 What kind of a piece do I mean, and what kind of a piece do we seek? Not merely peace in our time. Peace in all the time. To our video creators. Good morning everybody. Welcome to this Peace Tech Summit. Engineering, adorable piece. We've got a rich and a full day, chock full of many of my personal heroes in this field. So I'm going to be very short to get us started here. I'm Sheldon Himmelfarb. That's my real name, Sheldon Himmelfarb. And I manage USIP's peace tech work, which that means our efforts to use media, tech and data for conflict management and peace building. And as you're going to hear in a few minutes from our chairman, this has become a priority area for USIP because it cuts right across everything everybody in this organization does. There is not a single problem that we work on in this building, whether it's preventing election violence or inter-ethnic dialogue or land and water disputes, you name it, there's not a single issue that we're not seeing efforts to inflect it using new media and technology. But the results, as you saw very clearly from that video, the results have been mixed. I'll be presenting some data later on about the lack of impact to date and why that is. Because we at USIP, we have a responsibility, indeed, a charge from Congress to ask the question, why is that? Why are we not having the impact that we could from this brave new world of peace tech? More to the point, what can we be doing to improve the results and save more lives? And that's what today is all about. And we're honored to have, as our partners in this, searching for answers with us, the National Academy of Engineering, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, its 50th anniversary this year, and whose members have made the most extraordinary contributions to humanity around the globe. We in Peacebuilding have much to learn from their unrelenting drive for solutions to complex problems. We've already learned a lot in our partnership over the last few years. We'll hear more of their insights today from several of the Academy members who will be speaking. Okay, in a moment, I'm going to turn the podium over to leaders of both USIP and the Academy. But first, a little bit of housekeeping. We are live webcasting across the globe on usip.org. So to those of you in our online audience, lean in. Remember, you can ask questions and interact with the panelists on each other on Twitter at hashtag peace tech. Secondly, for those of you who are spending the day with us here, please don't hesitate to ask any of the USIP staff that you see floating around to help you with anything that will make your day more valuable. Quiet corners to make phone calls, directions to restrooms, local bars, whatever it is. We know how hard it is for you to get time out of your busy schedules to come here and spend this day with us. I used to say that we wanted the day that you spent with us to be at least as productive as the day you spend in your own office. And then somebody came up to me and said, Sheldon, that's really not a very high bar to be setting. So let us help you make it even more productive. Okay, last piece of housekeeping, buckle your seatbelts. After the remarks of our leaders, you're going to have the wonderful Nancy Payne of the Peace Tech Initiative is going to jump up and take this podium. And she's going to take us straight into a lightning round of 13 fast presentations when technologies you should know about because they're having great promise in the countries where we work. This is not going to be a dull day, I promise you. And with that, remember how I mentioned at the start my personal heroes in the peacebuilding field a few minutes ago? Well, it's my truly great pleasure right now to turn the podium over to one of them, someone who has not only served on USIP's board three different occasions in our 30-year history, but also served as National Security Advisor. Please welcome USIP's chairman of the board, Steve Hadley. Good morning, everybody. We're just delighted that you all took, as Sheldon said, time from your day to be here and I think it is going to turn out to be time well spent. On behalf of the United States Institute of Peace, therefore I want to welcome you not only on behalf of the Institute, but also on behalf of our invaluable partner in this effort, the National Academy of Engineering. This PeaceTech Summit grows out of a unique collaboration and a unique partnership with the Academy over the last several years called the Round Table on Technology, Science, and Peacebuilding. This is an interagency, interdisciplinary, public-private partnership that has been addressing many of the issues that we will be discussing today. And in a moment, I will introduce the president of the Academy, Dan Moat, who will offer his thoughts on the summit and say a bit more about the theme for today, Engineering Durable Peace. But first, let me say that I am pleased to be here not only as the official representative of the host organization, but also because I believe so strongly that our peace-take emphasis must be a component of all our peace-building efforts here at the Institute. As the video made clear, our world is ablaze with serious conflicts playing out virtually all over the globe. It is also being transformed by the spread of cell phones and social media, the strategic positioning of networks and data, and the growing competition between those who would exploit these media to empower people and advance freedom, and those who would use them to oppress people and to maintain state control. I believe that we cannot prevent or reduce deadly conflict or construct durable institutions of peace in the 21st century without enlisting these new technologies to the task. But in the same way that these tools can be both agents of liberation and agents of oppression, we need to recognize that these various capabilities can both mitigate violent conflict, but also can encourage violent conflict. And our task is to develop strategies to accomplish the more peaceful outcomes. For these reasons, the peace-take emphasis has been fully embraced by USIP, both by supporting the programs of the peace-tech group itself and by encouraging ways in which all aspects of USIP's work can be enabled by these tools and technologies. In fact, the USIP Board of Directors believes so strongly in this effort that we voted at our July meeting to approve the creation of a new peace-tech laboratory, a spin-off from the Institute that will be centered in one of the two buildings on Navy Hill behind the USIP headquarters. The lab will operationalize the same cross-disciplinary collaboration that the USIP National Academy's round table has represented. This is a place where engineers, technologists, and data scientists work alongside USIP's experts in conflict and peace-building to address conflicts and save lives. Sheldon Hemmelfarb will give a fuller outline of this strategy and this proposal and the plans for the labs at the end of the summit. But this is one very concrete example of how important we think these initiatives will be. Let me turn the podium over now to our partner for the summit, the president of the National Academy of Engineering, Dan Moat. Dan assumed this position in July of last year after serving for 12 years as president of the University of Maryland, where he remains on leave as regents' professor. Dan, welcome. Well, thank you very much, Steve, for your very generous introduction, and thank you for your applause. I always like getting applause before I speak. That way it ensures you get some. Anyway, and Sheldon, thank you very much for not just your presentation today and all your work putting us together, but for putting your soul into this so deeply. And that's what it takes to make these work. It's really my pleasure to join you, Steve, and all of you today in this Peace Deck Summit. We have really chosen this theme of engineering a durable piece, really with careful deliberation. It's the central premise to that of the roundtable that engineering science and derivative technologies can bring valuable assets to this peace-building process, and I think that's probably directly apparent to all of you, in fact. To appreciate the nature of these assets, we really need to understand what they are, how they were created, and possibly the roles that science and engineering play in them. The essence of science is discovery and understanding of the world around us. Science is all about getting understanding right. The essence of engineering is creating solutions to problems of people in society. Engineering is all about getting solutions that work. Technology, as is commonly used today, is a catch-all term used to describe the technical outcome derived from many areas, including engineering and science, among others. Engineering is a human endeavor that creates solutions that meet the needs and wants of people in society. Many people think of engineering as, in terms of things, artifacts, computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices, or aircraft, water treatment plants, power generation systems, pharmaceuticals, and so forth. However, we should look at these as solutions to human problems, not just things. The things are the pathway. The problems are the destination. Engineering solves problems using whatever it takes to do so. Science, ingenuity, imagination, guesswork, empiricism, experiments, experience, modeling, trial and error, whatever it takes. Scientific knowledge is very important when it exists. However, often it doesn't cover all that is needed to solve the problems when it does. If the Egyptians had waited for science, they never would have built pyramids. An important element of engineering problem solving is systems thinking and analysis. Through experience and by training, engineers learn how to break down the elements of complex problems, examining their interrelationships and their relations with other socio-technical issues. You can think of them in terms of building blocks of systems. Peace-building is a natural domain for systems thinking, given the complex interplays of the building blocks, stakeholders, human and material resources, technological infrastructures, politics, cultures, and so forth. Engineering is problem-solving. Technology is a technical outcome from wherever it drives. Science is understanding the world around us. Although technology, engineering, and science have not been thought of as first-order tools for building peace, they cannot be avoided, as a matter of fact. Indeed, over the past few years, the Roundtable has validated important contributions of engineering to peace-building in several areas. Through workshops and other activities, we have brought together engineers, computer scientists, social scientists, and peace-builders to tackle significant challenges and opportunities. We have advised the design of data-sharing systems to create more effective coordination in conflict zones and to promote the participation of federal agencies and non-federal organizations in peace-building. We have identified opportunities to use information technologies creatively to sense emerging and ongoing conflicts and provide better information and analysis that can be used to prevent violent and deadly conflicts. And we have illustrated how systems engineering can enable more effective planning, coordination, management, and evaluation of peace-building activities through a structured development process that identifies needs, functionality, and requirements for success as stakeholders proceed from concept to design to operation. In short, the objective of this collaboration is to help make peace-building a more strategic, systematic, and technical enterprise in keeping with the human core of the problems that we address. After all, engineering solutions serve people, so this should be no revelation to anybody. In the process, through increased focus on global, grand societal challenges such as energy, sustainability, security, and peace-building, and through the curricula of our engineering schools in this country and abroad, and through organizations just like Engineers Without Borders, which is one of my all-time favorites, we hope to energize new generations of dedicated engineers around the globe in this peace-building process. So congratulations on the effort so far, and best wishes for this summit and what's going forward. Sheldon and all of you, all of us together, I would say. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Mote. And Mr. Hadley. I'm glad to see all of you here. It's a good room full of energized and engaged people because that's really what this next session is all about. We're going to show you, as Sheldon said, a range of applications, ideas, capabilities that really capture the energy and the innovation that engineering and technology can bring to the peace-building field. So we want you to use this session to really kick-start your own creativity. We definitely have a room full of innovators and smart thinkers here. So start thinking of your own ideas as you start to hear these different presentations. They're going to give you a sense of what's new, and we also want them to plant the seed for what might be new ways and better ways to be able to leverage peace tech for conflict prevention. So this lightning round format is really rapid fire. Brevity is a virtue here. So to all of our speakers, we are going to have 13. These are going to go really fast. They're on a timer. They've got five minutes each. So please don't think us rude if you hear us call out or ring a bell when the time is up the stage. But two broad themes. You're going to hear two broad themes in this. One is the power of data for decision-making, and the other one is innovation through engagement at the local level. Those are two really critical components of this whole idea around peace tech. You've got the full list of speakers and their topics on your agenda, and there's also bios available. So I think all of you probably pick them up so you're going to hear a little bit, so you can read a little bit more about them. And as the song, and my boss, Sheldon Himmelfarb, always says, we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. So let's get started. And we're going to start with Kahl of Lee Teru, and he's going to be talking about G-Del. Give it a clicker. It's up here. Isn't it funny? We all call them clickers. There you go. Thank you. It should be... Oh, there we go. Excellent. All right, so I'm going to cover a lot of ground really fast, so hang on. So anyway, so this is my... There we go. So this is my dream, a single room that fuses a dashboard of global human society that fuses all available information around the world into a single room that has observed the world. And this is taking the first steps towards reality. This is actually, this is not a Photoshop image. This is an actual photograph of a floating sphere showing protests and violence around the world by day over the last 35 years, showing world history right in front of your very eyes. But how can we catalog human society? You know, how do we make a list of every protest around the world each day? Violence around the world each day. Well, the goal of this project, the G-Del project, is really about monitoring all open information, news, social, academic literature, anything that's open around the world, codify that by computer, so we can translate the news each day, the textual news, into an actual map that we can understand, visualize, analyze. So it does two things. One is to take a textual news article. So basically a textual, you know, a description here, actually codify that and make that into a quantitative database entry. So you go from text, a description that Iraqi leaders are criticizing Turkey for bombing Kurdish militants, and this becomes database entries that we can then transform, we can map. This is actually a map, actually, of Egypt when it destabilized again last year. We can actually watch in real time, in the media, what's happening in a country moment by moment. We can combine that then with the people, organization, groups, and views that are behind the news each day. This map on the left here, this is Ukraine, the day the president fled. You can see Crimea lighting up, all kinds of things happening there, massively pro-Russian sentiment, massively turning against the government. Really, really lighting up. And this map actually was very interesting because at the time period, there was a peace deal with the protesters. The country is at peace now. And of course, we all know what really happened. So to be data, it's not perfect. There is no perfect record of everything happening in society each day. But this can play devil's advocate for us. Same thing in countries like Nigeria. We can actually watch animated, second by second, what's happening, at least through the eyes of open information. What's happening in the country? What are the ebbs and flows going back decades in the country? Are there areas of countries that are destabilizing or re-stabilizing across the world? We can make influencer graphs. These are actually ground truth influencer graphs. You can go in and say, the oil and gas industry in Nigeria, the agricultural industry in South Africa, who are the influence in those? Business leaders, politicians, external influencers within that. You actually get back lists of who are sort of the controlling interests. So if you're trying to do peace building, if you're trying to interact, how do you enter new areas? How do you understand what that landscape looks like? How can we track out global leaders over time? A real-time popularity index for the world's leaders to understand what are the areas of greatest emerging instability that we might not be seeing at this moment? How can we take terror in criminal groups and actually make real-time footprints of them, second by second, through the eyes of the world? Some border town says, by the last few weeks, much more than usual. How do we observe that and map that and basically flag areas for others to look at? How can we essentially take every person mentioned in a large fraction of the world's news media and make a single network diagram that shows how the world is interconnected at a moment? This is an enormous next step. This is just a view this past week. Taking all of JSTOR, all of DTIC on class D class, and all of the Internet archives holdings of the open webs since 1996, how do we process all that for anything that's academic literature on Africa and the Middle East? You can drill down and say, in this particular area, what's known about that area? What are the conflicts and other areas there? And again, being able to inform if you're working with local peace bills in the area, what are the rest of the world saying about this? How do we map out global protest activity over time and see that, yes, post-Arab spring, at least through the eyes of the world's news media, protest activity is dramatically increasing but compared to the fall of the Soviet Union, very calm. How do we drill in and see a country like Ukraine and actually watch and say, what's happening now is compared to the past? The support of U.S. Institute of Peace. How do we make a large map, essentially, real-time? What are the major events, major conflict that's occurring around the world and how is it spreading through the eyes of the news media? How do we uncover the underlying trends of the global society? How do we actually get at the mathematical formulas of the news media? What's happening around the world? What are the patterns there? And how do we use this to forecast the future? And through the support of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, how do we actually then take this to decision makers? Take all these fancy data and actually put that in front of policy makers so they can make more informed decisions. And again, going back to my vision, essentially bringing all this together, allowing us to take all the world's information, open information, fuse that together in ways that are actionable and can inform policy. Thank you very much. Nice. Thank you. Next up, we've got Anjali Ayala. Are you from Internews? Let me take it away, please. I'm trying to figure out... Oh, here. Hi. So what I want to be talking about today is something much more related with what Internews does, which is normally media development and sometimes also humanitarian information. And by chance, we ended up also doing a peace-building project. So the first thing that I want to explain is a concept that journalists are very familiar with, which is the concept of a third place. A third place in journalism is a public place where people hang out. It's part of the daily life. It's part of, for example, going to a bus stop. That's a third place. You find a lot of people there. They hang out. They talk about different things. They're not there because they want to meet each other, but they meet each other in this place. This is an example of a third place. This is how people were recharging phones during the Gaza war. It was during using batteries from their cars, and they would hang out and be all around the car and chat and discuss about what was going on. A second concept I want to explain is the concept of white spaces. Now, this is a concept that is more related to business. And a white space is normally considered a place within a company or in a start-up where people can interact and think in a different ways because there are less rules they have to abide to. So normally, authority is very fuzzy. There's no rules. People can think in a different way, and that's the reason why, for example, a lot of start-up companies are trying to build their own spaces as white spaces so that people can think in a different way and be more innovative. Now, this is an example of a white space, and the reason why this is a white space is that this is a radio studio that we have set up in Ramallah where journalists are talking about the needs of the population in Gaza. And I will explain to you later why this is a white space where normally it wouldn't be. So, of course, this is Gaza as it looks like right now, and the reason why I'm talking about Gaza and why I'm talking about all of these different concepts is also the same reason why I'm really jet lag, which is that I just flew back from Ramallah, where the internet has been doing this project, specifically looking at the humanitarian crisis. Now, one of the things that is really important to understand about the conflict that happened in Gaza, which, by the way, this war is the third war in the span of five years, is that this is not necessarily only a conflict about politics, it's not only a conflict about resources, it's a conflict about identity. The identity of the two groups involved in this conflict is threatened by the very existence of the other group. This also creates a situation where the narrative within each group is only and can only be one. If you have a different narrative within your own group, you're threatening your own existence and the existence of your community. What this means is that the narrative that is being built is the only one that you can adopt as part of that group, and this is valid both in Israel and in Palestine. You cannot have a different narrative than us versus them, because if you have a different narrative than that, then you're threatening your own existence. Now, when Gaza went to start implementing this project, we were not interested in talking about the conflict, we were interested in talking about the humanitarian crisis, which means that we started focusing on something that it's not in my slide. That's good, perfect. I'll go on anyway. So we started focusing on the needs of the population, which means that we started asking people, what is that you actually need? Do you need water? Do you need food? Where can you go to find all of these things? And when we started focusing on that narrative, we suddenly realized that when we started building an ecosystem that had Facebook and Twitter and SMS, we suddenly started seeing a different type of conversation. People were not talking anymore about us versus them. People started talking about what do we need? How do we build a better future? What's going on out there? What can we do? And so suddenly we realized that the space that we had created, the virtual space, especially on social media, was a third place. People wanted to hang out there because it was nice because they didn't have to be us versus them. They could just beat themselves. And some of our journalists came to us and said, this is the first time in our life where we can actually be journalists without having to choose between a journalist and being a Palestinian. And so the question I want to leave you with is, can we use the internet and specifically can we use social media to create a space that allows people to create a different narrative within a conflict? Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Anna. It is not technology without a glitch. I apologize for that. Rachel Brown from Sasanino, Niamani. Great. So today, I want to talk to you all about a case study involving local level resilience to incitement. I'm going to talk about Sisi Niamani, which is an organization that I founded and ran in Kenya from 2010 to 2014. And the organization was founded in the aftermath of Kenya's 2007-2008 post-election violence. Election-related violence was not unusual or new in Kenya, but the breadth, the geographical spread and the duration of violence was something very new. It lasted five months. It took the lives of over 1,000 people and killed hundreds of thousands. And a lot of things contributed to this and a lot of factors were in play. And one thing that played a really big role was mobile phones. Mobile phones really changed the way that communication around conflict was happening in Kenya. They allowed people to communicate faster. They allowed people to communicate over a wider geographical planning. And they were used to spread rumors, to incite people to violence and even to actually organize for people to gather in specific places for weapons distribution and for attacks. Sisi Niamani was founded with the recognition that communication was being used very effectively by violent actors to incite violence and that violent actors had really understood and capitalized on this new entry of mobile phones into the communication ecosystem. We asked ourselves that if we knew that communication was inciting violence, could we instead use that same tool and empower local community activists to use that same tool to instead create peace? And what we did is we used a two-pronged approach. We started at the most basic level by working with community partners and we built and designed all of the programs in partnership with local community leaders. And rather than beginning with the idea of our programming, was more traditional programming in-person interactions, which included face-to-face outreach and branding of the initiative, local forums, policy debates. And then we complemented this with a new tool, a subscription based SMS platform, which enabled local community members to subscribe with their phone numbers and let us send targeted information based on their demographic information such as their location and the language that they wanted to receive messages in. And we were able to send these targeted messages about civic education to poll communities about their needs and to send messages that encouraged peace and also that disrupted violence and tensions. The partnership and interaction between this in-person traditional mediums and the text messaging was really important because it was the in-person interaction that let us build trust and community investment and let us build really on existing social capital and behaviors in the community. And then that meant that when we used this SMS platform, which let us communicate rapidly and directly with community members, we had that trust and credibility and people listened to us. By the time of the March 2013 elections, we worked with more than 50 local partner organizations to subscribe over 65,000 users to our platform in target areas in Nairobi and the Rift Valley. And in just the week surrounding the election, we sent over 680,000 messages out. We were able to then, because we had our subscribers' numbers in our database, we were able to ask them for their opinions and about their experience with our platform. 92% of 7,350 subscribers who answered a poll believed that the text messages that we sent had a positive impact on preventing violence in their community. And subscribers also reported that they interacted with this medium and with the messages that we were sending. This was important to us because we know that when people get messages inciting violence or spreading rumors from their neighbors or their friends, they're interacting with that information. They're going out and talking about it and sending it to others. 75% of the 7,350 subscribers surveyed spent their own money at least once to forward a message. And 85% had a conversation at least once. These are a couple quick quotes from subscribers from phone interviews that we later did to learn more about their interaction with the platform. This subscriber was from an area with low level of conflict. The messages made me relax even in the midst of the violence that was happening. I still felt like someone was in control and watching and I knew things would be okay in the end. The second quote is a subscriber talking about rumors. If people were scared or spread rumors, tensions would rise. SMS were useful to make people strong and when I saw them they made a huge difference. He also said he shared them with other people and it helped them relax. And finally, this subscriber said that the messages gave her the courage to preach peace. So we could see that the messages we were sending were actually disrupting the communications around conflict. And that was my last slide. So I just conclude. Thank you very much. Next we have Kara Andrade from Ashoka. I'm going to test the technology first. Okay, good. So good morning. My name is Kara Andrade. I'm the co-founder of a nonprofit that's called Alba Centro. And here's my contact information. And Alba Centro is a, we're both a nonprofit and a for-profit and we've been working with Alba Centro for the last few years in Central America in particular, but we also work with Latin America. And what we've been focusing on is looking at technology strategies and solutions for getting people to participate, to create public spheres, to create deliberative spaces, third spaces, what Nayib referred to, and to get people also to have access to economic opportunities through tools and information. And these websites are sites, they're citizen journalism websites in partnership with different local organizations in each of these countries. So we have communities in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, where I'm from. And so what's happened is that we've created this network of citizen journalism hubs and they're all run by volunteers, mostly young people. I think one of our youngest was like 14 years old when he started posting to Alba Costa Rica and the contributors share and they discuss information. They also have the ability to be localized so they can include different indigenous languages. Anyone can contribute via cell phone, email to web and directly on the website. And here's what some of the applications also look like on our phones, which they're all Android based. And they're all free too. But I want to start with essentially how someone like me, a concerned citizen and someone trained in journalism from like being in her pajamas one evening to like creating this network of citizen journalism websites. And it all started with Honduras. There was a coup, I'm going to say that in quotes because coup, it's still debated among some circles that if what happened Honduras actually was a coup. On January 28th, 2009 then President Manuel Salaya was ousted by the enduring government and he was ousted because he was trying to extend the Constitution as president a little bit longer. And so the Supreme Court from Honduras ousted him in his pajamas as well to like Costa Rica and a lot of the Costa Ricans, I'm sorry to Costa Rica and a lot of the endurance who supported him were not happy that he was ousted. And so there was a lot of like protests and different manifestations and obviously there's also like some ensuing violence and then just a lot of violations of human rights. And none of this was being covered in like international media or like even local media because there's obviously some very clear stakeholders that were keeping that coverage from getting out. And so they contacted me on June 28th they'd heard that I'd set up similar sites like Albuquerque and they said there was a group of like 15, 20 students activists and they were like could you help us set up a website like what you did before because we want to tell our stories we want to tell what is happening on the ground. And it really got to like something very fundamental about how in a democratic society you really need informed citizens. Informed citizens can govern and they can also serve as watchdogs. So while like we're taught as journalists eventually we'll become like citizens and I think like the idea is also to teach citizens the skills that journalists have so that they have access to accurate, reliable, timely, relevant information and that's the recipe we often use for news and what's newsworthy. We have access to tools to get what they need and to also like connect to the information and economic opportunities to sustain themselves. And all of our tools that we've created we created in partnership. We have different developers that work with me and also the community organizers and these are all requested. We don't come up with a single technology that a community that we work with says hey you know we really need this. And so here some I'm going to just run through some of these and like we have the websites that you've seen we've had simple blogs. This is all super lightweight, made to work in developing countries. Pretty unhackable I would say and probably like I'm sitting with engineers so you can probably hack it right now. It's tightly integrated with Facebook and Twitter. There's like full support for SMS's and we also have a similar one for young people when they actually want to start covering elections. Here's our text messaging platform where people can actually set up their own text messaging hub and this is the way it works. So it's very nodal and it's like easily expandable to more regions and countries and some of the lessons that we've learned because I have 30 seconds is you know really the most important thing is to build community right. Don't give people tools unless they really need them and they're cost effective and that they're also relevant to the work that they're doing already. And the last thing I would say is like strategy is really important like the tool should be last. You shouldn't start with like the technology first. You have to always talk about like audience and like who they're trying to reach because in the end technology is made of people and double brownie points if you can tell me what movie that's from. Soiling Green. Alright, thanks Cara. Next we have Mohammed Najam from Social Media Exchange. Hello everyone. My name is Mohammed Najam from Social Media Exchange Beirut with my partner Jessica. We founded Social Media Exchange in 2008 and we work on digital rights and training. Today I won't be talking on is this the one? Today I won't be talking about Internet Governance even though I would love to talk about it maybe at lunch or something but today I'm going to be talking about three of our projects that we did in the last two years technology related and what are the challenges that we had. The project we had is NUWEB which is a list of legislators. It's a basic simple contacts of the deputies that exist in Lebanon. How to contact them through email, social media. It's been on GitHub. We put this on GitHub and it's a way for constituents to contact their deputies because Lebanese website of the parliament had maximum nine contacts of the deputies that exist. Most of the contacts exist is around their background, their wife's name, their kid's name so there's really no direct contact. One of the challenges that we have on this project is our donor didn't think it's innovative enough and that's really a challenge because what's really innovative in the region in the Arab region is really might be somehow old-fashioned here but it's really related to the potential, how the technology can solve the problem. This is open for any developer as well to come and build on top of it to solve different problems as well. The second project that we're doing is called Tasharouk. It's a collaborative knowledge base for netizens and it's an online library that exists in English and Arabic of course, targeting Arab region and this had came after the trainings that we've been doing around online media for social change in the Arab region many people, many trainers come to us and ask us how can we access content, how can we access materials to train our people so what we did we aggregates all the open source material that exists from our part and from different organizations that they are already building materials and we put them on this library and this will be launched on September 30 which is in a few days but you can check it now, it's open and the idea is not only to put the materials for people to access but also to map what already exists in terms of materials to see who's doing what and to know how we can collaborate all of us together in the Arab region to really move forward in building new materials and not only duplicate on specific topics. For example there are a lot of materials now around digital security but there's not enough on many different topics. The challenge on this project is usability, usability was one of the challenges like how the software developer can really help us in building this there's also a challenge in really working on specific wireframe all the software that we're showing you now is built by software developers so I'm just mentioning now some challenges we had the third project is nithawa.com which is we transform this is also an online course, online learning course that's focusing on community building plus in this age of digital so the training that we've been also giving since 2008 we started by building one course and it focused on community building and online this is an eight week course we had a very good feedback from the participants the challenge, the main challenge that we really had is convincing donors to give us more money to do that while this was very exciting for many people in the Arab region the donors seems not to be very want to fund this kind of projects so the challenge that I mentioned are three the donors need to be thinking about innovation from the context in the Arab region and not from the context from DC there's a need to building capacity for software developer for civil society groups from the local communities donors should work with local communities in the context, the language, the problem that really exists and not really bringing solution to already existing problem that will really not solve anything and thank you very much and if you want to get in touch we can talk about all these topics, thank you thanks Mohamed next up we have Qasim Laqani and she is from invest to innovate hi everyone first let's do a quick poll in the room how many people already know what crowdfunding is? how many people donated on a kickstarter, Indiegogo one of those platforms majority of the room this is awesome I'm Qasim Laqani and the founder and CEO of a company called invest to innovate where we believe that entrepreneurs have the power to change the world particularly in frontier and emerging markets where the ecosystem is a lot more nice and it's hard for entrepreneurs to get the support they need to turn those ideas into reality what invest to innovate does is that we provide the support that entrepreneurs need to get there we've been operating in Pakistan since 2011 I actually just got off a plane from there two days ago, so forgive me if I'm a little bit out of it but what we do in Pakistan is that we actually run a startup accelerator program where we identify young entrepreneurs who have really incredible ideas to change the environment around them and in a place like Pakistan no greater need than entrepreneurial solutions to effect change so we've been running this accelerator for the last three years where these entrepreneurs not only get business support, they get access to amazing mentors and we currently actually two weeks ago just launched our third class of the accelerator program we have five companies, seven entrepreneurs four of whom are women which is really awesome but the reason I bring that up and the reason why I'm here talking to you about crowdfunding aside from the fact that I've done crowdfunding myself and I've trained on it is the fact that a lot of these entrepreneurs in these markets one of the biggest issues that they have is access to capital a lack of trust exists in these environments it's really difficult for them to raise investment for their businesses and so crowdfunding can actually act as a really amazing solution to really bridge that gap when it comes to capital and the reason is this crowdfunding really provides a sense of transparency particularly when information is not always readily available where people don't necessarily trust the information that they get the type of crowdfunding portals and platforms that we've seen really give a sense of transparency to the cause that you're donating to the cause that you're supporting not only getting to see where your money is going but also getting to see the progress of that what happens afterwards crowdfunding is also really great to be able to raise small amounts of money from a large group of people it's a really great way to mobilize and build community around your cause, around your business and it's such a great these environments are so great for that, it's so right the reason why we see crowdfunding really take off in these markets, sorry I skipped ahead, okay is because it is painless it's really easy for you to go on a Kickstarter campaign and click and donate ten dollars and get a t-shirt to get to be part of a movie and basically get a perk for just basically sitting in your pajamas donating to a cause that you believe in so while this is really great crowdfunding particularly in Pakistan but in a lot of these emerging markets tends to be a little bit restrictive particularly when it comes to these mainstream crowdfunding platforms that we've seen, the Kickstarter, Indiegogo we've actually often seen causes in Pakistan really been unsuccessful on Indiegogo and all these platforms and mainly because PayPal doesn't work with PayPal in a lot of these markets we don't actually have a lot of ways that people are actually donating for things online what's often the case in the culture of these markets is that you actually do more cash on delivery than actually putting your credit card online so when we see these traditional crowdfunding platforms they don't tend to work or you know there's a lot of restrictions involved when it comes to it so a great example that's something that's actually going on right now you should actually donate to it I was sorry, I'm not here to do shameless plugging but it's a company or an organization called T2F the second floor there's an amazing space in Karachi that's really brought together people over the creative arts around dialogue brought together filmmakers and what Sabine Mahmood who's one of the founders of T2F did was that she didn't want to necessarily put it on a crowdfunding platform because she realized that most of the supporters were in Pakistan they weren't necessarily going to be able to donate online but what she did instead was that she basically created her own crowdfunding website and so she had really amazing people that were supporters, Amin Gulji is a famous artist and basically people that were adding the sense of credibility, the sense of transparency to the cause and what they did was basically giving people really easy ways to do it we're actually their partners on PayPal which is how people overseas can actually do that but what we're working on right now with Invest to Innovate while this is a really great solution you can see the dropping off cash wiring transferring your contribution contributing via like four steps on TCS which is like R U P S actually adds these levels of complexity so what we're working on Invest to Innovate right now which I'd love to talk to you guys about after and during the break is actually using design thinking as a methodology to figure out how crowdfunding we can actually create a platform that works in these markets, can we use mobile technology can we use other platforms that currently exist so thank you Thank you Next up we have Jay Olfelder I'm going to mess up your name Olfelder from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Hi I'm Jay Olfelder and I'm going to talk to you about the early warning project this is a new system for routinely assessing risks of mass atrocities around the world this project's been in the works for a couple of years now it's actually a collaboration between the Holocaust Museum Center for the Prevention of Genocide and Dartmouth College's Dickey Center and Dolly Lab the premise of the project is simple better early warning can enable better preventive action obviously early warning isn't sufficient for prevention but we think it can create more opportunities for it and that's really what this project is about if you talk to people who work in the field you sometimes hear early warnings already being done we've got that covered that's not really an issue in fact a lot of what we call early warning now in this area are sort of like this guy's stone's weather forecast it's more that we get alerts about violence that's already occurring we think we can do better by building a system that first of all focuses specifically on mass atrocities not conflict at large second that really forecasts that tries to look as far into the future as we can third that does that using the best available methods that are specifically about forecasting and last and not least that makes the results of that available to the general public for free so that anybody with a motivation to get involved in preventive action can take advantage of them there are two main parts to this system the first are statistical assessments of the risk of onsets of state-led mass killing in countries around the world and here what we're really trying to do is try to get conversations deeper looks going on those cases we're doing this with a multi-model ensemble or what you might call a model of models that draws on a number of ideas about the risk factors and origins of mass atrocities this is the sort of standard practice in the world of applied forecasting nowadays because it produces more accurate results we're doing this with a multi-model ensemble today's because it produces more accurate results so of course we've adopted that approach here what visitors to our site will be able to do are explore maps and charts that compare risks across cases or within cases across the models or over time we're also looking to make this interactive so that users will be able to sort of tweak the inputs to the models to explore the implications of different possible future scenarios that won't be part of the initial bill but we think we'll be able to add that in the next year or so we're also sharing all the data and code we use to generate those assessments on GitHub we're hoping that interested researchers will dig around in there and help us think about ways to do this even better that's live now okay so the statistics are the first part the second main part of the system is a wisdom of expert crowd system we know from prior research that individual experts usually