 Just inform me, we are having a panel discussion after lunch, which will be the four presenters here today, which will be a great opportunity for you to ask any questions and put any polemics to the group. So thanks for the introduction Kate, as you mentioned, I've been working for a long time, well it seems like a long time now. So just further to what Kate said about myself, this is a photo from my first mission with Doctors Without Borders in Somalia some 13 odd years ago, and as you can see that my hair was terrible then, as it is now. The work that I mostly do for Doctors Without Borders, or for Oxfam, or for any humanitarian organisation whose aims and objectives I agree with, is mostly logistic support, which is, I like to say humanitarian roadie, we bump in the doctors and nurses, they do their performance and then when they leave we bump everything out, so we clean up after them. That involves also a lot of organisation, a lot of logistics, a lot of preparation and a lot of planning to go through in order to achieve that, which I'll go through in a minute as well. I started off with fairly humble beginnings in the humanitarian world, my first job after leaving the Army at a 10-year-old age was as a GIS operator and web developer for the Queensland Government in the late 90s, or turn of the century as I like to say. I got involved with Greenpeace doing just those sorts of protests where you see people handing out flyers on the street or holding a banner up somewhere, and then one thing led to another and before I knew it I was sailing on Greenpeace ships, the Rainbow Warrior, the MV Greenpeace, the Esperanza around the world doing some quite interesting and exciting stuff, but then following September 11th, a quite pivotal moment for many people of my generation, who I see a few in the audience, I made a decision to go and do something that I felt had greater impact on the disadvantage of the world and that was to go and work with doctors with our borders, I applied for a position as a logistician and a couple of months later found myself sitting there in Somalia wondering what the hell I'd done, and since then I've worked in a numerous number of other places, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malawi, Ankara after the Boxing Day tsunami, Tanzania amongst other places, as well as continuing my association with Greenpeace as an international advisor, particularly in working in hostile regions, so that's enough about myself. So when we talk about a humanitarian response, quite clearly everybody has an idea and an image of what a humanitarian response is, I'm sure. You've seen the news when you have events like the Boxing Day tsunami, probably the biggest one that we've had for well over a decade, but you may have well as seeing like the response in various other crises around the world ranging from things such as natural disasters, so natural or anthropogenic disasters, that being either like a tsunami or when we say anthropogenic disasters such as those that are created or exacerbated by climate change particularly, but we all are also seeing an increasing number of disasters as the poisoning of water supplies, such as we've seen in Nigeria most recently, where industrial concentrations or industrial processes are creating a concentration of toxins in the water supply, which is having a broad public health impact in privileged and underdeveloped communities. Obviously, conflict over resources, over land, over ideologies is a major driver of a humanitarian response, the likes of which we're seeing particularly in Syria and northern Iraq now, is a serious major driver, particularly the background photo here was taken in Afghanistan just after the US invasion in 2002 and of course one that's gripped the public imagination most recently, but will continue to time and time again is outbreaks of serious epidemics Ebola, but also it's unfortunate that in many parts of the world we still have to contend with diseases such as measles, polio which we still haven't despite our best efforts eradicated and other diseases that we particularly in the developed world take for granted, we get our immunizations when we're so young we don't even remember having had them and we go on to live lives unfettered by the impact of these immensely curable diseases. Unfortunately, this is not the case for very large parts of humanity and of course the one that we nobody really talks about so much, but that can happen anywhere which is vulnerable populations which are exposed to any or all of the above. So that's people that already live in a precarious situation and you have them here in Auckland as well, which is the people who they grow up either in severe poverty or through mental health issues or through drug abuse or a range of other factors can find themselves in very vulnerable precarious situations. If you have a natural disaster here even in Auckland in a developed modern country, those people are going to suffer the impacts. Those people are going to be the ones that are going to feel those impacts the most and if you can imagine those people in a country is much less developed say Mali in Africa. These are the people that are most vulnerable to any of those particular factors. Who responds? So I've just thrown up just a shotgun scattering of logos of the various organisations. These are kind of like the IBMs and the Microsofts and the Apples of the humanitarian aid world. Of course there's many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more. Many of