Digital response ecosystem map

Projects listed on this wiki are held by the wider community, and are listed here only for reference. Our goal is that they be worked on and owned in a distributed and communal way, and are thus Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. All projects should be seen as open to feedback and as continual works in progress. Questions, comments, suggestions, etc can be sent to digitalresponse@aspirationtech.org.

Is there a digital response ecosystem?

The digital response to humanitarian and disaster events is chaotic. Official and specialized actors such as United Nations Office of Coordinated Humantiarian Affairs and Red Cross Red Crescent benefit from the new skills of digital tools and the processes they enable. Frontline populations in affected regions continue to use the digital tools like Signal and Facebook to organize themselves and coordinate response. Ad hoc community groups such as churches and schools use their existing technical infrastructure and new social media options to organize larger local relief efforts. And digital responders help to clean, structure, and utilize the massive amounts of information generated in times of crisis.

The problem

While some official organizations have name-brand recognition, there is little understanding of the local, emerging, and digital sectors. Additionally, the flows of information, communication, and other aspects of coordination are poorly understood, even by those within the ecosystem.

Benefit of an Ecosystem Map

While a living thing, a snapshot of the digital response ecosystem could provide a shared view of the current actors and flows of data and communication. Our hope is that this shared view might provide better grounding for refining information flow, possibilities for collaboration, and shared infrastructure. We could thus begin to think more holistically about response, provide insights on how to make response infrastructure and mechanism more sustainable and scalable, and be able to easily share an overview to newcomers or other interested parties.

Current status

We're hosting calls with allies in the digital response space to explore what components need to be present for a useful (but not overwhelming) ecosystem map. We'll be examining the proposed structure and populating the ecosystem map

• as a remote session May 31st 9a PT/12p ET (please ping to be invited),
• at the 2016 June HumTechFest as a session on June 4th or 5th,
• June 7th and 8th as interactive wall art at the Humanitarian Technology Innovation Conference,
• at the Doctors Without Borders Canada logistics day June 10th, and
• at the 2016 June Meet Up on June 16th from 18:00-21:00 in San Francisco, CA!

If you have thoughts on what aspects of organizations, patterns of crisis response, or what sorts of data are useful in disaster and humanitarian response, please let us know!