 We're lucky to have Willow Brew talking to us today about decentralized humanitarian response. Willow is also a Berkman civic hybrid, a growing subculture of the production series. And Willow has done a lot of work with incubating and supporting groups bringing digital technology and distributing it throughout the world. She founded Geeks Without Bounds, a program that accelerates other humanitarian projects. And has recently been working with the Red Cross on developing some of their longer term forecasting for climate change. Cool. So I'm really excited about this. I just finished this presentation while everyone was doing their introduction, so I've actually been working on it for a long time. It's so nice to have you all here. Thank you for taking time out of your day as I know what it's like to make choices about what time we spend. So I'm going to try to do this in about 30 minutes, maybe less, because I'm honestly more interested in what you all have to say than the thing that I've been looking at for a really long time. But if I'm going too quickly, ask me to slow down, because especially when I get excited, I speed up and it doesn't help anyone. So this is a comic that I really like called A Software World, which always has this sort of quiet sense of desperation that I think is vital to understand about disaster and humanitarian response. So it says, people helping people in the aftermath of tragedy is the only really convincing argument for people. But when you mouse over it, it says, always in the shadow of a stronger argument against. So most of the disaster and humanitarian response that we face are in some way the results of people making bad choices, right? Either selfish choices or building in strange places or whatever else, right? So this is, but also people are amazing in these circumstances and they put aside all of their differences and it's beautiful, right? So this is the sort of tension that we experience on an ongoing basis. So this is what we plan for. If we have from a range of no ability to fight a fire to we are ready to fight the biggest fire we've ever heard of, we might end up with one fire engine and five firefighters. And maybe we do really well or really on top of it. So we get a grant or we fundraise or whatever else. And now we have three iterations of this, right? And maybe we even have surge capacity of five volunteers who are ready to help us in really dire circumstances. So on this scale, most of the fires that we're going to encounter, fire being a meta term for any disaster or humanitarian issue that we might face, we can do pretty well, right? We might even get to the limits of our capacity. This is the sort of thing that we train for and that we're like, we're on a really good team. But unfortunately, fires aren't sentient and they don't really care what we've planned for. And things are getting more and more epic, right? We need more and more soundtracks to listen to based on the issues in the world that we're facing. So while this is what we plan for, what actually happens is far outside of that, right? And so this is what I study, this little stick figure over here. It's totally me. You can tell because of the blue hair. All right. So these are our hashtags for the day. Well, Berkman Center, this is me on Twitter. We might use a special tag because there might be people listening in from afar and I'd love to hear what they have to say. Also, I will loop back to all of these links. Don't worry. This is the paper I've been writing on, the short link. A link to this Prezi is also embedded at the top. I welcome as much feedback as people are willing to give me. I cherish all of your brains, hooray. And then because I want you to pay attention to the talk and not the stick figures, here's a link to how I do stick figures in presentations. Cool? I love doing it. I'd love helping you. Hooray. All right. So back to this and the gap between what we plan for and what actually happens. Let's talk about Superstorm Sandy responses, our frame for this conversation. I didn't set my timer. Sam, will you keep an eye on things for me? Thank you. So I deployed to Sandy response with FEMA. I was on the field innovation team and they're a very large organization. They're tasked with delivering huge amounts of aid at a very large scale. And so they have all of these things. They have modules of response, we'll call it. They're big blocks. And so one block might be demolition and cleaning. You have a bunch of water that's just come into houses. There's going to be a lot of mold and other problems. You also need to search the houses in case there are people trapped there or whatever else, right? You also have issues of warmth. How are people going to stay warm? One of the reasons Superstorm Sandy was called as such is not as a tongue twister, but because it was coupled with a really cold snap right afterwards, right? And we might also think about food and water. How are people feeding themselves, getting clean water? Some of the most pressing needs. Because I'm FEMA, I have massive trucks, whole lots of people, and I have to deploy to basically a box store. What is the place that has a parking lot big enough for me to set up my trucks? And also for the lines of people that need to come in and register to have space to stand in those lines, right? This makes sense. This is the smallest I can get down into the system is something like a big parking lot. The affected population is over here. They're in their houses. And there's a pretty big gap between these two things. And you're asking people who might be injured are already feeling really fragile to leave their damaged houses in order to come stand in line so that they can get the financial aid, the boxes of blankets and baby food, et cetera, right? And this is just how it's done generally. And so I'm supposed to leave my house and my neighbor is supposed to leave their house and our neighbor neighbor is supposed to leave their house, right, in order to go there. And maybe when we show up there's only food and water available. And maybe we also need cat food. Maybe we need more blankets. Maybe we need whatever else. And so the people who are standing in the parking lot report back to the large organization. They say, hey, we need more other things help us out. And so more of those packets are sent and they