them very small organisations. Some of them that only start around a specific event or a natural disaster or outbreak of disease. Some of which such as Oxfam, the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have been going on now for multiple decades. The Red Cross well over a century, Oxfam, since the Second World War. But even MSF, Doctors of Our Borders, the young punks of the movement are now in their 40s and are trying not to get a mortgage and worrying about their illegitimate children that they've left around the world. As they smoke another Gawar cigarette and say it's not like the old days. And of course this whole, I tried to avoid the word circus, but the ecosystem of organisations, many of which rely upon Ocha, the guys in the middle, sometimes the unsung heroes, sometimes the incompetent baddies that try and make the whole thing work together and as an efficient and effective way while the big organisations. But that's just a sample of the organisations, some of whom I've worked for, some of which I've had quite a good deal of experience with in the field. But of course the big question I think, which not everybody always asks, why on earth do we respond to humanitarian disasters? For some people it's a very, it's a self-answer, it's a very self-explanatory answer that we're human beings. For other people, there is a very current and very large body of thought that goes around the idea of individual self-sufficiency. It's politics are very clear in certain countries such as the United States, less so in other countries such as the Netherlands or the UK. But one that has a different view of charity, that asks why people can't be self-sufficient themselves and if they didn't have insurance, why do they have so many children if they know they can't feed them. The other response, the human response is the humanitarian action. And this is one of my favourite quotes about why I certainly do it, is trying to bring a measure of humanity always, always insufficient into situations that simply shouldn't exist. And this is a quote from an unnamed Red Cross delegate that I think has become very much for certainly for myself, but many of my other colleagues sums up perfectly why it is that we do it. However, more dryly and perhaps a little less prosaically and certainly lengthily documents, there is the Sphere Humanitarian Charter. The Sphere Project is an international attempt to bring together standards for humanitarian response. Sadly, they have yet to fully understand the concept of open source. So a lot of those standards are still covered by archaic 20th century copyright. But basically the Sphere Humanitarian Charter, which many of those organisations you would have seen on the previous slide, establishes that we all organisations believe in the right to life with dignity, the right to receive humanitarian assistance and the right to protection and security. So the organisations that are signed up to that charter all agree to those three principles as the drivers of any of their humanitarian action. There is also the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, non-continental organisations in disaster relief 1994, which means that it will probably be amended at some point. But basically that is a longer eight page document that extrapolates on those key points, but it basically enshrines the very principles of humanitarian action. This particular Code of Conduct is developed in 1994, but it is an extension of the Geneva Conventions, which is established in Article 61870, something, any humanitarian law pundits here who want to give me a better date, no, which established in international law the humanitarian principles, which the International Committee of the Red Cross is named directly as, if you will, the steward of those principles and is entitled under international law to act on those principles. And of course, each individual organisation has their own mission statement that either detail further on those principles or talk about specifically what their organisation's focus or vision is. So while all these organisations have these principles, for example, Doctors Without Borders is very strictly medical focused. So they are a medical emergency organisation that in the event of a humanitarian disaster, their role as they see it is to bring emergency medical relief in accordance with these principles and a few other ones that they throw in because they're very French about it. Then you have organisations like Oxfam, who have as part of their mission in addition to this the alleviation of poverty and they achieve this through livelihood programmes that give people the ability to re-establish themselves financially and also their self-sufficiency after a crisis. But they also work on projects with vulnerable populations to improve their resilience to those crises before they happen. So these are the main drivers, both legally and ethically, of why these organisations are engaged in the types of humanitarian responses that you see and I hope we'll have some lively discussion about that later. Otherwise, at least that is usually one of the slides that brings the most discussion. How does a response happen? Well, essentially XYZ event happens, tsunami, serious influx of displaced people as a result of a conflict, say pouring over the border from Syria into Lebanon. Organisations dispatch into vene. Well, it's never really as simple as something happens, the guy sees it in the news, so they scramble a team to immediately begin working. Smaller