aren't very good at forecasting events like these but it turns out that crowds of experts even relatively small ones can do a very good job of it so we're taking advantage of that principle with something called an opinion pool if you've seen or heard of or maybe participated in a prediction market at some point this is the same basic idea except here without the trading part so in this registered experts log into the system find questions they think they can add some value and simply tell us how likely they think the event is by setting a slider like you can see on the picture there but the key part is they can update those forecasts anytime so when they see or read or hear something that changes their mind about how likely the event is they can go back in an update and the aggregate forecast updates immediately with it then what the public will get to see is for each of those open questions a chart like this one that shows how that's been trending over time we've got about 115 people in the pool right now it's been up and running for several months but the bigger and more diverse that pool gets the better this will work so we're looking to make a big recruiting push over the next year or so and hope some of you all can help us with that we're also running a blog and we'll have a social media feed to call out interesting changes in the forecasts relevant events that sort of thing an interim version of the blog is up now on WordPress that's what you see here and we're migrating that content over the site now and last we're hoping to see the site become kind of a hub for conversation about early warning and prevention as well so there will be a discussion forum built in that will be open to the general public as well so that's the early warning project the site I've been talking about is almost ready it should be up within the next several weeks and go live in October when that happens I hope you'll take a look and put it to good use thank you very much all right next up we have Dushad Okman from the ISC project good morning everyone well I'm here to talk about the experience of using technology in Syria during the conflict or at the beginning of the conflict well at the beginning of the conflict in Syria, Syrians used social network very heavily in a heavy way so they can't cover the news and what's going on in the ground and Facebook actually was the main way for Syrians so they can't verify news or verify images that they are coming from specific areas in the country also we have to know that the government tried their best and they're still trying to put a block on access for medium specific parts of Syria unfortunately that's using the technology in Syria or specifically focusing on social network to cover news because now it's actually cracking down because of the policy of the social network because as Mohammed mentioned now policies that they are running in DC they are totally different than the policy that they are running on spaces like Syria and recently Facebook cracked down a lot of social network pages because of violence of agreements of the user community recently we found that Syrians they are moving to the VK network because they are less restricted with the policy while Syrians they use technology or they use Facebook to cover their own news and to cover their own media that was the solution actually that the government used and other parties actually they used is just shutting down the communication and that was the largest problem in Syria my city is offline Qamishli where I'm from is offline since March 2013 and there is no mobile coverage or internet there so the people they found a very good way actually so it's using VSAT system and they built a cafe in each streets at the same time they built a lot of Wi-Fi hotspots so now even with the low bandwidth but still people they can't get access to the internet by using VSAT systems this is one of because of the government also cracked down a lot of websites they are getting down pages they are trying to limit access to the information group of Syrians they found something called the freedom of SMS so they were sending SMS to people pushing them to go out for demonstration pushing them to participate in for example at that SMS they are asking people to participate in strike that was actually at the beginning of the conflict the Syrian government put block on specific words so the solution was actually sending the solution what people they used actually they were sending recorded voice messages to these people even with that they were blocking they were blocking the voice call to go inside the country one of the largest problem also Syrian people faced is the Skod missiles as a former Syrian officer in the army Syria has a lot of Skod missiles and Skod missiles are dumb huge Skod missiles and Syria launched at least 175 Skod missiles on their own people so with the help of some friends I built MTA, MTA means in Arabic when it's a Skod missile warning system usually the base where the Skod missiles were launched from is nearly around Damascus and it takes up to 8 minutes to 9 minutes to reach the north of Syria or Raqqa or Aleppo so we built our new warning system based on spotters on the ground they were reporting the XYZ and the timing of launching the Skod missiles because it's huge they can't see it and they can't follow it and they will add that to the system and the system automatically will figure out the targeted areas and send SMS and e-mails to the people warning them that they have 7 minutes or 6 minutes to go unfortunately that wasn't that much successful because of accessibility to the network everything was shut down so it wasn't working that much this is the image of how MTA works launching the Skod missiles from south of Syria because this is the area where government is taking control and I can easily put the time actually find the time and the XYZ and automatically the system will calculate and it will also also it's going to show like a virtual effect showing the missile is moving on the map that gives the people a lot of trust also in the system we had more than 6,000 subscribers in the first two days on the system accessibility was our main problem and it's still our main problem there are a lot of solutions there are a lot of creative solutions on the ground but network there is no access to the internet and that was one of the main problem and it's still thank you so much thanks Toshad next up we have Anna Levy from Social Impact Lab let's figure out how this thing works there we go so as some as a number of there we go, as a number of the folks who have spoken up here already have talked a lot about SMS and it's the business that we're in, it's the work that we've been doing at Social Impact Lab for the past 8 years back in 2012 there were more than 6 billion people in the world that had access to a cell phone mostly to SMS and just over 9 trillion text messages were sent in the same year I'm going to skip that one this is a different presentation oh boy I'm actually not going to use the presentation I'm just going to talk a little bit so I guess I'll start here why SMS? the reason that we've been so focused on SMS for the past for the past few years is you can be a researcher you can be a journalist or a service provider you can be here without access to the internet and totally different you know what can I actually come back on a little bit later and just grab the right presentation you know what we're just going to take a quick pause and I'm going to ask to see if we've got this teed up I'm looking at the right one ready to go why don't we actually if we can skip to we can skip to Bill are you ready? and the real question is are we ready for Bill see if we can skip down to the next one on Esri no worries at all we'll get this it's not a conference until the technology starts to break that's why we work with SMS I'll put your five minutes thank you so much and we'll swap it out are we ready? there we go Bill's ready we're close we're close so good morning I'm Bill Sheridan with Esri I want to talk about GIS GIS technology and mapping technology and how it pertains to the peace building process you know every time you say GIS and systems mapping technology is the common voice in the peace building process core GIS technology brings information together in ways that help characterize activity, prepare our resources and even predict events I'd like to highlight on how our GIS users are using technology in order to support the different facets of the peace building process alright GIS and mapping technology is often used to uncover patterns and trends and data much like this CAPS product analyzing conflict information this valuable research enables us to better understand the drivers of conflict, the social, economic and environmental data is integrated. Dr. Kate Weaver is actually going to talk a little bit more about the CAPS project in a few minutes furthermore, non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch use GIS mapping technology to capture information and report incidents out to the public in these examples you can see they provide detailed assessment of damage to buildings in both South Sudan as well as Fallujah Iraq maps are often the first tool used in the humanitarian response to manage coordination efforts having data stored in the GIS allows information to be tailored quickly in order to meet local needs these are just a few examples of different maps at certainly different scales used in the earthquake response in Haiti nearly all UN political peacebuilding and peacekeeping missions have a GIS department which stresses the importance of this technology in the peacebuilding process and GIS technology allows peacekeeping mission maps like this one to be updated continuously as local events on the ground change and assets are reallocated and finally the everyday operations of the Security Council and peacekeeping forces require maps and geographic analysis but in order to move forward in the peacebuilding process we need to meet people's most basic needs in this example our user is collecting data on clean water samples in the field using a highly accurate GPS this map depicts the World Resource Institute system called Aqueduct for analyzing water scarcity World Vision uses GIS to collect data on sanitation and hygiene also known as WASH as well as other food security issues it's hard to achieve peacebuilding when basic health and nutrition are not provided stable and healthy communities are certainly essential and finally both CGIAR and harvest choice which is supported by the Gates Foundation uses technology to analyze crop information in support of food security food and water scarcity inhibit the peacebuilding process GIS's have been progressively introduced to Rwanda over the past 10 years this proved to be especially valuable in context of the nation's Vision 2020 program or 2020 initiative to become a information communication and technology literate society and building and protecting peace is critical having an integrated system that creates an environment where information can be shared allowing faster more structured coordination and response when incidents do occur and I mentioned Esri on the first slide you know we were a company that was founded in 1969 and we've grown from a very small research group to a large global company with over 350,000 organizational users worldwide many NGOs, governments, international partners use our technology we developed the GIS and mapping software we focus on growing GIS and its applications and we provide education support and services to our users and finally I hope you note that Esri is a global company we have locally owned offices in over 130 countries around the world you know this provides our customers local language, local context and certainly local access to staff because geography matters thank you thanks Bill next up we have Catherine Weaver from University of Texas at Austin thank you good morning so my name is Kate Weaver I'm a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and the program called the Climate Change and African Political Seability Project which is funded by US Department of Defense Minerva Initiative and in the sum the CCAPS program is designed to bring the social science ACADS to the high tech world and what we really try to do is bring social science knowledge about conflict, climate change and aid and use GIS technology in order to be able to harness the power of spatial information in order to get greater analytical leverage for the questions we care about so how does this work there, so we look at gathering and mapping very complex data on climate change vulnerability conflict patterns across the continent and subnational very granular information on aid and this doesn't seem to be working very well there we go do I need to point it up point towards the booth ok I will point to the sky so in our conflict backs in particular what you see here is worked on by the armed conflict location event data set by my colleague out of the university of Sussex in England and the social conflict in Africa data set which collects real-time information on conflict events across the continent puts it on maps in such a way that you can interact with the data so drill down and get real-time information about who were the actors in the conflict with the scale or nature of the conflict itself and also you can do temporal or time series analysis to better study conflict patterns as they're changing so as Bill showed you already this is one of our shots from our CCAPS dashboard which is an interactive dashboard that allows you to go in and interact with the conflict data but also to overlay it over other maps so in this case what you're seeing is conflict patterns over climate change vulnerability which is helping us to ask and answer essential questions about what is the relationship between climate change and conflict in Africa is climate change creating risks that exacerbate conflict or not we can also look and do time series analysis to see how conflict patterns are changing the example here shows the spread of the law's resistance army from Northern Uganda into the neighboring areas in the DRC in South Sudan we can also overlap the same information over climate change vulnerability and start to see where the spread of conflict may be exhausted by an underlying risk of due to climate change the area of the CCAPS program that I work on in particular is also integrating really granular subnational information on aid flows particularly in the most aid dependent countries in Africa the innovation here is we've found from knowledge where we knew how much USAID was giving for all agricultural programs in countries like Malawi to now knowing exactly what agricultural activities are being funded by USAID and which implementing partners at which parish level, at what time and with what amount of money we can then put that also over things like climate change maps and start to ask is that $100 billion pledged by the UNFCCC and Copenhagen in 2009 actually translating into real money being provided for aid to developing countries for climate change adaptation the question I think is most relevant here is how do we use this data to ask and answer questions about peace building so one of my colleagues Mike Finley and I are working on these questions of whether or not aid particularly aid dependent countries whether or not that aid actually exacerbates conflict providing resources to rebel groups or whether or not aid does what it's supposed to do which is to leave the underlying conditions of poverty and actually reduce the risk of conflict the spatial data actually allows us to get at these questions in a much more effective manner so we're using spatial econometrics also what we started to do very very recently is apply these questions in this data to peace building evaluation so now what we can do is go in and we can actually use spatial data on conflict patterns and other indicators on top of the UN Peace Building Fund activity locations and we're starting to do some very nerdy things and causing a full experimental impact evaluations for the UN Peace Building Fund in Burundi soon to be Columbia. Finally where are we going next? Asia. So the US Department of Defense has generously given us another Minerva grant and so we're extending this research to look at climate change vulnerability and complex emergencies in South Asia and Southeast Asia trying to identify where it is that climate change may exacerbate underlying conflict risks so that conflict turns into actually full scale complex emergencies and also using these geo located to better understand where resources are being mobilized to address those risks. Thank you very much. Thanks Catherine. Next up we've got Benson Wilder from the US Department of State. Hi. I'm also going to apologize in advance I have a terrible head cold and if someone could use big data to explain why that always happens when I have a public speaking event it would really be helpful. So the Humanitarian Information Unit is an interagency unit housed in the Department of State. We have staff working for USAID, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, Army Civil Affairs. We have been around for more than 10 years and have generally been focused on small data, operational data, trying to be in a node in a large network and support multiple international partners, UN agencies, NGOs, some of whom work directly with the US government many of whom do not. That's our mission but our focus we are in the office of the geographer department so we, Bill and Catherine have done a good job explaining the importance of geography and the importance of place in understanding complex emergencies so save me a little time. So our privilege is geospatial data although it's not always limited to that. This is one of our earlier flagship initiatives providing US government data on destroyed damaged villages in Darfur over the course of many years which was useful in documenting what was happening but also used by multiple operational agencies to better understand the context to engage in planning et cetera. We've done many things along those lines in other cases at varying scales since then. This is a more recent example during the jungled crisis in South Sudan last year before the larger confirmation. UNISAT the operational satellite program of the UN is also a key partner so we provide data based on US government analysis whenever possible but we also try to push data out so other independent agencies can do their own analysis. We are able to use the US government's purchase of large amounts of commercial satellite imagery leverage that, share that with partners doing their own work for a variety of human security applications and this goes back many years so that's both for conflict damage assessment as well as humanitarian needs. I felt badly not putting the human rights watch slide on but Bill included that so I appreciate that. The molecule work in South Sudan was using imagery that was supplied under the same license. I'm an African guy but we do a lot in Syria and Iraq and many other places in the world so I did want to mention that. We're also very involved in the creation of open geographic data particularly with an emphasis on the baseline. There's amazing sources of information you're going to hear more about today. We really believe strongly that without understanding that baseline the localized context of place and the interaction between people and their environment at various scales you lose a lot of that information. So we are working with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team who has already been leveraging OpenStreetMap a free and open editable map of the world for a variety of human security applications. We use the same license. We've worked through the policy and the technology tools to be able to share imagery in certain cases to allow digital volunteers to trace over that imagery which is what you're seeing here create baseline data which goes into this open map of the world and that's an example of how that's used in a variety in one of many emergency preparedness contexts. So that has also evolved and given launch to what we call the map give initiative mapgive.state.gov so the imagery is important working with local communities and giving them access to that data and building communities around open data and open mapping is more important and also the volunteers who are working around the world to create that baseline data to empower communities is perhaps the limiting reagent so mapgive is about getting the word out lowering the bar to entry for digital volunteers working with universities here and around the world other student groups, other stakeholders we have a set of tools for training that we use online and when we engage in mapping activities we also use social media to recruit and mobilize volunteers you can follow us at mapgive we've been very involved in the Ebola response as of late. Finally we're a node in a large network but nodes can also be bottlenecks so we're trying to apply the principles of open data as well as open source with DOD OSD funding we've just concluded a two-year joint capability technology demonstration now it's called GeoShape basically this is about everyone's going to have their different stores of data but let's have an architecture that allows people to share as much information as possible when they can, when they want to and also protect the information that they have to which is obviously very important in protection and human security and peace building contexts and just to mention that this also works hand in hand with our work with the Humanitarian OpenStreetBab team and the data that are created there and this final slide you can see updates made in real time within the OSM database great even with a head cold very good, alright now change up we're going to have Ana come back and I think we are set oh wait a minute one more second this is the point in the conference where we reiterate that technology is just never going to substitute human beings so the team working very very quickly and efficiently back there to get the right thing going are we ready? am I going to get a hand up from someone somewhere up in the booth back there we had it this would also be a good plug for SimLab everyone seems to suspense now and wants who are we, what do we do are we a black box top secret technology soon to be unveiled are we good? oh we've got one minute sorry it looks like we are switching computers I think that's the problem I think this gives everybody a minute to absorb everything that just came out very very quickly think about it think about what your questions are and hopefully maybe you've got some ideas to be able to share in exchange at the upcoming break the good news is that I was going to talk a lot about SMS which is what many people have already talked about I can start by just talking about two or three of the examples it is a lot more interesting if I show it to you up here give me a hand okay oh sorry I said the good news is that it would be a lot more interesting if I had the slides I'll go through a few examples of the work that we do we work mostly with SMS we're expanding a little bit now there we go alright okay perfect so I had just gotten to here I'm Anna, I'm from Social Impact Lab in 2012 as you see up here and as I said before people around the world had access to mobile phones most of them used SMS with that access about 9.4 little over between 9 and 10 million 10 trillion sorry text messages were sent and that number is much higher now the reason that SMS is more popular than anything really after radio as a communications channel is because it's extremely cheap pennies on the dollar it functions where electricity grids don't reach and absolutely where internet operations break down is the gentleman who went before me said before in Syria internet kind of collapsed or was shut down SMS often still works in those situations so we have one example here we have an example here this gentleman over here on the right is Hendrik