show up in the box store parking lot. So we have a pretty good idea of how the large scale systems work. We spend a lot of time thinking about how organizations work. We spend a lot of time helping them learn about themselves and self-improve and whatever else. But what about this stuff over here? What about all these houses and the people that are working there? So even though I was deployed officially with FEMA, I spent most of my time with Occupy Sandy, which you may or may not be able to tell based on my appearance is where I would rather be anyway, right? And it became readily apparent to me as we were doing this that FEMA didn't understand how a group like Occupy Sandy works, nor does the Red Cross, nor does the Office of Emergency Management, or even the national volunteer organizations that are the surge capacity, those extra firefighters from our first diagram in times of disaster. There are surge capacities within those planning structures, but they don't know how to interact with a group like Occupy Sandy. So how do these nodes surface knowledge to themselves? If I have a really large kitchen in my house or in my church or whatever else, how do I make it clear how the kitchen works to volunteers that are coming in, to someone who's taking over my shift, to whatever else? And a lot of this signposting happens embedded in the space itself, right? So this is some of the stuff that I'm explaining in that paper, is how these networked systems even work. So you have a bunch of signs all over the place that look like this, right? Things are circled and crossed out and there's paper taped on top of paper and it becomes this amazing layered like physical wiki, right? People are updating it in real time. How is knowledge transferred across these different nodes? So if I am in 520 Clinton, which is one of the Occupy Sandy hubs, there's a kitchen in the basement. There's distribution happening at a couple desks. So how people are doing logistics from requests from the field, as well as what resources we know we have. There are also all of the donations coming in from external networks that are being sorted out into church pews so that then they can be reorganized and shipped back out, which later also got fixed. There were meetings on a regular basis where kitchen and distro and volunteer intake would all sit in a circle. And has anyone here been to a meeting of a bunch of different nodes, like a housing co-op or an Occupy General Assembly or anything else? Has anyone here been to one of those? It's so time consuming! Oh my goodness, and you have to hear what everyone is up to. But that's also how you figure out when distro is talking about, well, we had a really hard time getting these hot meals out because of these reasons, kitchen can say, wait a second, if we change this one practice about what we're doing, your job gets easier and the food that we've spent all this time making actually makes it to the people that we're making it for. Does that make sense? You spend a lot of time in meetings, but I spent just as much time in meetings for FEMA as I did with Occupy. So when we talk about how time consuming it is, we need to frame it within the system we already have. I'm going to take a glass of water, or a drink of water, and then I'll tell you about transfer of knowledge to shared topic in a different location. So this is, if I'm in the kitchen of 520 Clinton, I might go on rotation to the kitchen in Jacobi. Why would I do that? Or I might go to distro in some other place, right? And the reason is that while we have all of this stuff embedded in space, we're only able to transfer the knowledge that we think to transfer, right? We only notice the things that are noticeable to us. So my favorite example of this was someone on rotation between kitchens saw that someone else was putting a damp towel under their cutting board and it kept it from moving around when they were cutting, which diminishes injuries of cutting yourself because things are moving around. That's not something we would write down. That's not something you necessarily put in training. It's something that becomes also embedded in the space as you experience it. And so there was a combination of both, please take at least one day off, here's some self-care so that the network actually remains sustainable, but also, except for this one person, who I think this was written because they wanted her to take two days off and she absolutely refused to. And one day in the field, remember why you're here. Go out and experience what life in other places is like. Good? Okay. All right, and then there's knowledge across the network. So how do all of these different locations talk to each other? And so in addition to the in-person meetings per location, there's a conference calling line called Maestro, which allows hundreds of people to be on the call at the same time so that you can vote with your dial pad. And so people end up, like, you can get the feel for a room. You can do twinkles just like you would in person. You can say you have a technical question. You can do all sorts of things. It's pretty amazing, and that's how knowledge across the whole network was transferred. Let's talk about knowledge transferred to another network. So Occupy Sandy was doing really well, but you're already preaching to the choir generally. The people who are showing up are people who have an immediate need to serve or an immediate need for something. But usually people are going to find your website in order to perform remote response, like sending a care package or donating money or helping with communication and parsing through all the tweet requests that are coming in. But it's people that already know to listen to Occupy channels. And so one of the things that this group did really well was merging with Google Crisis Maps, which was another network. And so how are they sharing information? So Google Crisis Maps are basically everybody generally knows to go look at Google, maybe who use DuckDuckGo, like I do, maybe you use something else. But if something is going on, you might hop on Google to search for it. And so there's a crisis team there that's wonderful. I adore them all, or at least the ones I've met, that have started doing these crisis maps. So what is the information that's necessary to know? And how do we know it? And so having