 Okay so very exciting to be with you and very sad not to be with you with you and so we're doing this digitally. I'm Pete Masters, I work for the Humanitarian and Substitute Map team, my colleague here is Heather Leeson who works at Salfrino Academy and we'd like to talk about this topic in two parts. So firstly some context in case studies and then exploring what this means for us bows and local communities and what's the potential and where are the frictions. I just want to make clear at the start when we talk about humanitarian we're talking about it with a small H. So we're talking about people working in solidarity with people to save lives alleviate suffering and restore dignity. We're not just talking about institutional humanitarian institutions. So I no longer work at MSF but I did work at MSF so that's going to be my first visit. So medicine Salfrontier or MSF is a huge medical humanitarian NGO operating in I think 60 to 70 countries currently and I'd like to talk about a few different few different and relevant initiatives from MSF. So I think the first serious engagement with open source at any kind of scale was missing maps. So this was leveraging crowdsourced open street map contributions for humanitarian purposes but at a scale not seen before. Interesting an interesting outcome of missing maps it really brought a different community to open street map as a project. So people with humanitarian motivations turned up who didn't necessarily know or care about open source which was both a huge advantage and a boon but also a challenge at the same time. The missing maps is a dedicated consortium of NGOs and that meant the project scaled rapidly and it really I really believe it changed the way that geographical data and analysis is done in the humanitarian sector. So that was a it still exists but that that that was a that was a really a really interesting and impactful initiative. So out of that came a tool called map swipe. This was a mobile app for supporting missing maps workflows and it was created by MSF initially as an open source software project and the success of version one totally posed problems for MSF in terms of sustainability and stability like MSF was unable to support such a project even though it started it and it had no understanding of the requirements or ecosystems or needs of what community contribution would look like so that that tool could continue. It's the tool still exists but it's very much thanks to others. The next example I'd like to talk about moves away from maps and into health information. So DHS2 is now the org wide open source health information system for MSF and I want to start with the cons of this as a as a platform. So firstly MSF has no internal expertise of you know designing configuring any of the stuff needed to get an instance up and running in an effective way. Compared to like what was available in the closed market the the UX of DHS2 is pretty bad it's unintuitive it's plunky it's a very high maintenance burden it's a very high training burden for staff and the configuration burden was huge it took ages to roll it out and I'm only going to talk about one probe and that's equity so MSF needs to be able to share data and tooling openly with ministries of health in places vulnerable to crisis and in those places ministries of health have access to open source. So despite the comparatively high resourcing and knowledge investment this pro outweighed all the cons and speaking to the ex deputy medical director MSF yesterday who oversaw this he said it was a horrible process and we'd do the same thing again just for that probe. And lastly on MSF I just want to quickly about COVID so the first one was PPE like the crisis was bad everywhere but it was it was acute in in places vulnerable to crisis. So MSF ran a project to design good enough replicable DIY equipment and we really wanted to lean in to open and open communities because there was lots of stuff happening we didn't know how we didn't know how to talk to people we didn't know where they were we didn't know how to collaborate on designs or share knowledge and so we ended up just designing for ourselves which probably meant that we got a less than optimal product and we didn't contribute any expertise. The second one was on medical guidelines so thousands and thousands of subject matter expert hours were spent developing and iterating medical guidelines for a never before seen disease and we had the conversation around opening the knowledge in the documentation but our lack of understanding of licenses permissions like the risks around ethical and legal implications actually constrained a productive debate and then we never even approached a decision let alone made one. So last thing I'd like to say just before we move on to the humanitarian open street map team is MSF is humanitarian in the acute sense so I'm sure you know the phrase give a man a fish and he can feed his family today teach him to fish and you can feed them forever. Well a good friend of mine in MSF Ivan talks about how that works in humanitarian crises where you can teach him how to fish but if every time he gets to the river he gets shot at you just need to keep giving him fish until that stops. So MSF is not by design but by necessity often for not with and so I want to use that as a segue into the humanitarian open street map team. So HOT is an NGO at the intersection of open source geodata humanitarian action and development and it's a humanitarian org with a with not for ethos and founded with a radical with not for ethos. So HOT was kind of the ground breaker in the use of OSM for humanitarian action and was the catalyst for an ecosystem a humanitarian open mapping ecosystem which now includes distributed networks of NGOs communities institutions corporations individuals there's also a co-founder of missing maps. It started as a grassroots volunteer collective and evolved through registration as an NGO development of governance staffing local and international collaborations a growing reputation for disaster response and then professionalization as a kind of humanitarian to humanitarian partner or implementer. Now the community first mission and values that HOT started with never went away but what ended up happening was what ended up with a funding model actually didn't allow a commitment to these values because the organization was just trying to keep the lights on like constantly you know taking on more and more more work from funders and there's a there's a tension when you walk the line between dual commitments to open community software data you know so I guess the values of open distributed participatory accessible you know knowledge creation and