organisations perhaps, yes. But for most of the larger organisations are the more well established. There is a surprising step in the cycle, which is preparedness. Organisations that have been working for several decades are very rarely caught by surprise in terms of their ability to respond to a disaster. So there's an element of preparedness, which is very rarely extolled in the media, I might add. Obviously a needs assessment and analysis, many people here in the software game know that a project that starts without actually looking to what the needs of the end-user are is doomed to failure, or at least expensive cost overruns, project forking, and some very nasty flame wars on the mailing lists. Followed by planning, which is identifying the areas, mobilisation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. So I'm going to go through each of those steps as a way to look at particularly where in those stages, also where there may be potential or where there may be a need for open source tech in those aspects or in those phases of a humanitarian response. So as I said before, preparedness is not sexy, but it's essential for effective humanitarian deployments. This is a photo of one corner of the MedSense on Frontier, the doctors with their borders, warehouse in Brussels, just about half a kilometre from the airfield. Everything here, the warehouse holds enough supplies to deal with a 400,000 person humanitarian disaster for three months. So there is everything in this warehouse that is required to intervene in virtually every type of disaster imaginable with the exception of a few of the more outlier ones such as Ebola. Certainly the resources are there for dealing with Ebola, but the terms of scaling up that we've seen recently in that particular emergency has very much outstripped MSF's initial ability to cope, but of course we've managed to play catch-up with that. But this will be everything from inflatable tents for temporary hospitals, land cruisers already fitted out with radio and GPS equipment on pallets ready to be loaded onto planes to be dispatched anywhere in the world within 24 hours. Tents, generators, generators that come with gerry cans and the spare parts and everything you need to do to take that generator out of the box, add petrol or diesel and plug in your refugee camp and you're away and running. So preparedness is a huge factor in terms of the success of any humanitarian intervention. And certainly this is an aspect where obviously software or tech has played a large role in the effectiveness for these organizations and certainly one where I think a bit more of open source could actually help it significantly. I'm not quite sure if you can, this isn't a very good angle, but there is a number of elements of the MSF warehouse in Belgium which are very funky in the robot arms that you can drive up and down to get all the boxes and the difficult parts to get and apparently you can ride them late at night after you've had a few beers. Preparedness in some way sits alone in that it doesn't need a crisis in order for preparedness to be fulfilled, but it is driven by the types of crises that you're likely to encounter. But then once an event does occur that needs an intervention, well then you obviously need to go and assess the needs as quickly and as rapidly as possible. A needs assessment shouldn't get in the way of an intervention and there are occasions such as where this photo was taken which is in the fly river area of Papua New Guinea, where we arrived in the villages where there was evidence of a cholera outbreak and we arrived and there were people dying in the village. There were ghost villages all up and down the river. We didn't need to do much more of an assessment because we found where the problem was and we just rolled up our sleeves and we began treating people for cholera immediately. And in the space of about seven days we treated 500 people that came, were coming to this village because they'd heard it was the only place where the sickness wasn't. They could really have the traps of using your own laptop. Much like the pre-John Snow days, many of the people believed that the cholera was coming from the jungle rather than ironically from the human beings that kept flocking to the villages to escape the jungle. But a needs assessment needs to be rapid but it needs to be able to cover the immediate needs of the people in a given disaster situation. So for example in the tsunami, one of the things that we saw as a medical organisation was that surprisingly low number of casualties and injuries because the tsunami impact was sudden, people were just killed immediately. You either had a couple of scrapes and bruises or you were dead. And what we saw particularly in the areas we were operating in was a massive need for shelter and for non-food items, so cups, pans, blankets to replace the things that people had lost in the disaster. So that was an area that we assessed immediately. We were able to focus on that's what we need and we were able to compile very quickly the lists of the things that we needed, headquarters tools. So some of the needs assessments may go beyond the immediate physical. We've seen an increasing component of natural disasters particularly but also with these rise of these terrible conflicts and genocides is also the psychological cost to people. And that is a need that is often overlooked in the early initial emergency phases of the emergency but is something that always needs to be taken into consideration. A