he's the head of a palm oil cooperative in West Kalimantan, Indonesia he started a citizen journalism network to use in negotiations with the palm oil companies operating in the area he would mobilize support basically do community organizing through SMS to get information from community members from people in the cooperatives to mobilize documentation through SMS to use in his conversations with the company this got carried or picked up actually we did some work on this also with internews I forgot her name but one woman spoke about it before over here and this actually got picked up by a local media network called Ry TV who started covering and reporting on the negotiations using the SMS content there we go all right what we have here is a poster that was put in various areas in 2011 post flood in Pakistan on the left over here you have a numbering system one through ten and each of these was a number indicating instead of saying I don't have access to food or my child can't use a certain kind of stairs or doesn't have special needs of some sort posters were sent all over the place in several different languages saying text number one to this number and as you see on the right explaining both pictorially and using language what people should do where they should have information what they needed during the relief efforts so text number one if you need something related to food text two if it's related to shelter I forgot what three is four is conflict five, six and seven have to do with reports that you want to make about the organizations or the people who are sort of distributing distributing services distributing goods text eight if you have an issue with women or children text nine if you have an issue with someone who is handicapped or has special needs and text zero if you want to say thank you in some way and after you text that number what happens is an auto reply would come back trying to sort out what exactly that person's need or interest is and a back and forth would take place until hopefully not in all cases of course it's extremely complicated and chaotic but a lot more people were serviced this way it was direct to the individual rather than always going through intermediary organizations yep right now we're actively working on a project again with internews and an environmental journalism organization called info amazonia working in and around the amazon basin they cover environmental degradation in the region in all the countries that are continuous to and touching the amazon and it's a little bit different normally when we think about text messaging I'm going to text you to see what time we're meeting tonight my mom texted me this morning and said happy Friday and this is actually a case where we've attached text messaging capabilities to a very low cost sensor that registers environmental matter, particulate matter in the air and in the water in and around the amazon basin so it's a low cost messaging system to send environmental information the second innovative part it's not such a new idea but the second sort of innovative part is that that information gets triggered via sms to governments to journalists and to local communities at the same time and many of those communities are indigenous communities so isms and this is the slide that came up before because this person right here as he started to say could be a reporter they could be a researcher they could be a service provider they could be a civilian information, run service programs access services that they need through this platform right here which looks and acts like an email inbox does most of the same things except for that it all functions excuse me, offline you don't need to have the internet you don't need to be by the internet in order to organize information through the system where we are right now at social impact lab is here where we're now trying to understand how and where technologies that serve the needs of low income and often very vulnerable populations in transition or otherwise how that works on a network scale we have a lot of programs now running we're doing a lot more work to support early warning systems mobile money networks, national health programs and we actually heard about a month ago that some folks started using using the software to organize their wedding so you can't see what that says but it says as of last year we were very excited the software reached 200,000 downloads in more than 135 countries around the world and we're trying to figure out how to move that how to move beyond that scale of organization to person from organization to organization organization to government and eventually transnational where SMS and low end technologies fit in thank you thank you and hopefully this will round us out with no glitches our own peace mechanisms and we'll get over from USIP and I have a head cold and I can't walk so I'm going to use the podium here let's see how this works what's that? we're switching top button here is that or the left and right left and right got it so I'm here to talk about the open situation this is a web based collaboration and data sharing platform and the idea is really to help people in conflict zones have better access to conflict data and to be able to do something with that to be able to find, collect, analyze visualize and publish the conflict zone data to really help people harness in Marshall the information in the world around them to be able to improve their decision making and strategies on the ground wow, that's a cool slide, it's not mine neither is that yep other way, got it left there we go this is the one I'm looking for so the first step of this is really looking at the fine phase and seeing what open data sets are available and so many of the systems we see we can describe as almost a data for Superman type approach where if I can just get these really important people on the left side of the slide all the information they need they'll find this magic button they press and the problems of northern Nigeria will start to be solved but if you see the possibilities for peace is more about the local population thinking about their future and taking different actions to do nonviolent means of resolving conflict then it's these folks on the right side or the ones we really want to ramp up and engage their decision making it's the local peace builders that are going to make a difference yep and so in looking at that what are they using, they're using what we might refer to as local data, it's a lot of different formats but the interesting question is because so many of these large data sets are sort of from an outsider's perspective it's an open question to see what they're going to find value of when they're the ones asking the questions but really we can't even start doing this you know connection until we're part of this trusted network because this is really where local data is exchanged this is why we made the core of our platform collaboration engagement and then we layer the data on top and so we're doing this in a place where information security is at a premium so while we want to put as much information as possible out in the open it's clear there's a need to have private secure spaces where just the folks that they want to work together are able to do so and they're probably not using 24 inch monitors you know to see 3D visualizations they're working in partially connected environments and they probably want an alert from their cell phone when the information they care about is changing and so how do they start working with this data so often we see cases where people go into conflict zones they engage a great group of stakeholders on an assessment process and then they leave and do the analysis and then they show back up with the answer this is a classic let me give you a fish and tell these folks that the local peace builders are just asking the questions they're really not going to be data driven in the sense that we're talking about here and so the first phase, the spine what are we trying to do well the idea is if we can just draw a polygon around a plot of land and give back people the information they care about be it twitter, conflict data environmental stress for information and let them to start interacting with it we really think this is the first step to start with and so to do this chart here to get that what we started with is a series of data sets so gdalt is one that we've worked with there's a number of other ones if you go to the open situation room homepage is a wonderful map that you can start working with but really the idea is to start building this tech for social good ecosystem where we give the local peace builders all that great stuff that that left side of the chart is giving Superman information about their environment peace building topics like how do you do gender based violence but also the technologists and data folks that they can connect to and if we give them these resources maybe they can learn how to fly too right and so the idea because this is long term you really need boots on the ground in this sense and what we're talking about is finding an awesome technologist from the region bringing them back to the lab, learn about data analysis and visualization but also conflict analysis and mediation and facilitation skills and have them go back to the conflict zone this isn't to scale but I think you sort of see what we're talking about bringing in local peace builders over a period of time putting maps in the wall giving them handouts so they can really start thinking about their data profile and so where are we going a lot of development to do the main points it's going to stay open source there's going to be no proprietary code there's going to be no USG code and the development is really going to be based on participation and use so we are really now at a place where we need you to come and join us come to SRX.org, start participating share it with your folks, this is prototyping it's going to be a long term effort but the water's fine, come on in Thanks Noel and thanks to all of the presenters and thank you our participants in the day for hanging in there and I hope this was a really stimulating set of issues and I think now is the perfect time to absorb all of this again go out, find the presenters that were here ask them questions we're going to take about a 15 minute break so want everybody back in here in about 15 minutes time but meantime please go out enjoy some snacks and coffee and water and whatever you need Thanks Thank you There's no more people We're done Although it's already been a while There you go Thank you Shit I'm so sorry Thank you Thank you Thank you I'm sure you won't mind Do you want one for the sweater and back at the top I'll turn it back I know a lot of you are sick I just want to put that on Belt maybe Control it That's your power on I knew I was comfortable That's fine I was comfortable I swear Okay, thank you Thank you Thank you Thanks Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you 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I just my company just got acquired by Silicon Valley Tech company and we were doing work in the Middle East and Africa. And because of my work in the Middle East and Africa, I'm also a mentor to tech incubators in Kabul, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Tunisia. And so my question for you is a lot of the startups that I've seen and I've had mentor and you know, and I've also done one too is usually about the application of existing technology already. So tying it back to the peace tech summit, you know, we're using SMS, for example, to do some really creative and innovative things. But at the same time, there isn't that sort of that technological breakthrough, perhaps mixed dimensions from Jordan, which does 3D modeling and printing perhaps they're sort of on, you know, on the edge of that technology breakthrough. But I kind of want to hear your opinions on why that is. Why is it that a lot of these startups in conflict zones focus so much on the application of existing technology rather than creating something different in artificial, you know, intelligent life, et cetera? I'm actually going to add something to that one, but anyone would like to talk about, you know, innovation and does innovation in emerging markets mean the next Silicon Valley? It's always the next shiny new thing. Maybe it means something else in conflict zones or emerging markets. I mean, how should we be thinking about her question? I think when I look at our entrepreneurs, you also see like, for example, we have, of course, everyone knows Hint will bake up from Lebanon. So she came up with the device that you attach it to your swimming goggles that allows swimmers to track their progress in swimming. Nowhere in the West there was a device like that invented. Of course, you have the things for wearables on the go so on and so forth, but it does not apply for swimming. We brought her to the Consumer Electronics Show in 2013 and she got the CES Consumer Innovation Design Award. So this is an example of innovation from the Middle East that was recognized on the global scale with global applicability as well. Another one we brought from Croatia, Teddy the Guardian, is a teddy bear that actually has sensors incorporated that can also allow parents to take the different health signs from the kids, also featured in Time Magazine and so on and so forth. Of course, the most number of companies will be applications of already existing technologies, but there are also examples of innovative products that have global applicability. I had a conversation with a great entrepreneur named Sami Toukan who founded what was effectively the Yahoo of the Middle East and we talked about this subject. And he said, just put yourself in our market's mind for a second. Pretend it's 2005 and a young kid comes home to his parents and he says, you know, I'm dropping out of college because I'm going to build this new thing called a social network. And trust me, 600 million people are going to come to it and it's going to be very successful and maybe a billionaire. He said, you know, his parents would have thrown him out of the house. His friends would have mocked him. The teachers would have berated him. And so one of the things, you know, Ivana, that I've seen in this kind of a thing is twofold. One is that the flywheel of success, breathing success is incredibly powerful. Because of Sami Toukan, because Yahoo bought that company, there is going to be other people who follow on with existing technologies, but other people will experiment because so many of these regions, as you know so well, they're mobile countries first. They never knew landlines. So it's pretty clear that at some point there's going to be a mind-boggling innovation that's going to come from places that we never think about it overall. But sometimes I think we need to check our definition of innovation because for a society that never had a smartphone and has now 70% smartphone penetration, that is innovation. And from that, I think very, very powerful things will come with a flywheel that will be very, very powerful. It's a staging thing I think we've seen. I mean, again, think about what just happened in Alibaba. I mean, there's nothing new in Alibaba that I sure wish I'd invested in it five years ago. Thanks very much. My name is Andrew Reynolds. I work at the Department of State, your neighbor across the street. This is a peace tech summit in engineering durable peace by definition, by title. I wonder if we might ask the entrepreneurs. You know the internet and this mobile technology is not an inalienable right of man. It is an infrastructure and it's populated and it's built on the shoulders of giants to use old paraphrasing. You're talking about use and users and applications. I wonder if some of your entrepreneurs in your experience are also looking at off-grid technologies to provide electricity, especially in rural settings. Because we're in an urbanizing world where rural populations are moving quickly in the urban environments without infrastructure and similarly the rural environments do not have steady sources and reliable sources of electricity to harness the mobile technologies. So are your entrepreneurs in your experience also working in the engineering fields in electrical, civil and mechanical engineering fields to in fact harness such technologies so you might have a reliable off-grid system. Thanks. So yeah, I think I'll answer this question. Yes, the short answer is yes. And finally, when we started Plastics Labs, just like going through the application, we thought that we'd focus on mobile applications, social networks when we started. And the last cycle, we had companies doing recycling. So it emerged from social networks and mobile applications up to recycling. And now we are mainly innovation-driven accelerators, not just focusing on tech or technology. And answering a question about engineering, yes, one of our companies actually doing exactly the same. It's called Saanajee. It provides solar energy solutions for off-grid market. And they have developed a solar lantern actually for all off-grid communities in Egypt. And they are working with local NGOs to finance these lanterns for off-grid communities as well. And something else, for example, is not like engineering, but it's an e-commerce for handicrafts, which in Arabic means handicrafts. It's a website mainly to take, like you were mentioning the handicrafts and that woman. And basically, it takes all the handicrafts that these women create from all over the societies around Egypt and they put them online and they sell them all over the world, like through Aramics and other couriers. They can't send them anywhere. And they have, like, more than 70 items sales per day on the other way now. And also, for example, there's Khubz, which is... They are manufacturing the first bread-baking machine for the Egyptian bread. The Egyptian bread is called Baladi Bread, which is really difficult actually to do any innovation actually in it. And it has been the same process for, like, 7,000 years or something. And basically, they have examined the whole process and they've decided that we'll create a machine that will take, like, the flour from, like, as an input and just produces, like, the bread. And they're almost there. They are almost done with the prototype and they have, like, 5 or 6 pre-orders now for big bakers in Egypt. And this is one of the biggest problems that we have, for example. We're going to add over here. Yes. I was thinking about the same example with the solar-based lantern. The second one is a company that was not just initially, but Promethean Power. MIT originated. Basically, they are able to provide solar-based refrigeration that helps with the transportation of food. A lot of the food, and they are doing the piloting in India, a lot of the food gets bad, perishable food during the transportation. So basically, they found a way to design something that allows them to capture solar energy so that they preserve the food in India. And the second one is, together with the U.S. State Department, we'll be organizing next week, actually, a boot camp in Morocco focused on green and renewable technologies where we'll have entrepreneurs from Morocco and from Tunisia. So I'll be able to give more examples by email. Desalination, fresh food, all these kinds of things I've seen a lot too. And also, I mean, it's so interesting how we think about innovation and technology. There's a guy I got to know pretty well who runs one of the largest mobile providers in Africa who discovered that a couple of years ago, because of the distance with which they put cell towers, they, of course, have to have their own independent energy source. And what they found out is they had much more energy than they could ever use. And also, a guy from the town would show up and say, can I take some of that? And they would sell some of it to him. And all of a sudden their town had electricity, whether it was in lanterns, where actually most of his business was charging mobile phones. So it's just amazing, amazing where we live in. So another example of reviewing the recent application from Southern Central Asia, is the backpack to actually capture energy to recharge your mobile phone from Bangladesh. Just by walking around with it effectively or solar. You leave it there in the sun, it charges, and then you plug your mobile phone into the solar base, but also you can have it while you travel on your back. Yeah, I was actually just reading an article recently about how there are so many incubators popping up that in Palestine slash Israel, there aren't as many for agribusiness incubators in the West Bank. And actually, I wanted to write to the author of that article, because my friend who just finished her MBA here in the US is going back there, leaving a cushy job to go back there and to start one of the first agribusiness incubators in the West Bank. So I think these things are always, you know, asked a couple weeks later, there's going to be something emerging. I'll keep you here for two hours and there's so many amazing things that are coming and folks need to be fed. But I want to ask each of you, if I could, a wrap-up question, which I think is going to be very important for the audience. I mean, the way you talk about this, it seems such a raging no-brainer and opportunity. And yet, governments and many institutions seem not to absorb it. And you're dealing here with an audience who I think by definition does absorb it and understand it and are thinking about it in very interesting ways. Just express why do you think folks are having such trouble understanding this opportunity? And as importantly, if everyone here could walk away with one thing they're going to remember you by about what they can take back into their perspectives to be more helpful to this going forward, what would you have them understand? I think one is a question of packaging and marketing, whatever has been done so far. There are already very specific examples of how this has worked both with like sort of global, local and regional programs. So capturing a way to go, a different approach to this problem. I think it's a very critical point. Second, the first one will inform the second one. I think one of the areas that needs a lot of improvement is when designing the blueprint for the foreign aid development programs. Many of the programs that I saw, they're not all the time in sync with the needs, in the way they are designed. Maybe they are in sync at a very broad level. But what is needed is actually a much more, an approach that understands what it takes to actually translate those programs into very practical tools or vehicles or programs that will help the entrepreneurs on the ground. And that is a very critical point, because if you don't get the blueprint right, that will tend to, you will replicate the sort of incomplete or the wrong blueprint and what the way you can develop a better blueprint by actually partnering with people on the ground that have a very in-depth understanding of what is needed and also talking to the entrepreneurs and to the people who are actually the beneficiary of those programs. And I think there's a lot of pressure right now on the governments here as well but around the world as well to come up with new solutions and also finding mechanisms for the entrepreneurs that already took their venture to a certain level. Yeah, speaking of the government, especially like the ones in the Middle East, I'm sure they're basically busy with many other things now. So like they are not, yeah, especially in Egypt for example, like we have many problems for the government to solve. Regardless, they're still trying to do something in the space for entrepreneurship and technology and they're very active in it. They have been active actually even before the evolution with different programs. But the thing is like when we start Flatsix Labs, I remember one of the founders of Flatsix Labs, he was talking to the telecommunications minister in Egypt and like explaining the model of Flatsix