humanitarian impact which tends to work along the lines of kind of centralized you know monitoring and evaluation based there's a real tension between those two things they're not antithetical but they definitely pull in different directions. Can I have the next slide please Anna? So it's tricky to keep to the right hand side of this diagram unless something happens that gives you freedom and a year year and a half ago that thing actually happened for HOT. So the audacious the audacious project is a prize that's awarded to organizations who are going to make going to make change at scale so next slide please Anna. This is a set I'm not going to go into what audacious is but it was essentially a bunch of philanthropists who said we believe in what HOT's doing here's core funding for five years and that's really allowed HOT to try and work out how to do the both try and work out how to do the local and the community first and marry it with the humanitarian the small H humanitarian and that's kind of where we are today so how do you really align an organization to meet communities both technical communities and communities that could use tech to have the social impact they want to meet them where they are to understand them deeply to support them to find alignment and how do you provide value in an ecosystem and especially if you skip the next slide have a especially when where they are is everywhere and we're not just talking about across different countries but where they are socially where they are demographically where they are in terms of what they want to achieve so the slide here shows these are two groups from Namibia but the group on the left is us is members of a slum dweller affiliate and the group on the right is a technical university students they're in the same place but they absolutely have different needs and I think that's a real challenge to the technology because I think often technology is created for everyone at scale and I think we really need to think about depth and context so with that I'm going to hand over to Heather for part two thanks thanks very much Pete um so we're talking about shifting possibilities so we're here at Ospo Europe and we have some clear asks for you so over the over the last few years and frankly for many years open source has been used in humanitarian action there's no shortage of product services insights examples networks that have come and gone projects that have come and gone in terms of that but we need to get to the next level opens to win within humanitarian action to actually support the mission that we're working on so let's talk about shifting those possibilities uh when it comes to humanitarian organizations and again I'm going to start with the large age humanitarian institutions they're very traditional their funding models as Pete mentioned can be super complex in terms of project driven versus kind of large core budget one of the things I learned when I first got involved in humanitarian actions they were missing digital pieces so you can't even start having a conversation about open source and open data if there's no digital strategy if there's a data in digital divide and frankly there's data in digital divide in every community in the world and every workplace in the world and frankly some days I feel like I have a data in digital divide so organizations themselves without having it in the strategy without having open in the strategy you can't actually get it beyond like little prototypes and so at the Red Cross Red Crescent I helped co-lead the digital transformation strategy open source and open data is in there digital principles is in there open principles is in there these are mechanisms for 192 national societies and world communities around the world and 13.7 million volunteers to be able to get more open that's not going to happen from a head office that's going to happen from all those local communities now the UN has the UN digital cooperation and the digital cooperation also has open in the center we know that they have an Oslo now which is fantastic congratulations we know that UNICEF has been really heavily focused on open there are many humanitarian institutions and organizations and development organizations out there that have been using open source products and services but we need to go back up to another level to how does open with so the modes that we work again the products the services the insights they'll always be charging and be able to kind of have that conversation and the advocacy whether you're in business whether in universities or whether you're in humanitarian actors this is something you're always going to have to do right that doesn't that doesn't leave the kind of conversation in the socialization piece but what needs to happen even more so from the modes is to get to a little bit more systematic change and so while it can be in the strategies I mean a bunch of us in different institutions have worked very hard to get open in the center now it comes more to the deeper work as Pete said that kind of implementation of local plus open now for the Red Cross Red Crescent these are our fundamental principles which are very much aligned with humanitarian principles I'm going to just focus on voluntary service I started as a volunteer in humanitarian action focused on maps and open street map and that became my career there are many people around the world during covid response who volunteered with first aid volunteer with everything that you can possibly imagine to help their their communities their societies their towns their world that idea of volunteers was very much at the heart of many of our lives but the opportunity to be able to kind of volunteer with open is even more important and there's certainly a large gap in terms of trying to build that forward now the open organization has principles about community and collaboration so those become principles that we can map the fundamental principles so those become talking points I can use but it's more about the methodology of how do we open up an organization you actually can't start with open source you have to talk about principles and strategy and what does it mean for the core that you work more often than not I don't actually even say open I say oh well you know our principles say that we should collaborate in communities and we should really be adaptable and be transparent they're like yes yes like you know that kind of sounds like open and so that's how the conversations go but we need to go beyond the mapping principles as Pete said we need to start thinking about local communities they are the first responders they're the ones who understand the problem set they have a completely different