that as a landing page. So here we see one iteration of this where you have toggles over here of what information is available that you can put on and off so that you can see what's up. And so here we have public transit, and down here we have food distribution. But one of the things that you'll notice is that these are all from official sources. These are from nyc.gov, which are really slow at getting information out. They want to be sure that everything is good. And so based nearly entirely on personal connections, Google crisis maps started hosting, pulled in from the API from Sandy's crisis map, what the actual live reports of people saying, I need this, we set up this district center here in our church or whatever else, right? And so then you had this layering so that when people from San Francisco wanted to chip in, they were able to see what's going on and see that there's a greater need in one area or another. Does this make sense? Cool. Another knowledge transfer to another network that I didn't find a screenshot for in time was that when the tornadoes in Oklahoma started happening a few months after Sandy, all of the technical infrastructure that Occupy Sandy had figured out, they spun up another version for Oklahoma's Occupy group. And so the Twitter accounts and the Google Fusion tables, they were still transferring to an open source project called Sahana, just the comms infrastructure in general, and then they put out a call of, if anyone wants to be a part of this, especially people who are in Oklahoma, let us know, join us on this, we'll train you up, we'll help you out however we can. There are people already incoming with shovels and water and whatever else. And so, and then whatever people in Oklahoma didn't use, they shot down, right? So this is the part of just accepting that some people aren't gonna like some parts of it and like, awesome, that didn't work out, shut it down, no need to continue that. Good? Cool. All right, and this means that these fires beyond the capacity of the ability of those organizations to respond end up getting put out by the individuals within the community. Good? The reason this is called digital and distributed response, so I think the distributed part is pretty clear, the digital part is because most of this was facilitated through digital tools, the communication, also just using databases instead of spreadsheets. I love so many of my friends in formal and traditional response, but still using spreadsheets, very few databases think about how to manage all of that information. They are their champions in doing this. I wanna make their jobs easier. So maybe this seems legit, but can we design this way? Sandy was very much ad hoc response. It all just sprung up and it worked okay. So I'll tell you about a project in Tanzania, which is based on these same principles but for a very different topic. So the project is called TRIFA, which means to report in Swahili. And it's based on this idea that water points keep getting installed in Tanzania because 60% of people there don't have access to clean drinking water and that's the government's number, so probably even worse. And while these keep getting installed, other ones keep getting broken. I think a billion dollars has been cemented on this and it's not very good. So when a water point breaks, I'm supposed to, as my little stick figure, walk up to the district office in order to report that this has happened, where I fill out a bunch of paperwork. That paperwork is then sent to another office, the district of water, the Ministry of Water, where all of that paperwork gets jostled around until the money and people that are meant to respond to it get sent out to repair. This might take a year. The paperwork itself takes about three weeks to process at its best. It might get responded to within a year. So in the meantime, I'm still stuck with a broken water point, which means I'm probably going to use my phone to call my friend who can fix it for me. Right? But that means that all of the paperwork at the local office, like why does this local office exist? They're not doing much as far as this is related. And it means that all of the national database is also incorrect. Nobody's updating it, so all of the information in it is at least four years old. But it's worth pausing here to say that while I am a strong advocate for networks and network structures and for mutual aid, I think that institutions are pretty amazing. This is one of the things that being at Berkman Center and being at Civic have actually persuaded me of over the last two years. It took some doing. Institutions can be amazing repositories of institutional knowledge, of objectives that last more than a single lifetime, or even five years. We can come up with things that last longer than we do. And the network is still not very good at that, and I don't know if it ever will be. But institutions are amazing at that. Also really good for holding repositories of resources. I know that I suck at planning at a long scale for myself and for my neighborhood. But knowing that there's an extra bank to tap into, bank in a more general term, that helps a lot, right? So I think that institutions are worthwhile and that we need to wait for them to get their shit together, excuse my language, as we figure out the rest of the network stuff as well. Cool? So the thing that we set up was that when this person now makes a free call to my friends, this thing right here, goes to any local private sector non-profits, whatever, who might also be able to come and help, but also up to the people who we're paying taxes to, to fix these things, right? Good. Because this is processed through an API, it means that when the response is reported as having happened, we can appreciate the volunteer who did it and have a report about our neighborhood. We can see the larger scale of what's going on, and there's also a report for the government to see how close they are to reaching their objectives. So this is what the dashboard looks like, so I could decide to spend a day making some money in a place with fewer points, or just I have an extra day, maybe I'll go help some folk. Here's how the neighborhood's money got spent, right? So you dropped X number of dollars and here's how those points ended up getting fixed. And then also, so this is the district