Labs to him and he was really excited about this thing and he told him, you are very lucky because you can't fail. You can go like as a private sector, you can't just go and have any startup or entrepreneur and they can't fail and you are fine with it. I can't fail. I can't get any startup to join any of my programs as a government and fail. This would be something really bad for us as a government. And from that actually stemmed the whole idea of our support to the entrepreneurs. Our first tagline of Flatsix Labs was entrepreneurship through natural selection. So we do believe in natural selection. We do believe that we just give the space for these entrepreneurs just like to innovate, grow and or even fail. And we never say that we are responsible for their success or failure because it's totally up to them if they have succeeded. This is mainly because they want to succeed. They have failed because they have failed and they weren't lucky with their venture. So this is mainly how we think about the whole how we run Flatsix Labs and how we deal with the government. We'd love extra support for sure from different governments in the region and our partners actually with the government in the UAE for example and they do support startups in different ways. But still it's mainly a private sector job to start these kinds of programs and engage the entrepreneurs, grow these programs and create more success stories. Yeah, I think wrapping it up what you two said it was spot on and for US government or international organizations being aware of the political and economic context in which these entrepreneurs work whether that's an economic sector that's largely in the hands of state or elitist control or the political context, whatever that may be. And then also encouraging education through not just rememberization but very much critical thinking hands on these kinds of programs that are being supported now across the region but continuing to do that and then on the ground increasing cooperation between institutions and then others working in business development, entrepreneurship and education. There's a remarkable Egyptian woman who I met who's an expert in corporate social responsibility in Egypt named Dina Sharif and she's no consultant, many of you know her. She said something to me when I was reporting that blew me away it seemed so simple at one level and I'd never had it framed this way and she said top-down institutions mean well, they really do for the most part but top-down institutions think about poverty and conflict and people in those circumstances as problems to be solved. We here in Washington, we here in whatever capital will fix your problem from here. The top-down world, the world that we're going to views people as assets not problems but assets and I think we are opening into an era because of tools and technology of unprecedented unleashing of individuals on the ground as you pointed out Ovi who want to solve their own problems because if nothing else they have the greatest stake and the outcome as well as the greatest knowledge and maybe that would be one of the most powerful things that we could think about in a very different mindset. You guys are unbelievable it's been an honor to be with you and thank you all for listening. Wow, thank you to Chris Schroeder, author of Startup Rising. He did this, Chris did this because this is his passion and so let's give him a round of applause. And what a panel to be putting together of incredible entrepreneurs. You guys are amazing and it is so clear that good ideas are just that, just good ideas without the entrepreneurs that help us realize them. So thank you very much. All right, we're going to break for lunch. Please join us for lunch out there. Before we go let me just tell you the plans we've got for the rest of the day very quickly because it rocks. What's coming up rocks. We've got a lunchtime speech by Secretary Al Shaffer from the Department of Defense and he is a key player in that part of DoD where technology really lives. AT&L, the research and engineering division that's given us DARPA. So that should be awesome. Then we have what can only be described as an extraordinary colloquy between two extraordinary people. Vinsurf, you know as founder of the internet and one of those who helped to create it. Along with Jane Hall-Loot who has worn two hats both at the Homeland Security as an undersecretary and at the UN as well. So that's an extraordinary colloquy between two people who are really talents, huge talents in this town. After that I will talk to you about the P-Stack Lab. I'll just kind of bring us home. So much of what we've heard all day ties together in what we're trying to do in the P-Stack Lab. I'll bring us home with that after that colloquy. So look forward to having you all back here but now let's join us for lunch in the outside here. Ladies and gentlemen, we actually have bento boxes underneath the archways here. So if you can help yourself to a lunch and join the table. Thank you. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Can you hear me all the way in the back here? Yes, you can. All right, I got some thumbs up here. Very good. Please continue to eat. You don't even have to turn your chairs around until the speaker comes. But eat while you can here. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the acting executive vice president here at the Institute of Peace and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this building, this summit. We were just talking about both the diversity and the average age in this room which is an order of magnitude below the Pentagon which we were talking about. So welcome to the Institute. We're glad to be here. This Institute is federally funded. It's nonpartisan. We are committed to the prevention, mitigation and resolution of violent disputes around the world. This is why we're here. And you are here to help us with that mission and we really appreciate your contribution. The other appreciation I want to give to offer his contribution is Assistant Secretary Alan Schaefer who is going to speak to you as your luncheon speaker and it's great to have him come across the river. He is the head of the department of research and engineering in the Pentagon's division of acquisitions, technology and logistics. You all know as AT&L. A close collaborator here with us at the Institute of Peace. On matters of technology and peace building, AT&L is a key part of DOD to join us for this Peace Tech Summit, for your Peace Tech Summit. It's a great collaboration. Not only does it contain DARPA that everybody is very familiar with, the internet and these kinds of things that we have represented around this table and in this room, but AT&L continues to be the technology hub, the supporter and partner for allied governments and militaries, for private companies, for non-governmental organizations and a host of other beneficiaries for conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance. AT&L gets to our mission. In short, AT&L is an originator and purveyor of Peace Tech in its own right. Assistant Secretary Alan Schaefer has devoted his career to making science and technology a key pillar of national defense, both in his current role and in the Air Force before that. Today's summit grows out of a similar commitment through a unique cross-discipline partnership with the National Academy of Engineering as represented by the Roundtable on Technology, Science and Peace Building. That Roundtable convenes government, businesses, NGOs and others to promote more strategic applications of technology to conflict prevention. And again, you can see the connection, the theme here. AT&L has been a strong supporter and participant in the work of that Roundtable and for that we are particularly grateful for the visionary leadership of Deputy Assistant Secretary Earl Wyatt and his colleague, Elmer Roman. So thank you both very much for all your work. I'm glad you could come across as well. AT&L has also supported efforts to expand the data sharing capabilities of the Peace Building field through the open-situation room exchange. A key component of the Peace Tech lab that Sheldon Hill-Farbe is going to talk to you about later on this afternoon. Every day we see the impact that technology has and innovation has on conflict. Good and bad help mitigate conflict but also help drive conflict. So this conference today is a great opportunity to explore that. We need the strategic focus on innovation, cross-discipline collaboration and entrepreneurship that this summit is highlighting. So with that, I'm very pleased to welcome a strong collaborator, Assistant Secretary Alan Shaker. Thank you. Good afternoon. Probably a little strange for you all to have someone from the Pentagon come over and talk about the Institute for Peace. I am really happy to be here today and I want to start out by saying as the ambassador said 38 years I've been around the Department of Defense. Nobody detests armed conflict as much as the professional military man or woman. We bear the burden of it, we see the impact of it. So it is a very, very strong commitment and Earl why don't you go ahead and raise your hand and Elmer. So we have Deputy Assistant Secretary Earl Wyatt and his deputy for Humanitarian Assistance Disaster Relief Operations Elmer Roman. These two people are pushing on the department to get involved more deeply with the Institute for Peace. So I'm really particularly pleased to be here this afternoon to talk to you a little bit about how we see the role of science and technology but I was sitting over here at the table and I got a summary and a recap of this morning and it sounds fascinating some of the things that you're doing, uses of commercial technology to go ahead and spread out information to start to get to some of the underlying causes of conflict. Today the Academy and the Institute have asked me to provide kind of our perception of where we are and it's a particularly interesting time right now in the department. So you here are talking today about peace and yet we have very, very serious armed conflict going on around the world right now. You're all, we're all aware of Afghanistan, we're all aware of ISIS and ISIL and Ukraine and there's conflict in Thailand, there's conflict in South Sudan and all of these are troublesome to the Department of Defense and they're troublesome to the nation. So how do we start to relieve some of these? We see growing tensions through the conflicts of transnational criminal organizations with terrorists and how those things work back and forth leading to additional armed conflict. We're really looking at how do we start to employ technology. What makes it particularly interesting right now is in addition to all the backdrop of terrorist operations and that type of thing, we're now starting to see some other nations advance their military capabilities very, very rapidly and very quickly. And very advanced high-end military capabilities. Coming out of a period where the United States had the dominant military capability worldwide for about a 35-year period. I think that's a good thing because of the things that the United States tries to stand for. But there are other nations now that are coming on board with very advanced high-end weapons systems. That poses a challenge because that increases the chance of conflict. We have to pay attention to where the department is going. About two years ago the Department of Defense published a new defense strategy and it was a remarkable document. It's about 12 to 15 pages long. It was written by then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta with Chairman Dempsey Under Secretary for Policy Jim Miller and a few other people over the holiday break season the end of December early January. They wrote it in about two weeks. And unlike most things in D.C. where you go into extensive staffing and bureaucracy waters down the product this did not have that. It was written by the secretary and the chairman. They wrote it together. It was their product. I very much encourage people to go take a look at it because it really is a blueprint for a wonderful world where we're trying to bring in peace. If you look at it, it does not look like a military document. It looks like a stability document. And there are about four, five key principles. I'll talk about four of them. First, the military of the future will be much smaller, agile, leaner and capable of response. And that response can take the form of humanitarian assistance, disaster relief more so than it can take the position of armed conflict. Second principle the DOD is working on building partnerships around the world and strengthening our key alliances and partnerships. And I'll talk about that a little bit with our international science and technology program. But partnership and partnering is the key word. And when you have partnerships and partnering you reduce the chance of armed conflict, I contend. We're rebalancing our global posture and looking at emphasizing the Asia-Pacific region. Why are we doing that? Asia-Pacific region is the region now that's economically driving the world. I was in Singapore earlier this year I always tell this story because it's fascinating to me. There are more shipping containers that go through the port of Singapore each year than go through all the ports in the United States. Think about the economic power that's going through the Asian region and why it's so incredibly important to have a presence there for stability. And finally, the fourth bullet was protect and prioritize key investments in science and technology to develop new capabilities. And I'll talk about some of the capabilities we've developed in areas that may be a surprise to some of you. So if you look at that we're starting to see a shift in momentum for the Department of Defense to much smaller operations things that can deploy things that can go in and de-escalate situations. And we're looking at packages to de-escalate armed conflict and de-escalate conflict before it happens. I'd like to go ahead and focus on three or four initiatives that are pertinent to this conference. The first is something we call the Minerva Initiative Second, International S&T and then third, some of the support we're doing through Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Roman to support the United Nations. So Minerva, how many folks out here have heard of the Minerva program? Excellent. One of you want to come up and talk about it? We have currently funded, Minerva is a fairly small program but it is the Department's outreach to primarily the sociologist anthropologist community to start to understand the base roots of armed conflict and violence. Minerva is looking at things as disparate as large data sets to look for signals early in the early in like the Arab Spring to try to pick out the precursors. We're looking for large data sets to understand some of the flow of money from transnational criminal organizations and terrorist organizations and there's an amazing correlation between the transnational criminal organizations and the transnational terrorist organizations and they feed off of each other and that continues to perpetuate violence. Within the Minerva project we're looking at mapping terrorist organizations. How do you understand the spread and what incentivizes terrorist organizations? If you start to understand some of the base root causes of some of these activities then you can start to go ahead and treat the symptom rather than the event and that's really the whole point of Minerva. How do you treat the symptom? We're also looking at things through the Santa Fe Institute in Minerva of studying the root cause of energy and environmental disruption as a precursor to violence and armed conflict. How are things like climate change and the battle for resources going to affect us in the future? And how do we think about that as a department of alleviating some of those problems? And as a nation and really it becomes a national problem. But the future battle over the rare resources of water and that type of thing caused by climate change will fundamentally increase in some regions the potential for violence. So what do we do about that? How do we think about that? And some of the solutions, and I'll talk about some of Mr. Roman's programs later, but some of the solutions for dealing with climate change are very similar to dealing with humanitarian assistance. Can you create potable drinking water out of non-potable drinking water or any other type of liquid? And yes, in fact you can. Elmer's fielded systems that are have deployed in such places as Haiti in Japan after the tsunami that creates fresh drinking water locally. That's a huge deal. That's a huge deal for preventing and de-escalating conflict. So I think that as we look forward and go forward initiatives like the Minerva initiative where we're trying to understand at the base root the sociological causes of armed conflict violence, terrorism will become very important to the Department of Defense. Okay, international science and technology. The Department of Defense currently has university grants with researchers in 57 nations. Think about that. Our DOD is a global enterprise for funding research and development and research in universities. We have research grants in countries such as Ethiopia, Vietnam, China, and Jordan, just to name four. Those are not places you would normally think of the DOD operating. But we believe very strongly that one of the best ways to reduce the potential for armed conflict is through understanding, through mutual understanding. We have a very strong global S&T outreach program because science and technology is one of the easiest areas for our government to interoperate. We can go in and fund research grants through the Office of Naval Research through the Air Force Research Laboratory and start to build some of those relationships at the science level. 57 nations. That's a lot of grants and it's very important to our future. But in addition, we have a series of strong bilateral and multilateral engagements around the world. We have long-standing existing relationships with Singapore, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. But now we're growing our international relations, science and technology cooperation with countries like India. The department recently announced the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative to go ahead and work with the Indian government in both weapons capabilities and science and technology. Why are we so interested in India? Well, I was there recently and President Modi, who's going to be in town next week, has a real, real challenge. He's got to create a million jobs a month for the foreseeable future. If we don't, if he is not successful in creating that level of jobs coming up, you will have tremendous increase in unemployment, especially among the young people, and you all know what that does to the probability of violence and armed conflict. There's already growing violence in India. There's already growing disputes. A million jobs a month. How would you like to be President Modi? That is a real issue. One of the great technology initiatives started by Secretary Hagel was to help bring in stability into India by helping create technologies and create opportunities and jobs. And that is a way of getting at some of the root causes of armed conflict. Think about it, a million jobs a month. The final area I'd like to talk about are some of the types of technologies we have developed and deployed. Now I'm making this fairly short because I really want to open it up to questions. I want questions or comments that you may have. But again, under Mr. Roman, he has developed a series of, and they're called joint capability technology demonstration programs to increase deployable packages for information technology. So the rapid open geospatial user enterprise, don't you love these names? I could, honest to God, they put words together so you get something like the Rogue JCTD. What Rogue is is a deployable package that will go out with ISR assets, unmanned aerial vehicles with communications capabilities with power and energy capabilities so that when you have some type of natural disaster, we have a deployable package that will allow the humanitarian assistance disaster relief people on the ground to have the best possible information awareness. Where are their problems? Where are their opportunities? How can we map the area for greater numbers of helicopter landings and airplane landings to bring in supplies? That's not always a given after a disaster, after an earthquake. The more situational awareness you can give to the people who are in charge on the ground the more quickly you can return operations and life to as near to normal as you can. That is a big deal. Part of the JCTD and this is another one of these, I got to read the names because you can't make this stuff up. Pre-positioned expeditionary assistance kits. The peak JCTD. There's nothing you can say about it. How many folks here from Washington? You all know this already. The first trick in getting a program sold has come up with a catchy acronym. But peak actually goes in with small deployable water generators and power generators again to be able to bring those necessary elements for normal life where it's needed, when it's needed. And then finally Elmer's field at a number of small communication systems that allow you to allow the responders to be able to communicate and understand what the situation is on the ground. DARPA has developed and fielded a number of technologies mostly in the communications area. How do we apply small cellular towers to restore communications locally? How do we understand what the precursors are to armed conflict? So are there by going through large data sets can we identify precursor events to increases in violence and conflict? So finally I'd like to close with what I think is one of the more exciting things that we're doing. And it again involves Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Roman and his support to UN peacekeeping operations. So these guys are the people in the department working with policy but these guys are the folks who bring in the material acquisition solutions and capabilities to support the UN when the UN is deploying. So the UN is deploying some force to South Sudan. Oh, Central Africa Republic I'm sorry. Elmer went out and worked with the army to provide deployable and deployable conditions so that we can actually go in and stabilize the situation create almost a mini village. It's terrible. It's a refugee village but it's still much safer than what the people are involved in anyways. So for that guys I got to say my hats off to you working the Department of Defense working with the UN to provide equipment is where we're heading for the future and that is going to be increasingly where the Department of Defense will be. So with that, I'm looking at the clock I have about another 10 minutes so I'd really like to say thank you to you all for what you're doing here today thank you for working with the department even if you don't know you're doing it to create stability and to minimize armed conflict around the world because as a career military guy I started off by saying this no one detests armed conflict more than a military professional help us help us help the next generation so we don't have to deploy young men and women around the world to places with armed conflict and violence questions? Sir, the disaster packages that you outlined here are they available to USAID and other agencies and is there an outreach effort to train people up on how to use these? So, are they on the GSA schedule yet? Yes. So the short answer is yes they're on the GSA schedule we have other ways to get it but again Elmer stand up so Elmer's the program manager who did this, he'll be here this afternoon talk to Elmer and find out what's the right way to do it and you know we make our stuff available for disaster relief operations around the world we're certainly available to USAID we'll just go around the room yes ma'am? Does your