understanding if you talk to people who are working in open and different parts of the world how they apply open how they use it how they shift it for their own purposes that is beautiful because then it's not a top down North American use European version of open it's an open that works from the community backwards and what can we learn from those local communities on how they apply open and shift how we do it that's one and then two when we're thinking about open open communities are around the world there are logs in every country in the world right if there's a log in every country how are they working with the Mediterranean development organizations if there's a Mozilla community how are they working with it there's a Microsoft open source community how are they working with it so local means aligning the different open communities with the existing communities and really truly listening and seeking to understand and thinking about that so i'm talking about a small and movement even though it says capital M yes there we can start talking talk about creating a new organization but that's not what we need right here what we need is a movement for this is not happening fast enough 10 11 years ago I was in an organization where we were talking about the need for an open source network it still isn't there but what we do have are networks of networks right and networks of networks is where we can make that change and networks of networks means the movement forward can happen faster so I have kind of six examples that I think might help us in terms of movement that Pete and I put together one that used to be a network centered resource not an institutional centered resource and a network centered resource can happen across universities businesses city governments country governments and more importantly civil society the second thing is is that we need to work on discoverability there are things like the digital public goods registry which are which are lists of organizations that are working in open source and open data my concern is is that a lot of us in humanitarian organizations are not familiar yet so how do we know and search and match our problems that with the problems that you've always identified that discoverability means that we're duplicating things and we're also stuck because things aren't translated and when we work in local communities around the world we need to be able to work in their languages it is respectful it is how we seek the common language and it's also how we can learn from each other it was amazing to have multi translated events that I worked on last year and listen to national societies in the Red Cross teach each other and help each other on best practices for COVID response if there's any time that we need a small end movement to move open faster and forward it is now fourth when it comes to sustainability hospitals and open source you're actually at a better place right now because humanitarian organizations are starting to understand why it's important and they see and I think we're starting to get closer to that conversation around alignment so the sustainability of open organizations we need some help we also mentorship and partnerships so everyone talks about partnerships but I think we're talking about deep mentorship where's the outreach program for open source and humanitarian action and development to help us learn from ospos and learn from people who've been doing this because honestly it's been it's been um we've had small networks in the Red Cross repressing of people who are working on open I talked to other humanitarians who are working on open but we almost need a network-centric approach for ourselves and a little bit of self-help much like you guys did in business for many years so these common approaches can help us get forward and open can be this way and I'm super interested in the model of the source program offices because the open source program offices offer a structure that we need but they also offer uh opportunity to be able to uh think about sustainability and think about so pardon me think about think about sustainability but they also provide this huge opportunity to think through how we coordinate communities around it so then it's not just putting things on github it's more about thinking about sustainability of the project and being a good open community member and I think humanitarians want to be part of things that are codified and so I'm not asking for an interagency steering committee on open source maybe but I do think that ospals are in governments they're in businesses and they're starting to happen in universities maybe they build maybe they maybe they grow there and then humanitarian development actors work around it or maybe we put it in institutions but first and foremost it has to happen with local communities so when I talk about open um you know it's it's very clear that Pete and I we've tried to give you some examples of how we've worked in our institutions we've at the sofrino academy for two universities to build that open source products and services just to connect our global community it's been incredible to have their support over the last 18 months if not longer just to be able to connect our community during a difficult time and so it's thanks to open communities that we're able to do that but the communities that open up and how we work in our local communities around the world that's the real power it can't happen from a head office in Geneva or Brussels nor should it or Washington it really needs to happen in Dar es Salaam it really needs to happen in in Abuja these are where the local communities are already working in civic tech hubs so it's just a matter of aligning and getting closer to the problem set but also thinking through how we have that structure but not too much structure that strangles that opportunity for innovation and then really just focuses on going beyond the little fires and going into kind of more network approach so we hope that our questions around impact and getting towards open source program offices will give you some insights and to be honest this is just a starting conversation not a lot of institutions have hospitals in the humanitarian space do they need them I don't know maybe they just need to partner with them and so if you are building an open source an open source program office how are you working in your community of social impact and how might you support people who are interested in doing open a little bit more yes you have your core business models but to me if we've had anything from this COVID coma the last 18 months it is too late to wait and so thank you so much and let's keep opening things up thanks Pete