water engineers view point of how things are going. All right, so this means that this down here is working. People are still doing what they've always done. They're calling their friends and whoever else in order to have things fixed. But hopefully it's happening even faster now. It means that up here, hopefully these groups can use that time for things that are more constructive. So what can they spend time on instead? Can they optimize this system in some way? And that the national water point database is actually up to date. So that as things get moving and are more and more refined, these repositories of resources can be applied appropriately. All right, so is this actually what I want to talk about? Here we go, all right. So there's this gap between what we plan for and what actually happens between the network and the intentional hierarchies. We're going to continue being intentioned for quite some time. So this is one of my favorite pictures from an Occupy meeting which was from Occupy Wall Street. These are the folk who were shutting us down, right? The people in uniforms were there to shut down just about anything we were up to. And here we have people who they are now relying on to figure things out. Like this was a powerful thing and this was always intention in these moments. And there were, I spent most of my time thinking like, well let's be pissed off at the right people on either side and like, let's actually figure out what's going on and let's hold out for a little while and have some patience and some trust. But I'm interested in what, if I've sold you on this idea, maybe you're asking what can you do? What can I do? And here are some very simple steps that I think are worthwhile in the meantime. I'm sure there are more, I'm excited to hear them. So software developers and designers make the tools you already make useful in these other situations. So don't depend on a constant connection to an internet or external process. I know this is so hard. I know I'm just like, I just do the thing and I know that it's so hard. But whenever possible, if there are neat ideas of how to do this, I'm excited to hear them. Store things locally so you can upload them later. Don't assume that everything has to upload right then. Mesh when possible. And don't assume that meshing only happens in certain, anyway. Okay. If it's possible to have an energy saving mode, right now mesh drains your battery like nuts. And so, and maybe all the power is out as well as the telecommunication structures being down. And so being able to decide when to do things and when not to do things. And don't reinvent the wheel. The space is getting a whole lot of attention and from large organizations now and all this other stuff. And a lot of these things have already been explored, at least nominally. Continue to develop in the open source and free ethos of don't reinvent the wheel. Find what's already out there and build on it. Yes, we already have a people finder app. In fact, we have several. Now we're trying to figure out how to streamline them. And yes, we already have many, many mapping applications. I encourage you to spend your amazing energy on improving these rather than creating them anew. Unless there's a really good reason to do so. Policy folk in the room. You can help by advocating for a balance between institutions and mutual aid organizations. Many people who are into these ideas think that these networks are input functions for their existing hierarchies. So, I don't know how many times I've talked to people at FEMA about, well, just crowdsource this information so everybody's going to tell us what they need and then we'll still take the long time that it takes to get it into the parking lot, right? That's not the point. It's about actually merging these models. So, I don't mean network into functional hierarchies. I mean actual integration. Also, working for things like mesh on an ongoing basis, don't say we're going to have a mesh for disaster situations. That's a nice entry point, but it needs to be an ongoing thing that people know how to use. Having to learn something new when you're already under duress is a really awful thing to expect of people. At the same time, use this as an extra vector for pushing these policies. Usually we talk about human rights versus human needs. And human needs are a really hard thing to contest. And usually people sound like jerks even more than they do when they are advocating for against human rights, right? Also, as most people in this room probably know, I can sneeze in an event happens. This is one that's happening in May that I'm really excited about. It's my first one with aspiration in San Francisco. So it will be here and we're just going to talk about what it looks like to build technology with these sorts of things in mind. I'm hoping it will be a pretty radical lot coming in because this is the best vector I know to achieve social justice. Yes, okay, cool. So I bet that I'm out of time or out of breath. And so thank yous to many, many people. A lot of people have been giving feedback on this but here are some of them as many as I can fit in a graphically interesting way. Here are extra links again there. I'll give you a short link in just a minute. Blog visualizations. Here are Twitter things. This is my email if you absolutely have to contact me that way. I hate email but it's okay. And then again, paper the link to this are at that link. Good. All right. Thank you. We have about 45 minutes for questions conversation. Where do you think FEMA learned from Occupy Sandy? So FEMA did FEMA is learning. They even released a report called the Resilient Social Network which was basically like holy crap that was amazing. How do we learn more from Occupy Sandy? And I think that them taking a risk on something like the field innovation team means that they will more in the future. They become a little bit more permeable. And they are working on things like how do they redesign the disaster recovery centers which are in those big parking lots. So even if people do need to stand around in order to in order to register whatever else they're figuring out faster ways of registering people. And they're also figuring out how to build space in a way that's better for community. So I think that when I'm charging stations while I'm already standing around I want