international research fund both US and overseas scientists together from universities in the US? So the answer yes, so the answer is it depends yes and the reason I'm giving you the qualifier yes we do do stuff with both collaborative US and overseas researchers if it's a straight single investigator grant obviously the answer is no but we have all kinds of different basic science and basic research programs that involve multiple universities so yeah. Do you encourage that sort of international collaboration? Yes, absolutely so the world is getting smaller, you know Thomas Frieden kind of had it right the more that we work together and the more we understand each other the better chance for starting to relieve some of the tensions we always want to work with the researchers in other countries Well, American science is great soft power It is, absolutely right Yeah, I'm Cole Cartledge I'm an attorney but also a retired military myself and thank you for your service and your talk I was with the 352 civil affairs command not far from here international legal officer I'm curious about how some of what you're talking about might be pushed forward and worked with with the civil affairs community because they really do have a worldwide mission for a lot of these similar things I don't think I have a good answer for you and the reason I don't have a good answer for you is I'm not aware of what the impediments are I don't think that there are any legal maybe with the exception of some of the ITAR restrictions but we tend not to get into those types of things for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance I think we just push on the envelope and find out where the boundary is I do not know the answer to the question guys, do you know the civil affairs community at this stage we are in that process of looking at what the civil affairs side of the house is looking at terms of capabilities working through the Department of State bringing together the ideas and identifying a way forward so there's a dialogue already started Dr. Lee Schwartz Department of State Geographer and some of the capabilities Mr. Schaefer discussed are being considered for those kind of efforts and thank you Elmer and I will say this because I feel compelled to say it every time I go out and talk it's too easy to get a bureaucratic no so people don't try to push the envelope push as hard as you can go as hard as you can as far as you can and make people come up with no but make people come up with no that is not on the statute, not opinion yes sir Regarding your outreach to the humanitarian community and disaster response, do you have a media strategy or an outreach strategy to deal with actors who may be skeptical or receiving aid or help from the Department of Defense? Could you repeat the question there's a little bit of echo? Certainly. Regarding your outreach to the humanitarian community who might be initially skeptical of receiving aid from the Department of Defense? So I think the answer is yes, but the answer is yes because we work very closely with our State Department and our overseas embassies. We obviously don't go to any country until the Department of State says we're welcome. So we work with the Department of State and our deployed, forward deployed ambassadors and their teams to get the, you know, at the end of the day, if a country says no, we don't go. But most people don't say no when the U.S. is coming in offering to provide assistance. Yes, sir? Lloyd Solace, University of Maryland. You made mention of Singapore as one of the busiest ceilings in the whole world and considering the rise of China as a potential superpower in the future, is there any possibility that a U.S. military base will revive in the Philippines or any Southeast Asian country for that matter, be it naval base or air base? Thank you. I think we're looking at our options right now for forward basing. And you mentioned China. China has remilitarized incredibly rapidly. But right now, so is Japan. And we have North Korea and South Korea. So we look at the Asia Pacific region, and although there's no conflict there now, there are a number of potential flashpoints. So we're working through what's the best response intergovernmental for the United States between state aid, Department of Defense. What's our best footing for relieving some of the conflict and some of the tension? And some of the tensions there. I've spent a little bit of time in Asia recently. Some of the longstanding tensions between those nations are very, very deep. And, you know, I worry about unintended consequences spilling over into armed conflict. I think the U.S. presence there is a stabilizing influence. And I think that we will have an increasing presence. That's it. One more question? Okay. Well, we do have one more question. Please, sir. My name is Franklin. I actually came from Nigeria, you know, to witness what is going on here today. And I'm sincerely happy. And I would just like to ask one question. Even though most of the issues you have discussed here today seem to have answered my question, but I still would like to put the question forward. The issue of the 200 Chibor girls that have been held hostage in Nigeria, I would like to know, because I'm really, really concerned, if there's anything going on between U.S. Department of Defense or USIP in that regard, and if there's nothing going on, is there any way Nigeria can collaborate with America in that regard? Thank you. So that's a very good question. One thing I will not and cannot get into is anything we're doing currently, operationally. This is something we don't talk about. But I will say stability and the Department of Defense and the U.S. is taking the actions of Boko Haram very, very seriously. And that's all I'm going to say. But yes, it's a serious, serious threat and it's something we are very worried about. Okay? And that, I think that was it. By the way, thank you, folks, for what you're doing. And it is great to come out here and see a young crowd. Enjoy the rest of your lunch, but we will reconvene to start promptly at two o'clock the colloquy between Jane Hall-Loot and Vinsurf. So make sure you're in there for that. You don't want to miss it. All right, let's try to keep on schedule here. Welcome back from lunch. It is just such an honor to have this podium so I can introduce Melanie Greenberg, the President and CEO of the Alliance for Peaceburg. Yeah, you can clap. I don't know anyone who has been more selfless or more effective at promoting the professionalism and the growth of this still young field of conflict resolution. I know that someday, Melanie, Harvard Business School is going to be doing a case study of your leadership here. And I am not exaggerating that at all. So with that, let me turn it over to Melanie who's going to take us through the day. Thank you. And Sheldon, I'll get to embarrass you when I introduce you after this panel. I'm Melanie Greenberg, President, as Sheldon said, of the Alliance for Peacebuilding and network of 85 peacebuilding organizations working in 153 countries around the world. I'm also very honored to be the Co-Chair of the Steering Committee with Bernard Amaday of today's Peace Tech Summit and also Co-Chair of the Data Sharing Working Group of the Roundtable. And I feel so passionately about the connections between peacebuilding and technology and the work that Sheldon has done. Because peace, as you know, is more than just the absence of war. And peacebuilding is more than just people coming around a peace table and shaking hands. And what struck me so much this morning was that we talked about peace in many different contexts. And actually sometimes peace wasn't even mentioned. We were talking about agriculture, environment, entrepreneurship. But in a highly networked world, this is where peace is happening. The real excitement of the field is how to bridge peace and these other sectors, all of which we know come together to create societies that are resilient enough to resolve conflict, which is always with us, through consensus building, through problem solving, rather than through deadly violence. And technology is crucial for all of that. I was in Togo recently meeting with young peace builders who self-identify as peace builders. But in fact, what they do is work on water issues at the village level, at education, on women's empowerment, but they see that work as peace. And what's equally extraordinary is that they were using a lot of the technology that we talked about this morning, from SMS and cell phones to mapping to using Google to find new ways of thinking about their work. But for them, they don't see it as something radical. For them, it's like picking up a fork or using a shovel. The tools are there and they use them. And that's very relevant for this panel, which has a very interesting title of peace building meets technology, imagination, and necessity. But in fact, all of those are coming together in this generation that are using tools. They're highly imaginative, yet they're working out of the most dire necessity of how to end deadly violence in their own societies, whether from the bottom up or from the top down. So it is my great pleasure to introduce this panel, which has great personal meaning for me, as well as substantive meaning. The first, Robert Versigliano, who will be moderating. I've known Rob for at least 20 years. Rob shares the Alliance for Peace Building Board, was one of the founders of the Alliance for Peace Building, and is one of the great builders in our field. When he ran conflict management group at Harvard, a spin-off of Harvard's negotiation program, he merged that with Mercy Corps, the large development organization. And it was one of the first mergers that brought peace building and conflict resolution together with development, which has now become really the paradigm for the field. You can't have one without the other. As I mentioned, he founded the Alliance for Peace Building. He is now head of a revolutionary program at the University of Wisconsin that brings hard scientists, social scientists, students together to study sustainable peace building. And he has a wonderful book on the subject called Making Peace Last. So, Rob, thank you very much for moderating this panel. Jane Hall Lude has been one of my great heroes throughout my career. We actually met at Stanford more than 25 years ago when I was... Less than 25. Less less, much less, time work. Well, Jane was blazing through her PhD before going on to work on war termination with Norman Schwarzkopf. I got to know her through my husband Lawrence, who was a political science graduate student at the same time. And Jane would just start a conversation by saying, I'm just a simple soldier. And he knew that what came out of her mouth next was going to be the most profound thing that would change the whole scope of the conversation. That's very nice. I then worked with Jane at the Carnegie Commission for Preventing Deadly Conflict, where again, with David Hamburg, reshaped the whole idea of how our field thinks about conflict prevention, realizing it's not just process, but also structure. At the UN Foundation, she helped change the thinking of how we integrate peace building into programs with women, programs and innovation. And then at the United Nations itself as running their peacekeeping... As being number two with their peace building... Peacekeeping Operations Unit. And then Assistant Secretary for Peace Building. And finally, the Department of Homeland Security. I always felt comfortable knowing that Jane, in the situation that was looking at the direst consequences for our country, at the worst of the worst of potential terrorist attacks, was always bringing peace building values to that job. So I slept well at night knowing that you were there. And finally, Vint Cerf. I feel, Vint, and we just met, like introducing Mr. Gutenberg at a printing convention, or the Wright Brothers at an aviation convention. It was very hard for me to wrap my mind around how do we talk about one of the fathers of the internet. And it occurred to me last night as I was at my son's last back to school night, where the chemistry teacher, the math teacher, both said, we've thrown out textbooks. We like to go on the internet and find problems that are going to excite the kids. We just don't do teaching the same way anymore. To these peace builders in Togo who are using the internet in ways that would have been unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. So I hope that you feel in this discussion today and meeting members of the peace building community how grateful we are for all you have done academically in your work at Google in shaping this technology that is really defining our age. So with that, thank you, and I'll look forward to the discussion. I've already made one critical decision here, which is I, Vint handed me his card and it says, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. And I thought, well, as chair of the Alliance for Peace Building, I can make the unilateral decision to change Melanie's title from President and CEO to Chief Peace Building Evangelist. So I wanted to let you know the sort of choreography of today's panel will be opening statements by Vint and Jane and then some discussion amongst the three of us. And then we'll open it up to questions from folks here in the auditorium, but also people online. And before I turn it over, I wanted to just give one sort of observation that hit me as we went through the morning and the various panels that we had. And it has to do with what's up on the screen here and a possible incompatibility, which is in the technology world. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. And I'm getting at least right is you hear about speed all the time. It's like how fast can we get to market? We want to fail fast. We want to aggregate information, create and get it out to as many people as fast as we can, rapid prototyping. And then in the peace building world, people may be thinking in sort of longer time frames. So the word durable up there, which maybe is purposely shaded a little bit for that reason, is there a conflict? And to what degree is there between just if we're trying to talk about how to get these worlds together and mutually empowering each other? Is there some fundamental incompatibility between how we think and the cycles at which we work? And what are the opportunities and the promise that you all see? So I'm hoping we'll cover some of that territory over the course of our discussion. But maybe if we start with just your opening thoughts when you think about technology and peace building and the relationship between them. Did we flip a coin earlier? I don't know if we... Yeah, she didn't. You get to go first. Are you sure? Did you flip a coin? In my mind. Yeah, I don't. Jane, one. We should take you to Las Vegas. But well, first of all, it's a special honor to appear on the stage with these two, especially with Jane. Let me tell you about Jane. This is a person who knows why she has opinions and it's not common in the administration to have somebody who has an opinion and then can explain why she has that opinion and where it came from. So I have a lot of respect for that. Second, with regard to your conundrum, let me explain that making things happen sometimes takes a lot of time even in the engineering world. Despite all of this, you know, internet time and rush to this, that, and the other, when Bob Khan and I wrote the first spec for internet, it was 1974. We didn't get to turn it on into operational form until 1983. It took nine years. The interplanetary internet's taken 15 years and it's now finally functioning, but some of these things just take time. Let me start out by observing that you can't solve these kinds of problems, peace building, peacemaking, creation of peace and the conditions under which peace can be maintained or even created without understanding what the origins of conflict are. And sometimes it has to do with resources. Sometimes it has to do with ideology. Sometimes it's as simple as you're in charge and I'm not and I don't like that. That's a tough one because there's not necessarily a good argument that lets you reverse that view that I should stay in charge and we see this all the time. So that's one point. Understanding the origins of conflict is essential to figuring out if there's a way to diffuse the conflict. The second thing is that we are faced with the politics of poverty versus the politics of plenty. And in my world, trying to create plenty to avoid the politics of poverty or the stress between abundance and scarcity, that's a big deal. Trying to create abundance where it isn't is really important. And finally, I think Jane, you and I should try in the course of this conversation to help these people understand the difference between safety and security because we've had a lot of discussion about the difference between those two terms. And I thought you articulated it extremely well in your time as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, recognizing that the title of the organization was almost wrong given what it was you were charged to do. So I'm going to stop there and hand over to my distinguished colleague. So thanks, Vint. It's also a special pleasure for me not only to be at USIP. My Dr. Father Alexander George was a fellow here for several years. And Melanie is not only one of the kindest people on earth, one of the smartest people I know, has been a pioneer. I love your suggestion, Rob. You are Chief Peacebuilding Evangelist. I'm going to stake out what may prove to be some controversial ground on two fronts. I think we are witnessing the intersection of two very powerful trends that is probably changing the role of government in our lives. And that intersection, and that because the role of government in our lives will be changing, how we approach the prospects for peaceful coexistence, that there are implications for that. So the two trends, one is a trend of growth and one is a trend of decay. The trend of growth is what I call the global cyber awakening, which is the social consequences of the penetration of the Internet. It's not the same thing. It's the social consequences of the penetration of the Internet. In 1996, 15 or 16 million of us were online. Today, 3 billion. That's pretty substantial growth. The big money is on the O3B, the other 3 billion. It will not take them 20 years to get online the way it took the first half of the world. We are connected to each other and to ideas and to possibilities and to power in ways we were never before. And when I say we, I mean we the people. It's extraordinary, this explosion of awareness of other and of empowerment. We like it and we want more. And it's just a massively accelerating, powerful trend, and I call it the global cyber awakening. And this for a population in the world that is already healthier, wealthier, more mobile, more educated than it ever before in history, notwithstanding the problems we have. This is enormous individual empowerment on a scale I don't think we have ever seen. And it's smashing into a trend of decay, which is the near total collapse of trust in public sector institutions and its global. People everywhere around the world are angry at their institutions. They don't like banks, they don't like business, they don't like the media, they don't like markets. Many of them don't like their governments and they're angry about it. There's a great deal of anger, whether it's manifest in the Occupy movement, demonstrations in Rio, in Istanbul, anywhere you like around the world. This is broad based social anger and it's targeting the public institutions of our lives, about which and in which we have lost faith. So we have an enormous trend of growth in the global cyber awakening and an enormous trend of decay in the near total collapse of trust in public sector institutions. And I think there's going to be consequences for the role of government in our lives. So I spent a lot of time these days talking about cyber security. I tell people there are only three interesting questions when it comes to cyber security. I'm not a technologist, that's why there are only three. Question number one is how do we architect systems we can trust from components we can't? Question number two, how do we maintain the integrity of our information and our identities in an open internet? And question number three is what will the role of government be in all of this? Now why is this an interesting question? Because Vint mentioned security. Governments are used to being the dominant players. In fact, they're used to being the monopolists in the security space. We assign security to governments. We want safe streets. Governments, you run the police. We want a safe country. Governments, you run the military. So governments are used to being the monopolists in this space and they are in physical space, but they're not in cyberspace. And they're not because governments don't have the power that matters. They're the dominant players in security and physical space because they have the power to protect us, but it's the power to connect us that constitutes power in cyberspace and governments are just market participants here. So I think in the backdrop of the very important, I think, and interesting things that Vint laid out on the table, a little bit of role reversal here in terms of character of conflict, I think this is a strategic and tectonic shift in the way geography matters, in the way geopolitics matters. This is really interesting. Government had a very important role to play in creating the connectedness that we now both enjoy and fear. So government did have a role to play, but James Wright, it has now gone well beyond government. The Internet is owned and operated 95 or 99% by the private sector. So this is a correct observation. The other thing that's very scary about this kind of technology is that it is apolitical to first order and therefore can be used for a bunch of different reasons, including really harmful ones. And we're seeing the power of that connectivity and communications in some of the actions by ISIS in YouTube and online videos, which are horrendous and scary. And they hit us as if they were next door because of this lack of distance. The network makes us feel like everything is happening in our own backyard, which creates a great deal of angst for a lot of people, I think. ISIS has gotten strong because people are coming from everywhere. They will go anywhere because they feel as though they belong nowhere. So what is the role of government in solving this problem? So let me ask you to step back even from that and maybe look in the vein of trying to plumb the depths of the promise. Jane, when you were talking about the nature and the order of the change and that growth phase, it strikes me that we talk a lot about as technology is helping us do things that we do marginally better, like we're faster in knowing about movements of refugees, we're faster in knowing about activities of armed groups or whatever it is. So there's that potential for technology to make a very significant contribution to doing the stuff we know. Right now we know what we need to do but do it better versus the capacity, our capacity to kind of reimagine just what the task is and what the promise is. So is the limiting factor just the ability of the technology, the state of the technology, or is it more of our ability, our human ability to sort of fundamentally rethink how we should be organizing ourselves? Because as you both were talking about, if the nature of government is fundamentally changing, that's a really profound opportunity to reimagine how we relate and how we organize ourselves. So how do you see that challenge? You suppose this is a failure of imagination? A failure of imagination. I would say it depends on how you narrate the problem. I mean to me the value proposition of government is to establish threshold conditions for security, well-being, and justice. That's just sort of the going in proposition. Don't you love it the way that just roars right out? Well, but