world.

During my time with the Qatar Red Crescent team at their annual Disaster Management Camp, we determined that core materials need to be translated into Arabic. I’ll be hosting local Digital Humanitarian training in Doha starting on October 1st. But what about the rest of the global community of civic tech and technical savvy communities. We hope that this will support our collective mission to encourage resilience and preparedness. And, while we are focused on crisis and emergencies, we think these core skills are very transferable to all the Sustainable Development Goals.

How to get involved

Or contact @heatherleson or @willowbl00 for help.

Draft Table of Contents

In the upcoming Digital Responders call in, we will review this draft table of contents. This will then be added to github to begin the curation process. Stay tuned for more details soon.

SECTION: Digital Humanitarianism Introduction
History of Crisismapping and Digital Humanitarians
Lessons and best practices
Code of conducts
Ecosystem: Working with Humanitarians and Contributors
Tools and Techniques overview
Examples by various topics – environmental, crisismapping
SECTION: SMS, social media and messaging (Whatsapp)
Digital Storytelling
Storify, Storiful,Blogging
Social media storytelling
SECTION: Community work
big tasks, small tasks
Microtasking 101
Software development in HFOSS
managing community lists
managing language and culture
SECTION: Data collection and analysis
Data Collection 101
sensors, social media, sms
Data Analysis
basic tools and techniques
SECTION: Verification
Overview and the Verification handbook
Verily and other tools
Visualization
charts, graphs
SECTION: maps
basic network maps
Geo for Good
Mapping 101
Mapping Google
Mapping OSM
Mapbox and Cartodb intro
Mapping ESRI
SECTION: Simulation 1: Teamwork and Roles (Global scenario)
How does coordination work during emergencies?
Coordination and community guidance
after action review
Simulation 2: Technique and mentoring (GCC scenario)
Technique testing
after action review
What to do with data after a project is done
How having a pre-existing community matters (KLL and Public Labs as examples)
Adversaries in digital space? InfoSec but also GamerGate
Digital colonialism
APPENDIX
Sample curriculums
Sample simulation templates and checklists

I envision that the manual will have chapters by country and region. The Taiwanese OpenStreetMap community, for example, might have specific examples and scenario templates for their region of the world. Plus, it is our hope that the manual will help people find best practices across the very topics and civic tech communities. We need to learn from each other. This Digital Humanitarian Handbook is for all of us to evolve and fork.

2Sep

The Next Stage of Digital Humanitarians

The World Humanitarian Youth Summit is in Doha, Qatar this week (September 1 – 2, 2015). Students and young people under the age of 30 joined from over 80 countries around the world. They are here to consult on a number of key issues creating an outcome document with key recommendations. Last night the drafting team was up until 5am AST working to compile all the brilliant ideas. This work will be submitted as part of the larger global consultations to Reshape Aid.

It was my honour to join the Transformation through Innovation panel to share some thoughts on how people could get involved as Digital Humanitarians and how they could learn and lead with these skills. During my talk, I share some thoughts on how we could challenge the future to get young people more involved all around the world. See my slides and detailed notes for more information.

The Next Digital Humanitarians from heatherleson

**********

Thank you to Reach out to Asia, the World Humanitarian Youth Summit, and the Children and Youth Major group for welcoming me in their conversations. Also thank you to Chad Bevins, Mark Iliffe, Kathmandu Living Labs, Yantisa Akhadi, and Stace Maples for their photos about Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and OpenStreetMap activities around the world.

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