my phone to charge having space for kid care taking so that people are still collaborating while they're in the space. And even maybe having facilitators in those spaces to help the community self organize in a way that's useful when they return to their homes. I don't know if they'll end up acting on that more than they had during Sandy with some of the other people. So I think that's a good way to do that. Thank you. Some of us in hierarchical organizations want to embrace this approach which is more promoting self organization network based and so on. And there are many reasons why it's not easy to promote. What can the network crowd do to help us build the evidence to open more doors for you. So we generally are not good or it's hard to show that doing it your way is faster or better or cheaper than our way. Yeah. So there's a group called Occupied Data. I think it's OccupiedDataNYC.org something which has gathered an awful lot of data around these things. Tools like Charifa that create the reports out of the exhaust of the interaction rather than having to fill out a report if as Red Cross that I know you are with starts to incorporate technology into the ways that you interact making sure that there is the technology is taking on more of those reporting functions so that you can spend more of your time doing your work I think will help out generally. I wonder if you've thought about sort of the threat modeling aspect of this as two quick examples. My wife worked on a vaccination program from New York City. It was meant to find hidden populations that wouldn't trust someone coming around with injection drugs necessarily because of their legal status and so they were trying to understand how to build trust there and if that's been something you thought about and then or in cases where a disaster happens in a rebel area or a sort of contentious area like how a any experience you have with building trust across those lines how we stop the governmental powers from taking advantage of these situations. Yeah, okay so finding hidden populations and building trust in general again I think that's why it's so important to focus on the community serving itself because in doing that in an authentic way if FEMA were to embark upon things like this on an ongoing basis then they would claim the trust that those communities would have in them. The thing that we did was we would show up at a community center that was a community discovery disaster response center and say okay so in theory if there were people that were a part of your community that in theory wouldn't be comfortable showing up to register about their house being hurt because in theory maybe what legal citizens then what in theory would they need and they're like well they would probably need about 12 baby food packs and we would have this negotiation where we just we assume that we wouldn't be a part of that cycle at all but we would help make it happen as we could and I think that those sorts of interactions will open up more doors in the future but that's a long game something where I think institutions have fallen down is that some of my favorite ones are considered pretty impartial and so you can trust to show up there and for it to be okay as far as in conflict areas there are two people that I would prefer to refer you to I've thought some about it but they've thought way more one is George Chimales who has thought about what it looks like what these cure most of these tools are and if it is in a conflict prone area how do we think about these systems and redesign them and build them better the other person is Marshall Wallace who I'm just a big fan of in general who thinks about how we re-script social interactions and community interactions especially in conflict zones so it's not just us versus them but choosing a third path and I think that it is possible with these tools especially when we work with the communities to build and maintain the tools themselves to restructure the conversations that we have cool but I haven't worked in that situation yet so I might be completely wrong thank you one and then two when you talked about Teresa you were saying that basically they would contact a water engineer who could come fix the system that they're talking about and in general it's a good way to collect data from the exhaust of an interaction but a lot of the things I've read about especially with water systems is that they just don't get fixed like no one gets called but what exactly allowed the exhaust to exist in that situation where you could collect it or in general too so we had I'm really glad you brought this up because I've focused mostly on the technical side of that interaction we had an amazing community partner in this that we just got another big grant we get to keep doing what we do until it becomes self-sustaining even better where they've been working with communities for a long time to start taking ownership of their so it's a long history of people sorry it's a long history of communities being just neglected in general and also having all of their own self-direction removed where people trying to take action it's been cut down and like how dare you do that and you did it wrong and whatever else and so this has been more we are besting you with the legitimacy and also the knowledge of how to do these things on your own and so their community owned water supplies water supply organizations in Tanzania and so working with them was the other not even other side of the coin because it was so much more massive than the small component that we did we just made it like a help with that interaction does that make sense okay thank you Eric I'm interested in institutions are good at being affect less let's say they're good at getting work done in some way because of the lack of affect or emotion I'm curious as to how what the role of affect is in networks and specifically the ways in which intensities might create function or operation that's not intended and how you think about designing for affect yeah so this is one of those things about the rotation of people through the different nodes was that the parts of so the parts of affect that were checking so like inspiring people or creating some sort of feedback loop so inspiring people are getting people to reconsider things because people are cynical or whatever