what we see now is how many people can find a measure of security or answer to their concerns about security by going online? I mean nobody interacts with their government unless they have to. Unless they have to. It's like the Department of Motor Vehicles. Virginia's got a great DMV, I'm just here to say. So let's put the problem at the center. If you want to prevent the emergence of mass violence, I mean I listened to Vin, when he laid out the problem, and of course he's right. On the other hand, we have a lot of mythologies about violent conflict. I mean calling a conflict religious or talking about poverty as the source of conflict may tell you about why there's disagreement. It's not telling you anything about why people are killing each other over those disagreements. So if you want to prevent the emergence of mass violence, it's a separate problem from trying to prevent the spread or contagion of violence, which is a separate problem from trying to prevent the re-emergence of violence once peace has been achieved. Is there a role for technology in helping us solve each of these problems? I think so. The problem is that not that we don't know, it's that we don't like the action implications of what we do know. Do you think that the technology has legitimized or allows people to legitimize violence? Everybody's doing it, it must be okay. I don't know, I'm not saying... Or that there's... anybody can get their narrative out there. So it's their... Everybody has a narrative, and if we... does that give legitimacy to... I think there's no question about it. What you'll find are fellow travelers. I mean, you know, we have... I think one of the things the Internet has done is it completely disintegrated the notion of a minority. I mean, because you can find virtual company on for any issue and for any perspective on any issue. Well, to the extent that the minority in the past would have had difficulty finding voice, the Internet is an amplifier. Not only does it make the voice louder, but it also draws other people in who would not otherwise have known that they had fellow travelers who had the same view. So that's a big point. You know, I think one of the things that we've thought about our international institution, certainly over the course of my lifetime, is that they function to be a check on unilateral action. Right? We'll put ourselves all in a club, all in a group, and we'll keep an eye on each other, but we share principles and so we have kind of a predictable bandwidth of behavior and so it will be a check on unilateralism. But what we've seen instead is precisely what you've described, is that they become amplifiers of unilateralism. And that's... it's kind of, I think, not intended. I don't think we know what institutions now mean in the age of instant access to others who think like us. So there was a time when Esther Dyson made the observation that the antidote for bad information was not censorship, but more information. And that sounds pretty good on the surface, but I am beginning to wonder, the more information makes it sometimes harder to find the information and so even if it's there, I guess we should let's hear it for good search engines, but then we have the other problem that we get the bubble effect, the filter effect, where you find the stuff that is of interest to you and reinforces your own view and you don't see the other stuff, so you never discover there's a different argument that would have changed your mind. So this is... we definitely do not have technology as the deus ex machina in this story. It may be a tool, but it may not be the thing that saves us, unless our imaginations allow us to use it in ways that solve this problem. Pushing into the area that you mentioned, Vint at the beginning, so we look at the general sort of accepted drivers of conflict, or the traditional drivers of conflict, and we were to push into that realm and say, well where is it that technology can be of service to those that would like to see conflict go in the constructive path that's opposed to the destructive path. You mentioned if the internet can be an amplifier for unilateralism, it sort of bodes against the... as an amplifier for collaboration, but can it be... or how can it redefine what happens at that early stage of conflict? Democritization of access to information has to count for something. The notion of misunderstandings, where you take genetically modified crops, there's a lot of misunderstanding about this. People sometimes imagine that there's some guy tinkering with the molecules and they forget about the fact that cross breeding does exactly that. It's just that you might be able to do it in a more targeted way and not take quite so long to get there. There are bad sides to that too, it's like the genetically modified crops that don't have seeds or the seeds don't work unless you supply a certain additional thing and therefore you have monopoly rents on the availability of the seeds. This is the awful thing about technology is that it has the proclivity to be used and abused and there's nothing about it that prevents that. It's failure of imagination and failure of commitment to try to bend those technologies to positive ends and that's where I would like to spend my time, not necessarily in this discussion, but I mean just generally speaking, take the technology and push it in the direction of benefit. Are there some examples that strike you along those lines? Well, think about water for example. Riparian rights have been the source of huge debates all in the West in the US and of course it would be so elsewhere. We know that fresh water supplies have become seriously deficient in many parts of the world. You can imagine some day that the oil tankers of today will become the super water tankers of tomorrow. If we find a technology that allows us to produce an abundance of fresh water that would make a huge difference. Some of you may be following graphene, this funny stuff that the bucky ball then unfolds into this flat sheet. It's a single atom. If you take two sheets of graphene and you put them not quite aligned, it turns out at least in the lab you can filter out everything except the H2O and it goes through very quickly because it's such a thin membrane so there are ideas like that that could make a dramatic difference to places that otherwise would have conflict. So one might ask well what else do we have conflict over what can technology do to undo that conflict by providing abundance instead of scarcity. So that's another example. Electricity would be another good one. So I'm very attracted and interested into these these ideas. I'm not sure we have a failure of imagination. I think there's nothing more exciting than the millennial generation right now. To me they are the greatest generation. I mean and they question everything. They accept nothing. They're courageous. They're other regarding. They're inventive. I think what we're failing to do is make space. There's plenty of imagination out there and again and again I'm struck by God how come this wasn't invented before? You know you see great new things popping up all the time. It's so exciting but our generation needs to make space for this imagination that's coming up in problem solving. So it's our failure of imagination out there. Well I wouldn't say that not you. You did enough imagining for the rest of mankind with that little three, four no drawing that Bob put together. I think if you come back to this problem of violent conflict and I'm worried about violent conflict and Vince absolutely right there are ways to ward off paths towards violence. I mean it's not this inexorable march. I mean war is not the weather. You know but we behave as if it were. You know oh it's going to rain. Oh we're going to get wet. Oh it's war is going to break out. Oh well. I mean that's nuts. War is not the weather. So how do we prevent. I mean it's this toxic cocktail of things that come together and solutions like this introduced in timely ways making space so people can have some confidence in a trial. That's I think at that that's true prevention where you're really preventing the outbreak. You know I mean what's your theory of the case. Why do people kill each other over their differences. I think you need two clusters of variables to come together. You need a group that's susceptible to being led to a fight which is a pretty low bar and you need leaders determined to have a fight. If you just have the group I mean you they may riot but they're not going to engage in a systematic campaign of slaughter unless they're led. War is a phenomenon of leadership. Violent conflict on a sustained basis is a phenomenon of leadership. I'm not sure we have a technological answer for that. You know what role do you think despair plays in all this. I think what makes a group susceptible to being led to a fight the intersection of deprivation and discrimination will make a group susceptible. I mean it's not just the case that poor people kill each other rich people will kill each other too as we know. That's because you're in charge and I'm not I don't like that. But it's this it's this you know why do these young men mostly young men join us they feel like they belong nowhere. You know they're in many cases you know of those that have come to this country for example they're in you know first or second generation you know communities the very insular we need to break down barriers that isolate communities. They don't feel like they belong in the old world and they're not accepted by the new world. It's an overly glib answer to what is that route a very difficult problem. So economics has to play a role here too. I mean if you think for just a second about people who have no income there's no GDP there's no jobs you can't you can't even meet the expectations as a person in a society in the absence of you know some kind of capacity. So jobs must play a role GDP must play a role investment plays a role and the big problem here is that I was asked to invest in a place which is in conflict the reaction I have is well wait a minute let me get this straight you want me to put x millions of dollars here and it's going to get blown up tomorrow why would I do that and so creating conditions in which investment in infrastructure and other capabilities is feasible and sensible is part of the of the challenge of overcoming some of these conditions. You know what we're witnessing and you know and we're living in an era where governments have lost the corner on the market on the three key things that used to distinguish them the control of lethality the control of capital and the control of rulemaking now where has that power gone I mean it has not gone to the United Nations it's it has gone into individual hands so you're private entrepreneurs who are wealthier than the vast majority of countries on the planet individual yeah absolutely stunning there's that disparity has to tell us something and and maybe even bode not well depending on how it's used so they have to give some credit to Bill Gates who's done an amazingly good job of taking the fortune he has created and doing something constructive with it and I feel compelled to credit Ted Turner who was the first of the newest generation when he gave a billion dollars to the UN it was a third of his wealth and and this is the kind of engaged social engagement that you'd like to see among the most privileged of us but when you when you think about this what then should how do we address what what responsibility should we give individuals of this of this capacity should we make you know a high net worth individuals responsible for preventing or resolving violent conflict what seems like the the we look at especially that now in the trend to looking at all these situations of these complex adaptive dynamic systems and the role of self-organization is always sort of seen as being the key lever for for change whether it for the good or for the ill what is the what is your experience with with the various technological capacities we have to abet that the sort of self-organization to the good whether it's at the the very high levels it may be a UN private sector kind of collaboration or it's in a village or an urban an urban area did you this is really an interesting observation for me in my world where technology engineering standards are so important watching this self-organizing bottom-up process by which ideas become codified and are made widely and freely available there's a it must be a sort of social belief maybe this comes out of the academic world because that's where the internet engineering task force originated in a bunch of engineers and colleges and universities that were sponsored by DARPA to do the development of arpinette and the internet and their their coin of the realm of sharing information there was no there was no notion of you have to pay me for this idea and so we gave it away because that was how you did things and I was proud of the fact that Bob and I just gave away the internet design and the expectation that if anybody could actually figure out how to build a piece of this and find somebody to connect to this thing would just kind of grow in an organic way and that seemed like the right thing to do because it was the infrastructure didn't do anything it enabled things and it's the enabling part that's so powerful so this self-organizing notion of benefit by everybody sharing this sounds like co-ops it reminds me of barn raising you know where everybody participates because they all benefit later all that stuff is partly based on the expectation that if I do something now I will have a benefit sometime in the future people who are faced with nothing faced with with no expectations have no desire to wait for anything and I I remember being in London in the early 1970s and queuing up to get something maybe it was a meal and I noticed that then a few weeks later I was in Tehran in 1975 and I watched the way people got on the plane in Maribaud they just you know they all had seats they understand that that everybody had a seat they just jam themselves into the air vent and I remember thinking okay this is the difference between people who have the expectation that there will be some for them at the end and expectations of people that there won't be enough for everybody so I need to get mine now and that led me frequently to this politics of poverty versus scarcity versus plenty so how do we how do we reinforce this notion that actually sharing stuff is is the way it's like sharing information is wonderful because it doesn't never exhaust itself there's plenty of it yeah it's right and it's an inexhaustible supply I mean one of the things that has struck me is the global cyber awakening is forcing governments to treat their publics as an asset not an obstacle to problem solving that's interesting and you know governments are kind of falling into one of three categories in my view there are and again this is a reflection of I guess the the time I spend now and in the cyber community and talking about there are governments who fear threats in cyberspace from outside their borders there are governments who fear threats in cyberspace from inside their borders and there are governments who really aren't preoccupied with threats at all but are pretty sure there's a lot of money to be made and they have not figured out a way to cash in in part because again governments have not figured out the potency the magic of data liquidity in fact I mean governments are still in some level stuck in 1947 where they think important information is hard to get you know and so you have to kind of go isn't this like the people who think they say information is power and I'm hanging onto all my information I'm not sharing with you because it makes me more powerful and you know Mike community says wait a minute information sharing is power is by sharing the information that you create power it's a non just it's a non zero-summing game yes exactly it's non-rival so let me ask you to address some issue you brought up Jane which is around I mean are those that are in the category of an ISIS or groups like that actually doing a better job of using technology to organize to attract to get their message out than those who are trying to feed more people generate more power bridge gaps between yeah well the bars I mean the bar there is what's the where's the bar there is no bar I mean what they've done is is find that they've mobilized again mostly angry young man they they're a particular organization with a particular taste for violence that attracts a particular type of person again who will come from everywhere to go anywhere and have they done a better job I'm not sure that's it's sort of not the question I I would rather you have asked me I would say answer the question I've asked yeah this is going I mean all violence is some manifestation of lawlessness right it's either no order it's contested order it's alternative order take your pick I mean you can categorize all violence into one set of it and this is going on in the face of an obvious capacity to act and an equally obvious apparent inability to organize for the action that's necessary so why is that the case and how can technology I mean you we have private individuals who can mobilize satellite assets to take pictures of refugee movements of burned villages of of violent group tracking whether it's in the Sahel or Sudan or or South Sudan or anywhere else why aren't governments doing this same kind of thing to mobilize the outrage what are the effective measures that stop this violence those are those are the questions that we have I think as a public's right to expect some answers and the question comes down to doing again it's not that we don't know it's that we don't like the action implications of what we do know say a little more about that Jane what don't we like about the action implications you have to do it if you know if you know about it you have to take action you have to do something about it look and you know we we talked for a long time on the work on preventing violent preventing deadly conflict with David Hamburg and Syvance and that Melanie referred to it did change the dialogue in our field when when I first started doing this work in 1994 people laughed at me said Jane there's always been violent conflict you know you lost your way I mean what's going on and and I remember being struck by that now you can't talk about violent conflict without talking about whether and how it might have been prevented and who should have done who should do the work you know and and we talk about triggers you know what's going to you know we want to know what's going to trigger us to act look at trigger as a policy choice you choose whether or not 200 young girls in Nigeria being captured by Boko Haram and imprisoned for all effect is going to call you to act or not so trigger is a policy choice again here what technology has done what information sharing has done what this what the social engagement with this technology has done has narrowed this the room for governments to do nothing with impunity so this raises a really interesting point it's related to the action question you have to go back and ask what are the incentives that lead you to one choice or another and unless you understand incentives of the various actors in these plays you can't really understand what leads to their actions so I think we need to bore bore in deeper now on what the incentives are I'll give you an example and this may not be politically correct to say but I'm going to say it anyway think about Hamas for a moment and think about the apparent fact that they were losing a certain amount of their authority and and the ability to control the situation and one view of this is that in order to regain the ability to take authoritarian measures you trigger a response from the party that you need to point to and say they are the threat and you need me to protect you so you trigger something that causes a response that you can then use to say you need me to protect you from those guys and this this sort of incentive to maintain the threat in order for you to retain power or some other thing you want is part of the incentive matrix that leads to some kinds of actions and I think unless we understand that kind of thing we won't understand what tactics make sense to defuse it so Paul Collier known to many in this room the scholar in the UK you know written very interesting done very interesting research on you know why do incipient rebellions become full-fledged insurgencies because young men join them so at some level if you want to understand you know this is to your point you know you look at the microeconomic decision-making of the potential rebel but that I don't think carries you the whole way of course I mean so this is you know more to your point I agree that you know incentives matter you know but when you want to do something any excuse will do when you don't want to do something any excuse will do so it's it's a can we construct incentives so I want to go back to your observation about millennials for a moment I'm not sure that I have the right generation here but my son participated in something called utopia in four movements it was a performance thing and it talked about these grand visions that didn't quite work out one of them was Esperanto another one was communism you know a third one was Cuba and a fourth one was the biggest mall shopping mall in the world in China and the guy that built it was very you know wealthy entrepreneur and they told him you should build roads to get there or nobody will go there didn't build any roads so there's this giant mall and it's empty so they he and his partners conveyed this through sound commentary video and the like and in the end I said well so what was your point and he said well every one of the people who were involved in these efforts had a vision that was bigger than themselves and they wanted to commit themselves to this big vision like the Esperanto case if everybody spoke the same language surely the world would be more peaceful that's sort of like saying that the telegraph would make the world more peaceful or the internet would make the world more peaceful but so they had this vision that they committed themselves to and his comment was in the 21st century he's not seeing people with positive visions that are drawing people together and that the absence of that constructive larger than yourself objective may be contributing to some of the problems we're having people want to be part of something bigger than themselves to know that their efforts get amplified by everything else and that amplification cuts both ways I want to open our conversation up to the audience I wanted to just give you one more question if you if you want to take it up which is is there a priority an action an issue that you think would help most unlock the potential for technologists and peace builders to come together in a constructive way whether it's to address incentives or address structures like governance or whatever it is is there is there something that stands out to you as being a priority for us I have some ideas well you know you can't really solve problems unless you understand the nature of the problem and the possible nature of solution that's just a platitude obviously but what I want to get at is that information can help a lot and measurement and observation the accumulation of data and its analysis understanding how why things interact the way they do and how you can change those things to give you a concrete example when you look at a virus for example well take Ebola if you know how viruses reproduce and you understand what the sequence of events is and you know that there is a way to interfere with that it's all that information is needed in order to figure out where to stick the monkey wrench in the gear and so the idea that we provide people with enough knowledge enough measured information to and and modeling to understand what opportunity they have to change the outcome can be really powerful but we have to harness our ability to