2016 June HumTechFest

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

Wind Farm tutorial

Nathan stepped us through an overview of ways to communicate when comms are down. Read more here.

Game / Scenario / LARP

2016 HumTechFest LARP

Sunday June 5th, 2016

Discussion Topics/Breakouts Morning

Engaging responsibly with tech folk: Too much tech, not much designed for communities. Designing with a community can be difficult, how to set aside technical bias and listen to how people are doing, what knowledge they have. How do you build tech up from that versus "here is a solution for a problem I'm not even sure you have." Embedding yourself into communities. Cannot do a quick fix. Tool makers shouldn't get the glory. Difficult for people to do, to be humble, wash up, make coffee. Don't fall into a "rockstar" role especially when people keep trying to slot you into that. Also onboarding, how do you get folk to join an orga already doing things. People have ideas of what is the best to do, which might not be what is actually needed. Do something tha thelps you understand the organizational structure and needs. Doing this at scale... maybe context and specificity means scale isn't so important. Get the right people involved in the right way.
Community groups in crisis: How to get the community groups involved in the existing response system. Understanding how the system actually works in order to utilize it. Organizations in the community didn't have the tools they needed, weren't prepared. Our experience in Queens to help keep money and power locally, which is against how it's laid out in the network. Started on a chart in our small piece of the puzzle. Line funders up in advance for if something happens. Understanding the context in which you're functioning. Understanding money flows, how to fight for themselves within a system. Someone is going to get the funding, how do we attract it to the places that need it most. Toxic people are a big deal, feedback processes to come back to the table. Didn't pool resources.
Data sharing ecosystem without org buy-in: Lowest common denominator tools. Also how to raise capacity to a lowest common denominator. Humanitarian Data Exchange, HXL, CCAN. Awesome Table, Air Table. How do you take a bunch of different spreadsheets documenting a certain thing, analyze them to create a shared data model, show people that we're all recording the same thing and then share it under the same mnemonics (without imposing). Showing the artifacts and templates from those processes into a usable template, then play with things like Awesome Table to do all sorts of things, something a developer could use for a web app.
Reincorporating disaster lessons into the everyday: Tools used in rhetoric to transfer information. Documents, thresholds, file structures, work flows that we care about in everyday life, bring into crisis situations, iterate, take back out. Overall capacity building. Also about objective truth not being enough, have to message it in such a way that folk understand and can act. Some practices around how to act on data including Co-Ops, maker spaces, and community mastery board used by Agile Learning Centers. Going from an assessed need into a community practice.

Farmer's Knowledge Market

Focused on the Digital response ecosystem map

Discussion Topics/Breakouts Afternoon

Mapping overview: Worked on CartoDB, some web tools to map some lesbian bars in NYC. Talked about OSM data collection process that she led the Red Cross data collecting. Maps are created by information coming into the map. If no one has mapped it yet, there isn't any data. So when Ebola broke out, there was no data on where infrastructure was. People collected the data and added it to OSM. Tools to make it happen.
What would we do with an ecosystem map?: Talked about the previous actors in this place of trying to make this map. Documentation of who is in this space. What people, organizations, institutions that have tried to document this before. What has failed? What could this look like? Is this a wikipedia project? Are we looking at previous iterations? Are we looking at civic infrastructure? Are we building a Yelp of response groups? Data cleanup is a big problem in this. Knowing if we're tracking the people? Can that be secure? What sort of project this could be or become if we or Aspiration wanted to make it a project. How to make it last and work for us and others in a crisis?
A handbook for digital response: Handbook for onboarding. Diverged into two areas: 1) organizations need to know to help others onboard (info about staying healthy and how the org is structured and how decisions are made etc), and 2) what individuals need to know (checklist for when you're thinking about what orga to join, what question to ask them, what should you know before getting into a volunteer thing, skills to do work for an org). Lots of lists etc to build on.
Inroads to formal organizations: Why would you even want to? Problems of management within institutions, bureaucracy, sherpa like roles to help folk from outside play with them. Dealing with structures at a human level. Need for standardization and interoperability. Example from Digital Public Libraries of America of 0 data practices (cleanup and massage), system where they were providing a service, get their data back all nice. Therefore contributing to a standardized space. People are humans and have motivations, making them happy is helpful. Documentation, how relationships are managed is often a blackbox. Tell stories about successes (not even case study level). Things don't happen between orgs, they happen between people. Focus on relationships. How did you achieve success? Threw a dinner party. Structure for folk to step forward and take initiative to support others.

Where to from here

2016 HumTechFest I will We should Don't forget

Projects

We touched on

Things to Peruse Further