else end up embedded more in the community and sometimes even in the space but that's something I still haven't figured out and I don't know how to balance the idea that I don't like of cogs in the machine versus we are the machine where we're all interconnected and through that connection we end up determining where we go but that also has affect in play we should talk more about that later otherwise I'm just going to ramble as I try to figure it out okay well yeah there's a lot of preparation Alex Wilson talks about that there's a lot of work with Boston and other communities there's also the covers.org which sets up disaster plans beforehand you have a window of concern by the outside community for about 10 days to 2 weeks and you don't know what you want in those first 10 days or 2 weeks and so they develop software that allows you to go back to those who have offered and say this is what we need now those kinds of things so what about the preparation of what's happening with FEMA and Occupy Sandy maybe not happening with the Red Cross and what I've heard but to have this preparation by the institutions to look at the natural occurring things that are happening preparations even down to the architecture before disaster happens to prepare for those events that you can foresee and make sure that you have the preparations in place so just because I'm worried about sound I'll restate part of the question it's not looking at me that's fine okay so the idea of how do we do preparedness Recovers.org saying you can reach back to people who have offered to donate in the past when their resources might not have been used things like that this is one of the things where institutions are fantastic because we know what those needs often are at least to some degree and so having those repositories are great there's a guy at MIT named Jared who teaches about humanitarian logistics like how do we store things we know how to ship it where do we hold those repositories so that they're the fastest deployed everything else and so I don't think that's a problem on that end I think that's resolvable as far as attention goes Pablo who's in this room who already asked a question is working with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center on something called forecast based financing you do get a community to understand what its needs will be in a disaster by playing through scenarios so that then you know what you can do in advance to be more resilient and you also know how to respond when that time comes it also sets up mechanisms by which people can donate resources and money in advance so that the community can be more resilient because right now the whole system is all of the funding mechanisms everything are set up for response not for preparedness not for resiliency and so playing those same scenarios and games with people who are both in an affected area as well as the people who are supplying money and everything else means that there's a common narrative and a common understanding by which people can take action and I I think that that's arguably I like that system change more than some of the other ones that I've seen your comment on how institutions can be a really important partner to networks in terms of holding on to knowledge that outlives generations of a network are there good examples of where that's happened where that cooperation has happened or where an institution has done a really good job at holding the knowledge of a network in place I've been doing this in such an over focused way that I haven't looked up enough to look for other examples does anyone in this room have good examples of that of a good partnership between a network and an institution right now and collecting knowledge and just haven't actually been going long enough to see it yet I'll just chime in from my non-profit experience back in a previous lifetime that institutions are not automatically good at institutional knowledge a lot of them struggle with it terribly so I think it's institutions have as much to learn about having institutionalized knowledge in an accessible and sustainable place as non-institutions and one of the things that comes up with historical institutional histories and knowledge is that right now arguably most of the networks to which I belong have a longer memory than the institutions that I interact with trying to explain to some friends of a friend who happened to also be federal agents that it was a really dangerous idea for me to go and talk to them because Hoover because everything else because all of my friends in the last 20 years who have been crushed against their system and they're like what are you talking about we had no idea that's not a really strong vote in the land of the institution but I really want them to figure this out because I think it's valuable and I don't think it's something that a network can do quite as well yeah I'm here with a large delegation from Egypt and who are coming from the United Nations Development Program and specifically what they're doing is working in an office of innovation and so I wanted to point out that it's interesting that within some of these large bureaucracies that they're sort of creating these sort of disruptive elements from within in order to do exactly what you're talking about but it requires actually a separate office in order to facilitate that kind of connection so can I call on you and ask you to say a little bit about that shall we forecast you yet or not so what would you like me to focus on specifically well I just think that the nature of an office within a large bureaucracy in order to build these networks well basically if you don't change the way the bureaucracy of working the large organization will die so what we're trying to do is we're working by learning along the way so sometimes we'd want to implement some things that there might not be a certain regulation for so for example we do these innovation camps where we bring youth to come up with the solutions for the different challenges that they face instead of us imposing the ideas on them and then we actually the group here workshops that we've done where they came up with games for community development and we face some challenges for example like copyright are the solutions ours or are they theirs and so by time we realize that the organization