point I'd like to make here as well is about there's often a lot of people and when you first do your first initial needs assessment and you're on the ground and there are people everywhere, displaced, there's chaos and you're trying to tabulate the data that you need to. It sometimes feels like this could be an excellent in for a nice bit of tech, some tablets, some gizmo, some gadgets. But then you quite quickly find that you've got nowhere to plug anything in to charge it or that those torrential rains don't stop and even the waterproof the rye stops working after three or four days. So there are some considerations that I'll discuss in the next part. Planning, those who fail to plan plan to fail as they say, planning is an essential component. Once you've done the assessment you find the needs that are there, the glaring needs, medical if you're a medical organization, livelihood if you're a poverty organization, etc. You begin the planning of how you are going to deliver the necessary relief, supplies, the necessary interventions, medical care, etc. This is from a measles mass vaccination campaign that we did in Malawi in 2010. We vaccinated 2.4 million children in the space of eight weeks and we did that as a massive... They're welcome, you're welcome. For 2.7 million euros. So we actually did it for cheaper than what many countries like New Zealand or Australia or even France would be able to do themselves. And that was an enormous logistics effort, probably one of the biggest deployments I've been a part of. There was over a team of expats of about 45 expatriate staff and over 500 local drivers and thousands of nurses and doctors from the local community. The planning in order to deliver that efficiently, but also quickly, in a measles vaccination, for example, it needs to be done as rapidly as possible because the clock is ticking against as you watch your case numbers grow in certain areas of measles versus the number of vaccinated. You've got to beat that dead one. And it's the same in any disaster. Thousands of people left without shelter, the monsoon rains are coming in, you've got to do something about that quickly. So planning is essential and vital. And also, as I go back to that slide before with all of those different logos on it, there's going to be hundreds of different actors all coming in, tripping over themselves, some of them to do exactly the same thing, some of them to do things they've never done before, some of them to do things in a different way. Somebody needs to coordinate all of that. Oatures is the main body for coordination and planning and distributing of tasks. Sometimes it works and when it does, it's beautiful. When it doesn't work, well, we just go and do it over there anyway, huh? Mobilization, that's the next stage where you put everything on the planes and you fly it out. So after the tsunami, we got on the phone, on the thrower, we read off the list of things we needed. 94 tons arrived 24 hours later of all of the supplies that we needed to set up an emergency base of staff, of 30 staff, and then begin within 24 hours distributing emergency relief supplies to the local population, setting up temporary hospitals and getting the job underway. Mobilization for some organizations, unfortunately, also means finding the money to do their deployment. Not all organizations benefit from the massive support base that organizations like the Red Cross and Doctors at Borders do. Not all of them have the half billion or billion euro annual budgets. So they've got to take that needs and planning assessment and put it on the table to a donor and say, give us the money that they need in order to be able to respond. And some organizations have the money to respond, but then they need to follow through with grant applications in order to keep those programs rolling. The mobilization is a key component of the effectiveness. There's no point having the best aid plans of mice and men, as they say, if you can't deliver on that. If you've got all of your supplies sitting in a warehouse in the capital for three months while the real crisis is 300 kilometers away, it's not doing you much good. You haven't been able to get the items to where they're needed. And of course, mobilization along with the preparation requires quite a long tail of logistic support and infrastructure. Implementation. This is us distributing those goods in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. That's the rolling your sleeves up, getting down to it, delivering the goods, the supplies, the relief where it's needed. I'm going to skip over that bit because that's the bit that I'm sure everybody is familiar with or has seen on the news. And coming down to the least sexy of them all, final phase, and that's where you monitor. Monitor is the program, is the program doing what it's supposed to do? Are the goods getting to the people that it needs to get to? Are the smiley, happy children reunited with their parents and everybody's got that beautiful Facebook profile refugee selfie that they've been waiting for for weeks. But that also feeds back into the evaluation of those programs. Was the program effective? Did it deliver on what it was supposed to? If not, how can we improve it so that it does meet those objectives? What do we need to change? What do we need to do better? How can we deliver a better response? So to wrap up, what are the challenges? This is my own opinion from my own observations in the field and I'm sure there will be many different ones that