2016 June HumTechFest
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Ever wanted to know about, or work on, disaster and humanitarian response technology from a people-first perspective? Aspiration's #HumTechFest strives to build capacity for humanitarian aid and disaster response efforts through technology and community. These are participatory and community-driven convenings designed for field practitioners, media makers and storytellers, technology developers, information security practitioners, members of affected populations, researchers, and everyone in between. The agenda is co-developed with participants, facilitators, and partners in the time leading up and during the event.
Please check out our Participant Guidelines before the event.
- Saturday June 4th and Sunday June 5th
- Berkman Center for Internet and Society
- 2nd floor at 23 Everett St
- Cambridge, MA
Event overview on the Aspiration site
Saturday June 4th, 2016
Universe of Topics
Accountability
- Information sharing to promote local actors' agency and hold non-governmental organization and accountability
- How to better connect tech to local needs
- the intersections of ad-hoc, NGOs and gov leadership (effective partnerships)
- working with the UN
- who takes ownership of leadership and how in crises?
Sustainability
- How to create sustainable communities around a project
- burnout/mental health
Actor power dynamics
- Helping big NGOs be less bad (and doing so for for free) is problematic
- How to empower local/ and/or grassroots
- Supporting existing local in country capacity
- how to engage non-traditional actors
- expert knowledge versus community knowledge (folk, indigenous)
- Right to connect versus "cyber sovereignty"
- Decentralized personal battery powered AI
Human (social) organization
- How to decentralize coordination, tech, power
- How do we get socialists and anarchists on the same page?
- Gender-responsive humanitarian solutions
- How do you intro in new expertise without dominating coopting the convo
- how do we negotiate what should/will be done
- best practices for hyper-local prep (resilience!)
- how do folks new to the area get involved (or deepen involvement)
- Who's missing that should be here
- how people plug into response efforts
- bringing civic tech and digital humanitarians together
- digital onboarding discourse
- the difference between needs in response to civic versus natural disasters
Tools
- all kinds of radio!
- disaster directory (and dictionary)
- using humanitarian tools for mutual aid purposes
- tools for better interpersonal skills in crisis
- how can w user-test crisis response tools?
- early warning system/disaster risk management
- virtual reality in crisis response
- can tech tools help with the refugee crisis?
- tools/code/network/clearinghouse to support co-creation (build with/in parallel)
- using tech as a tool (not as an end in itself)_
- community-sourced tools for disaster response
- new financing mechanisms
- messaging/high latency protocols versus web/low latency as fundamental comms architectures
Accessibility/Inclusivity
- How can the tools we create be more accessible, relevant, to the communities they're made for?
- how can our social and tech responses be inclusive to the most people?
- empowering entrepreneurs ethically
- the relationship between 1st response and resilience
- we need more use of existing open source software
Orphans
- Intelligent property rights versus open-sourced problem solving
- Emergent citizen group manual (to share knowledge)
- how to redirect tech ? duplicate (stuff we don't want) and abandonware
- how to redirect action for "evidence" solutions
Media, Games, culture
- Trans-media campaigns for shifting awareness
- Gamificiation
- Digital curriculum
- re-application of lessons and insights in disaster to other spheres/fields
data
- how do we keep people present when collecting data?
- open data standards
- data quality and data sharing
- how to identify resources and needs
- new economics and bitcoin currency have a role in economic resilience
- is there an open source option for responder databases on a national/global scale?
- mitigating security concerns of social messaging collected data
- opening and sharing data (community ownership of data)
- can open source ethics crisis response be security and privacy conscious
- how to improve tech for more efficient needs assessment
resource organization and distribution
- crowdsourcing in crisis and disaster
- how can we organize and distribute resources more equitably?
- how to distribute resources
- alternative energy capture and storage
- resdesign the needs evaluations assessment
- how to fill resource gaps
- decentralized distributed reputation
Spectrogram
Statements read
- Nonprofits can help in a crisis
- Technological singularity will overtake human leadership of disaster response by 2040
- We can't trust the government to respond in crisis situations
- Everyone is responsible for their own recovery
- You can't fix things without the government
Statements not read
- Everybody who should be here is
- Traditional (including agile) IT design works for this
- We can model people like atoms / we can gain full control
- In a disaster it is better to send money than items
- Monetary donations in disaster should be spent as soon as possible
- Money can solve humanitarian problems
- Crisis will be the catalyst for positive social change
- Humanitarians are irrelevant if people practice resilience
- All NGOs are bad
- Nation states are the primary actors in responding to global humanitarian crises.
- Look to underlying social problems to make change
- Outsiders are always helping
- The most resources should go to the most vulnerable
- Cash disbursement is the most important type of aid
- Small solutions are better than big solutions
- Development relief is intended to build the US economy
- Rather than humanitarian intervention just give all cash
- You don't need the internet to communicate effectively
- Everyone can help in a crisis