doesn't cater for innovation to happen but we at the same time we try to change the way that it's working by practicing wonderful, thank you for doing that what's the question about if you have a solution and you want to make it for larger impact mostly in Egypt we have very small groups working on similar problems but when we try to merge these groups we're not going to merge maybe it's not going to be like your experience so I don't know but what extent can we merge groups or can we just make people work on the same problem from different perspectives so working on the same problem from different perspectives so like the humanitarian technology interaction thing is I really like to get people in the same room who would benefit from knowing each other and whether or not they decide to work on the same thing that we'll learn from each other right now I think we're I don't know if this is true or not but I think we're overemphasizing a lack of redundancy right now the whole thing of don't reinvent the wheel maybe we do need to every once in a while maybe we see that someone is doing something and we decide to do it a different way like the same thing a different way and then we get evolution we get to see what works and what doesn't and how they interact standards and sharing are so great as much of a hassle as they are to deal with is because regardless of what the platform is and what the specific tool that that community then feels the most ownership of because they built it other people can still benefit from it we don't need a blanket response that fits everyone because everyone's different thank you Ed it kind of has the same question from the technical perspective what you said about reinventing the wheel you know I definitely see a lot and there's kind of an incentive for people who are participating in hackathons and things to make something new and do something exciting that nobody's ever done before are there people who are not reinventing the wheel and consolidating their efforts effectively and like what are the incentives to do that and how do you do that I was not ready for that question I'll respond with something that is not quite an answer to are there people out there who are not reinventing the wheel which is I am seeing a few more software groups that are interested in making their the thing that they've built useful in other circumstances as well and so can it work offline can it can we transfer through bluetooth right which Amy is working on right now so what can we share in a local space let's talk more about that later because that would be a great log to make a great list to make yes please do Amy I was part of the commotion wireless project which is on the one hand reinventing the wheel on mesh sort of but I think the technical outcome of that project was the least exciting it was a way to actually engage with communities and taught and teaching around mesh networks in day to day life and that's actually there's so much to learn they did an amazing job there I think looking at those kinds of places where the developers and the tool makers interacted with the people and the humans on the ground and kept at it even after the exciting part finished is a good thing to learn you know the other thing to learn in that case maybe it's more about we do need to reinvent the wheel they chose to just base their work on the stock kind of mesh protocols OLSRD Batman Robin sorts of things that work for like urban mesh that are static we have lots of time to set them up and that was kind of a failure in my mind because they didn't actually consider the circumstances of a conflict or disaster or something and the thing they came up with was just too hard to deploy for most normal people so I agree we should keep reinventing the wheel and then we should also think about people using it more yeah, there's a lot like motion wireless, I think they have all their curriculum online actually if you do a search specifically for red hook initiative that was their red hook thing airheart and then sol I'm curious about how this new kind of version of humanitarian response changes what we expect the public to know and understand about what their role is and what they should be doing in any humanitarian response I mean like classic examples of like know the common iconography for a bomb shelter or some other resource in your community and be able to find your way there in a certain case are there new sets of skills and knowledge that we need to be thinking about in terms of what the community knows to do and a particular response given kind of your vision for how this happens now totally actually can I pass that to Pablo do you have things to say in response to that we held not only hackathons some facilitated by willow but also iconathons because for the idea of disaster preparedness when the usual is a flood happens oh my gosh let's run and try to help but before the flood happens climate science tells you there's a giant dark cloud about to dump a ton of rain somewhere and the water is coming this way and we don't have a language either visual for the literate or institutional etc to know how to do so it requires local knowledge of the community normally on a normal day but also what would happen with or to the community under extreme circumstances this can be hydrology you may need if someone builds a dam and the dam may collapse the community has no experience of what happens when you have three meters of water coming down but also just local knowledge of insect behavior and stuff like that that can't help so we're trying to work more with anthropologists technology developers and who knows who else and by the way anyone here who wants to support cross work abroad doing this kind of thing I'm going to hang around because we have no idea how to do this stuff but we want to learn and so this also really quickly gets into I the role that citizens have been allowed to play in their own response and they're like self-rescue I the really horrible stories from Hurricane Katrina where people weren't supposed to leave their homes you're not supposed to go out after curfew if you're caught out on the streets bad things happen people were essentially kept from being able to act in any way at all and so the slow shift from we will come and save you or you won't get saved at all back to a