In this week's class on Crisis Informatics we were lucky to be able to Skype with Mr. Gisli Olafsson, the Emergency Responce Director of NetHope. NetHope is an organization whose goal is "to be a catalyst for collaboration among international humanitarian organizations. By working together to solve problems and share knowledge...our members have access to the best information and communication technology and practices... We do this by working across our membership as a highly collaborative team, solving common technology problems, fostering strong relationships with private industry, and educating our members and the wider community of humanitarian organizations worldwide." Mr. Gisli Olafsson, since 2010, has been the Emergency Response Director of NetHope where he has been responsible for emergency preparedness and emergency response activities within NetHope.
More information about NetHope can be found at their website:
www.nethope.org
Going into the discussion, about how digital age technologies are changing humanitarian responses, as well as the role of technology and information in humanitarian responses and how crowd sourcing, mass collaboration, information, and self-organization will affect approaches to disaster and crisis response methods, I had a few questions. How has technology advanced and impact the realm of disaster relief, and where is it headed, and where can it improve? What would be an ideal disaster relief technology, and what are the discrepencies between what that ideal technology is and the capabilities of today's technology/ society? Which area of disaster recovery is the most difficult to achieve in regards to communication efforts in disaster response, and how would the difficulty of accomplishing that be ideally resolved?
Throughout the Skype video chat, I found a few of the answers that I was looking for. Surprisingly, the first thing that I learned (but should've deduced for myself already) was that most of the institutions we rely on today for help in disaster situations were created in the Industrial Age. Now, more than ever, we are beginning to notice the difference in the way things were run back then, and how they should be run now; since communication costs are going down, institutions are no longer the go-to-fix anymore. We are beginning to see a convergence of a technical revolution and social revolution...a new digital evolution and generation. This was especially noticeable about seven years ago, in the South-East Asia tsunami; we began to see a humanitarian effort "reform". Changes that have occurred in the past five to ten years have been more drastic than decades prior.
Although, we have come a long way in a short amount of time, we're still not there yet. Technologies described by Mr. Olafsson which would be most beneficial to humanitarian aids and relief efforts were such things as a "check-in" for NGO's to see who is there, who is doing what, where they are, and how much they have accomplished so far; sharing data better at an international level, not a word document, excel table, or pdf file, actual data from which conclusions can be drawn independent from who collected the raw data; as well as capabilities to visualize data in certain ways to make it more appropriate to work with, such as geo-spatial-analysis of tweets done by Ushahidi during the Haiti Earthquake relief efforts.
Technology has come a long way, and it will continue to go further beyond our wildest expectations into the future. Perhaps, by then we will have the technological capabilities and social expectations to make some of the technologies described by Mr. Olafsson possible. Until then, we'll just have to keep inventing 'til something clicks!
Jennifer, I thought that you brought up many good points about the quest speaker we had in class last Monday night. The conversation that we had with the guest speaker was a new thing for all of us and I thought it was very effective compared to something like a phone call if the speaker couldn’t make the trip in person. You brought up a good point that there have been drastic changes in the last 10 years that have been going on in the disaster relief world. There has been a giant combine effort where many different organizations and government agencies have joined together and began sharing information in order to better relief efforts.
ReplyDeleteWhen thinking about all of the technology changes that have occurred within the past 10 years I can’t help but think how many new technologies will come out within the next 10 years. If you think about it natural disasters are not getting more dangerous, but humans are finding better ways to combat these disasters and they are also formulating better crisis mitigation plans to be prepared for these crisis. Humans have been learning from their mistakes for many years now, and I am very interested in seeing in the next decade how we advance further as a people.
Jennifer, as a fellow student in this class I feel that you had very good input in this blog post after watching and listening this past lecture. Many of the topics that you brought up really helped positively reinforce the topics covered during the lecture last Monday. I look forward to being involved in more of these Skype lectures by guest speakers. Jen, your blog post was very legitimate and interesting and I look forward to reading more of your posts in the near future. Keep up the good work buddy see you in class!
You question about what would be an ideal technology to be using in disaster relief and the capabilities it has, is a great question because it is something we have to do for our final project for this class.
ReplyDeleteYou make a great point that the institutions we have now are old, and the ways things are done could be improved to fit the kind of world we live in now, one full of technologies that can help when disaster strikes. You make an important point in your second paragraph in my opinion, and that is that institutions are no longer then go to fix, it is becoming the guy in his living room eating donuts and drinking coffee in his pajamas helping tremendously.
Mr. Olafsson made a great idea about some sort of “check-in” program for NGO’s to see who is there and this way they can better help the area in need. This will help with the coordination of all NGOs to make sure there is no repetition, in the work being done. Communications between NGOs will improve with this because NGOs will now have to share what they are doing, where they are, and how much they have done. This can be done with some kind of program like Google Docs but so that no one can delete anything on the sheets being uploaded for everyone to see.
I just have to say that with these individuals coming in to speak to us during our class time will just help us come up with more ideas for our final project. This is their way of life and this is how we can learn from them to make something better for disaster relief.