could write for discussion at the panel. But the challenges for tech, I see any sort of tech regardless of proprietary or open source in humanitarian response. Is it tough working conditions? Sometimes when you jump off that helicopter and you run into the village and you hang on one helicopter taking off, that you realize that you're stuck in a harsh environment, that you don't have access to immediate tech support, that all of the gadgets that you have are as susceptible to the environment as you are and sometimes, and I've found myself on a satellite phone reading out a logistics order to somebody back in Barcelona as the only reliable way that we had to be able to get that information back to headquarters. So in those initial phases and in the planning phases through the implementation, there are some very tough conditions under which people are working. Emergencies are not good for alpha tech either. So emergency situations are not the place to be taking new products or new toys. I think a lot of people would compare it, say, to the difference between a consumer website and traffic control. The immediate phase of an emergency is like air traffic control. That shit can't crash on you. There's no blue screens. There's no, you know, do you want to file a bug report when you're dealing with a winner-takes-all situation like that. Places, of course, for alpha tech in humanitarian response, but the initial emergency phase is not one of them. And of course, as I said before, some of these organizations are going on, you know, the ICRC over a century. Doctors at our borders is getting gray hair. These organizations have entrenched working practices and these have come from decades of working in very low-tech environments. And in some cases, the attitude ranges from outright belligerence towards new tech to skepticism and an unwillingness to change simply because of existing working practices. And solutions need to reduce the complexity of the situation, not increase it. There's an apocryphal tale, which I like to tell, it's not entirely accurate, but that old classic about how the United States spent millions developing a pen to work in space and the Russians just used a pencil. And that perhaps a pencil is, you know, severe tech from some of the places in which your responses are taking place. And they need to be sustainable after the response as well. If some of this tech is going to remain behind, it needs to be usable by the people who are going to be left behind to use it, whether that's colleagues in longer-term missions, the local ministry of health, the local ministry of agriculture. It has to be a solution that is not just sustainable in terms of its complexity or its tech level or its implementation, but also you don't want to be trapping, I think this is probably a Colton Newcastle here, but you don't want to be trapping people into proprietary state licenses. So this is certainly an aspect, an area where open source does provide that sustainability. But you also don't want to be destroying local economies with an influx of super-cheap smartphones that some well-meaning provider has dumped, thinking that it will improve things for the organizations that are working there. But all it does is destroys the available bandwidth and leaves a glut of super-cheap phones that destroys the market for those phones and those services. Opportunities, obviously rapid data collection and analysis, potentially not necessarily in the field. Logistics and supply chain management, and I think it's important, these are already some projects that are doing this, some of these great projects by some of my colleagues here in the room, that assist, that are open-source projects as well, that are assisting in these areas. And there's also numerous avenues here for innovation as well. Take the missing project, one of my current favorites. And there is the opportunity as well to bring sustainable solutions. As I said, open-source particularly, not encumbering organizations or the beneficiaries with proprietary systems, that they're either going to be able to upgrade, develop or expand on in the future, or afford the enormous licenses. And I'm going to wrap it up there. We are going to have a plenary, unless it's a question of clarification. Oh, yeah. Sorry, where was that microphone? Just a clarification on the first bullet point there, the data collection and analysis. What do you mean by not in the field? Sorry, is that the same before? In that initial phase of an emergency, there is a lot of data collected in the field initially over the conditions people are in, the condition disaster, the damage to infrastructure. I thought about it myself how many times it would be great to have a tablet and an application, but then that would probably last two or three days before it's either damaged, destroyed, or runs out of power. So that data collection and analysis, particularly the analysis side, there's a lot of scope in there, I think, for open-source tech to play a role, but it may not necessarily be in the sexy part in the field, but desktop support in disasters. When we run into these disasters, we've got a full backup team back in Barcelona or Paris or Brussels, that for them to have better decision management and decision support tools, and the desktop and the headquarters, I think, in an area that is still wide open for improvement. And we'll wrap it up there. We will have a panel after lunch. I won't cut into any more of my colleagues' time, but thank you very much for your time.