society where we're expected to know how to help each other is going to be a long haul but we're approaching it in so many different ways like education is getting at this everything is getting at this I think that there's hope yay Whitney do you have a response or a question cool do it and that's all I was just going to say if you speak to the tension between like on the one hand I'm really into the whole individual empowerment thing like let's take care of our own communities let's do this stuff but then also there is this kind of institutions abdicating their responsibility to government institutions like the whole get a plastic bag and duct tape because it's your job to save yourself and so if you can speak to like how can we empower communities and do all that good stuff without fueling the kind of like everything is everyone's individual responsibility again there are things that institutions are super good at that they should be entrusted with that we should be supporting with our taxes I love roads oh my goodness roads are amazing and we can't also expect that even communities only protect themselves because sociology that Whitney and I share means that communities that do really well tend to not want to help communities even close to them that aren't doing really well and so we I think that we do need those overarching accountability structures for more equality to be reached in the world that might be an inflammatory statement but I don't care it's how I feel and so yeah does that help does that answer okay I got so excited about that statement I forgot it it's a great statement all right thank you Sol another one Iconophon is the noun they did something about schools and law services fascinating nobody could actually understand the literature schools so they worked on a new Boston schools Icon which is so completely out of date relevant that's not really why they wanted to answer another group that's sort of trying to move from the hackathon model to a more enduring model is code for Boston I mean they are they have an embarrassment of riches in terms of volunteers so they are trying to do things like rather than build another adopt a hydrant to shovel out the hydrant thing to build a platform they are calling Adopta so that it's a generic platform for any community to implement to adopt whatever resource there is they also had a hackathon recently where they were really focused on almost being an incubator in the sense that they knew that anything interesting is not going to end at the end of Sunday when they gave out the prizes and a lot of the prizes they gave out is access to co-working space so the teams that could form could keep working together on things they believed in so that's a pattern that I'm really glad is spreading when random hacks of kindness was really taking off and there are all sorts of things that we could talk about as far as hackathons but random hacks of kindness really kicking off in late 2009 late 2010 and Geese Without Bounds which is a group that I co-founded around the same time we hosted 1-5 hackathons internationally every month we also mentored teams per 6 months so that they could take the thing that they started in the hackathon and actually bring it to deployment readiness we talked about responsible data, we talked about human rights we talked about business management we talked about all sorts of things over those 6 months and it's absolutely not in those moments that those it's not at the hackathon that those things actually reach deployment status that's where you do your prototype and so it's wonderful that those things are continuing on and I look forward to more of it I'll just say we're going to take maybe 2 more questions we're meeting with this example each panic in response to disaster earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 where the National Guard was called out and they actually did more damage and people were forming groups to take care of themselves but that that threatened the structures that were there in San Francisco Katrina to certain extent and Sandy in a society in spectacle, certainly where politics is always up at this level rather than talking at that level when you have people beginning to take care of themselves that threatens the structures that already exist and that can lead to a deep panic so it's good to know that FEMA and the Red Cross are thinking about these things that have now evolved but what about the politics what about the media who are probably still subject to that kind of elite panic oh my god the people from the streets are rising and doing stuff for themselves rather than by our permission yep and this is one of the ongoing tensions so there's a quarterly exercise that happens at a place called Camp Roberts it's part of the Star Tides Network which is basically how do we deploy these technical things in advance of needing to so we can test interoperability no such military so it's with the Naval Postgraduate School these are people who are usually military in nature who are figuring out how their skills and resources apply to humanitarian issues the US military responds to about 5% of disasters a year that's worldwide but think about how how many resources it takes just the fuel alone to send in one of those massive ships to provide medical aid and to produce clean water which then they don't have the means to distribute off of the ship at the same time things like Star Tides which are military based are really incredible like this is where a lot of the interoperability steps happen but it's at events like that that I talk to people who I adore who are in the State Department or whatever else where they're like I don't understand why people are skeptical of us when we show up to these environments and it's like you're serious like you destroy their lives the rest of the time they live in fear of you and then you show up and expect them to open and to me it's just an example of like until we fixed everything else these peaks of heightened awareness are going to continue being busted as well and so to me one of the reasons that disaster response is so interesting is that it's just a hyper focused point of all of the other things that are right and wrong in the world which gets us back to our original cartoon right one last question we all know what we're doing what we're doing