understand and model phenomena whether it's social phenomena or or you know mechanical and natural phenomena in order to figure out how to respond so the technology community and the and the scientific and research community can contribute most by helping people understand why you know what's going on and why and what things you could do to make a difference right I think that the this is not going to be a spectacular answer I think that the again the answer resides somewhere in making space when I was at Homeland Security I we had what was called Cyber Wednesdays we'd have a three-hour meeting every Wednesday morning rain or shine you know do routine things routinely one of my things I'd like to live by and we had this on Cyber Wednesdays and the format of the meeting was always the same the first hour was a tour de table everybody and it became must-see TV I mean because everybody wants to know what everybody else was saying about everybody and the second hour was a deep dive into a particular subject for example you know you know using technology at the border or some other problem that we were trying to solve and the third hour was for the young people in Department of Homeland Security working on interesting things to come present to the cyber leadership of the department it was known as the third hour and they they they kind of you know jostled to to get in to get slotted for that third hour and we would sit there for you know one young woman invented the app for tracking food trucks in DC I mean it's very cool I mean that's the other thing you need so you so you need to make space to become aware of what's what's going on if you don't do it as a boss it's not going to it's not going to get done because people are buried under you know a ton of their own work and Vince absolutely right they want to connect to meaning it's why they come into public service for that connection to meaning but if they work for a jerk you know it's kind of over and so you can't be that jerk I mean you've got to create space for for these ideas really to grab hold that to me and and bringing technologists into the conversation because they do things policymakers do not policymakers say what problem are we trying to solve and they put the problem in and they're trying to solve this problem solve this problem I mean technologists and engineers do that but they also do things like vint did which is they sit there and they say well wouldn't it be cool if it wouldn't be cool if we could carry all our music around in our hand yeah that'd be pretty cool you know can policymakers don't usually go wouldn't it be cool if I've not I've been in policy a long time we don't have that conversation great um so if nothing else comes out of this we know the key is don't be a jerk so let me open up to the audience folks have questions for for for event and for their microphone we also know we have some questions the hand up already and we have a hand up already yeah great the volume is not on it how many engineers is it taking turn on a microphone that's still not working no they speak loudly well now for our next you know I was a signal officer in the army for a long time it's your worst nightmare yeah so what is it easier to organize around people or issues when it comes to using technology what's the tendency actually I don't think that that's necessary I think that sounds like one of those false dichotomies that let me try to give you an example do you remember the ice bucket the big thing for ALS that was all about an issue people and this crazy action of dumping ice all over yourself and I don't know about you but I got challenged multiple times during the course of this thing and after a while I got tired of doing the ice bucket so I just wrote a check I was thinking more of let's say a decent living wage something a little more abstract but meaningful to a political consumer I think personifying an issue is powerful and an issue by itself is less motivating than a person that you resonate with that you relate to that you respect that that either personifies or articulates that issue and so for me it's almost always about people and it even though it's bound to an issue people really seem to count in this space especially I don't know how I absolutely agree I think it's a false dichotomy but it's a really an interesting way to frame the problem I think people are very because people want to connect to meaning they associate with ideas but then after a while their energy dissipates unless they are led there is there is something magical about the about connecting leadership to issues that causes action I mean you can prevent deadly conflict with a rave I suppose but I think you're you're immeasurably increase your odds if it organizes you know with leadership and whether that leadership tends to get personified I mean in the Arab Spring you know Tahir Square they were looking I mean not only was the international community look who is the leader here but the people themselves exactly so did Twitter I mean but who would be the face you know to carry this movement forward around whom people could rally because they were they took on the responsibilities and that's what leadership is it's about responsibility it's not about authority it's not about power it's about responsibility I think you need both what's the most powerful discovery you can ever imagine it's very simple I am not alone and when you discover you're not alone you are empowered and that's these media really help you with that discovery process thank you here we have to get you there is it a non-working microphone check there's a microphone this is really for you when I look back at your career to the degree I know it you have worked at it only at places where Jane's question wouldn't it be cool if is the operating question so let me ask that question to you in your current role where you work with very creative people what contribution can the IT community not Google but the IT community is a whole play to help us do our job better as I'm Melanie's deputy evangelist for peacebuilding so actually I don't even know whether we said what wouldn't it be cool if it was more like what if you could X so this is going to sound corny as hell but I really believe it if you look at Google's motto organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful we really believe that I really believe that I think it's stunning to imagine that you know barring some restraints like well somehow it's copyrighted you have to pay for it the idea that I could get access to the entire brainpower and knowledge of the whole world all the knowledge that we have at my fingertips if I could just find it that's the most beguiling notion and the accessibility part by the way is equally important to me I'm hearing impaired I have friends who are blind or have motor problems accessible here doesn't mean just being able to get to it but getting at getting to it despite these various you know impairments of interference but I still believe that's one of the most powerful means in our 21st century and if if we could make that really true think of how empowering that can be you don't have to wait you don't have to there are no barriers to your ability to discover what people know and then apply it so I mean that's like I say it sounds corny but I really believe that's right I love it so I'm gonna don't be a jerk and if it's okay to be corny if you really believe it you know I used to when again when as a DHS I would I would walk around and I would talk to the senior leadership in the various components that we have and I would I would always ask them what's at the top of your if only list and don't tell me more money okay let's just take that one off just tell me if only if only what because you know when you're the number two in the department the story goes you have some authority to change a few things but it's a very empowering question actually but it's also a responsibleizing question suddenly they have to think about oh my gosh if only uh and they often didn't know what would be at the top of their if only list and what are you doing about it that's the next tough one right well once you get them warmed up you know so so I think you know there's I'm going to try and flip this whole conversation on our own heads here and and ask you what percentage of your problems would go away if you could cherry pick the team you worked with and put in place a by name exactly whom who you wanted to be in each position what percentage of your problems would go away 95 96 97 percent of your problems it sounds like an auction it's one of my bid for 98 but it's extra when you think about it that way then suddenly you know you're not looking for the technological solution you're it's a it's this interaction has been said at the top you know of people and ideas and things um that I think comes into this I mean we know what a durable pieces right what are the elements you know representative governance market economic activity that gives opportunity to the greatest number robust civil society based on the rule of law we know what the pieces are you know it's the it's the the architecting and the maintenance and the this sounds like a great title for a book or a paper putting the pieces of peace together yeah putting the pieces of peace together another question yeah hi seeing peace um will you be on my team you said I got to pick I pick you um my name is sally smith I started an organization called the nexus fund uh to end genocide and mass atrocities a couple of years ago just a really low-key organization um and we believe in supporting civil society um to help solve their own problems um by giving them the help that they need as they tell us they need it not as we think that they need it um and my question for you is uh around innovation and technology because like usip the nexus fund is interested in making connections between what we see as a gap the people on the ground who have needs that could potentially be met with technological solutions and then you know what I just generally refer to as technologists in silicon valley who have the technology available and from my limited conversations with those kinds of companies like google are interested in helping but may not have uh what I have called a tech sherpa to help them reach the people on the ground to provide those solutions or at least to help those people build their own solutions so my my question is really to you and and or to either of you of how can we best do that how can we best play the role of tech sherpa and getting and asking these people in silicon valley and even if I may um for the wealth piece as well you know is there is there a desire in silicon valley to contribute some of that wealth to technology building in um conflict zones or prevention areas so the answer is absolutely yes I can't I won't speak for any one company not even for google in this instance but um you know about code for america as an example this is a an effort to get people to help solve problems that could be solved by software um a related notion here is lowering barriers to exercising your ability to solve problems so finding ways of producing infrastructure that is widely accessible and the example of this is mobile phone and the application is bazillions of them now that are have been implemented for them the reason that that has worked is that we've standardized the interfaces the application programming interface the people who write the applications on the mobile don't know anything about how does the mobile actually work and they don't have to that's the important part they lowered the barrier to your ability to implement something to try something out and if you you want to remove um barriers to exploration and experimentation you want to remove the risk so um those sorts of things silicon valley can do the maker movement is another example of this sort of thing there are some kids in this area at a place called nova labs who are using 3d printers to build more 3d printers they build the parts from the 3d printer and then they put the you know it's like the sorcerer's apprentice and they're worried about that um but that's an important movement by the way this is this is you know in the business world there's this notion of jujitsu business tactics where you take your opponent's momentum and you use it against them well in the positive sense kids are getting very excited about concrete results of what they're doing i mean the fact that you could make something and you could hold it and i made that is a lot more satisfying than you wrote a piece of code nobody can see it because it's just starting floating out there someplace so um i have this this sense that in our current world we have technology that's removing barriers to solving problems or exploring solutions to problems and even and it's you know what is the right thing here it makes it cheap to fail and that's good because it's okay to fail it's terrible not to try anything it's okay to fail as long as a you learn something from it and you don't keep doing the same thing over and over again like the Einstein definition of insanity so uh although this doesn't solve all problems these themes i think are really important guidelines to tactics that you want to introduce for enabling people to solve more problems so i think there is value in the high payoff intervention i mean what is it i mean we suffer in our field um as what my colleague tony seger at the council on cyber security talks about when we talk about cyber security says we're you know we're suffering from the fog of more you know we've got more more more more more you know more offerings technology checklists all kinds of things we suffer from the same thing to a certain extent in the peace building world the fog of more you know what are the high payoff interventions there are two educate young women employ young men the rest is commentary that's really good she's just full of these incredible sound bites man that's amazing i hope somebody takes my field melody said we've known each other a long time um those are the high payoff interventions you know and so everybody to a certain extent in our world you know governments are competing not only with each other not only with groups of them they're competing with the non-governmental world as well it's and it's and it's it's really contested space so to whom should societies turn they're you know we're i mean i've heard of your organization it's really incredibly creative and interesting i let's i love what's going on out there in the world today why aren't governments wrapping their arms around more of this making space for these kinds of initiatives it's governments can't do all that needs doing and all that needs doing can't be done alone and you have to treat people however they organize whether it's a small NGO or a movement around an idea you know whose whose time has come you know governments have a role to play here and we shouldn't let them off the hook before we take another question from the audience i want to see check in on the folks who are monitoring twitter if there's any online questions i sense there is one this is so tightly woven there are no questions actually the the bad thing about getting a no answer to your question is does that mean nobody's paying attention that's really painful people are paying attention i promise we had some questions on twitter about tools like google translate so i want to know our efforts like google translate or the broader effort to catalog all of human knowledge as audacious as esparanto and what are the implications if we fail i didn't hear so google translate okay um and the and the aspiration yeah to harness all the world's knowledge is it really as audacious i mean is it is that really the agenda i think it is i mean look google is also a business and it's in in the business to make money and its stock price shows that but what's astonishing about this is that it's allowed us to do things that a lot of other companies would never consider doing i mean we've got what larry page calls moon shots like the self-driving cars and the contact wounds that measures the level of sugar in the tears of your eyes and relates that to the blood sugar levels so you don't have to keep sticking your finger uh we you know calico the company that wants to figure out why we die and how do we stop that uh you know we won't get there but it might extend life but these are all crazy ideas and larry likes that because he has the wherewithal because of the business model that the company has but the company really believes that getting information out there in people's hands is important so google translates an interesting example it's by no means perfect those of you who speak anything other than english uh will recognize that the translation from anything into english and google translate is often amusing uh it's better than what it was in the 60s though i was at stanford and we were trying we poured a russian english dictionary into the computer thinking boy this is easy and we stuck in out of sight out of mind and it translated into russian and came back invisible idiot okay maybe we have some work to do here so so i mean we've we've taken advantage of statistics and large corpora full of duplicate documents and two different languages we even gone to the business of going through multiple languages to get from one translation to another and nobody's going to be ever perfect at this space at least not in the near term but it helps you get just at least and figure out do i really want to dig deeper into i want to find a better translation and so on uh so i really the company really believes in this idea and it's invested very very heavily in a lot of these technologies in in aid of that belief you know i've been um thank you for a long time that there are only five things that i can think of that claim a billion the active affiliation of a billion or more people on the planet in being indian being chinese being catholic being muslim and being on facebook um and and yahoo religion and yahoo is not far behind and and yahoo and facebook know a lot more about their subscribers than any government or those religions know about their their populations and so we know a lot about people online but we know them mostly as consumers uh i think that's beginning to change i think we're beginning to know them now as citizens and so the organization is in your citizen identity how much of your online experience do you do as a citizen you do a lot of it as a consumer you do some of it as a as a mom dad student sister brother worker how much of it do you do as a citizen in the rest of the world they do a lot they do a lot as citizens online um we need to pay attention to that there we need to embrace the notion that publics are becoming much more actively involved i love vince um what he said earlier when he said the democratization of access to information has got to count for something whether we want it to or not it will um and i i think there's just a ton to grab onto here are these audacious ideas they are i mean at some level and i'm not an economist but it seems to me that that facebook is offering a different economic model than one that most of our societies are used i mean most of our societies are kind of based on the notion of family you know as the basic economic model right well facebook has introduced the friendship as a different economic model and google has introduced you as an as an economic model because it pivots around you i mean it's a really interesting change in perspective on how we relate to each other and to the structures that we've set up and that we've been living in you know i i wonder if we're not witnessing sort of the transitional era you know some say we're seeing the change in the nature of money we're seeing the change in the nature of government um so jane jane has has really hit on something that i resonate with very strongly this notion of online citizenship uh is fascinating to me i mean think about civil society think about the technology world about government and so on these are all segments of our society the question is how do they manifest in this online environment there's a term that's used in my world called netizen and you know that a person who is a citizen of the net uh but i think uh jane's point here is really worth scrutinizing how can we enable online citizenship in a way that is constructive and productive it's not just a question of the government telling you what to do and i i have to say i was very amused watching the american um members of congress discover the internet the first thing they discovered was wow this is a way for me to tell my constituents everything that i'm doing then they discovered it was a two-way medium you mean they actually can talk back and say yes congressman that's that's right um so this this idea that jane has planted now which is to look outside of the u.s. at how this online citizenship is manifesting is probably a very worthwhile thing for us to understand and then ask how can i enable that more effectively what else can i enable about this online-ness as a citizen in a a society think about the rousseau and the social contract i went back and reread that i'm in in translation my french isn't that good but i was very excited about the idea that there is such a notion as a contract i will give up some of my freedom in exchange for certain safeties and and conditions of course i don't want to give up too much and there's a big argument about where that line should be but this idea of of social citizenry online bears some serious examination so thank you for bringing that up so one of the things that i just in your example in your response around the google translate which may be another attitude that that we the technology world may bring into the peace building world just like the the what if list that you mentioned jane is the is the non-linearity of strategy so that the idea of we're going to set a goal out here we we're pretty sure we're not going to get there we're not going to stop people from dying but we only get the whole bunch of other good places and how a lot of times i think in our field in the peace building field we tend to want to confine ourselves to only those things we know we can do and think of it all as being a one two three four when we know it's actually not going to work out this is such a good point there's a question on the audience yeah so with the velocity of change and all the things are happening some subset of the people are going to get this and thrive in it and whatever there's going to be another subset that just isn't going to and as things are changing so rapidly and this group kind of gets left behind what do you do with them how do you compensate essentially for the digital disenfranchisement if you will perhaps by their own choice but nonetheless not feeling part of this new world so this this reminds me of something that came up in an AARP meeting it was the the the assertion was that us old folks don't know how to use technology and my reaction to this was i have news for you some of us invented it so that's a great laugh but however to be fair you know we were a lot younger at the time that this was going on so i think lin's question is very legitimate i'm going to argue that this is a potentially false meme it's a very attractive argument to make everybody kind of gets it wow things are running really faster and you can't run that fast so you're going to be left behind and yet i see how quickly people have grabbed the use of new technology smartphones are only eight years old and they are in the hands of a lot of people of all ages a lot of these things are designed with interfaces that are intentionally simple to use technologists have a responsibility to make these things accessible to everybody and we don't always do a great job of that but you know being able to poke a button because it's got somebody's picture on it and it makes a phone call that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and some of the contact systems get really close to that i don't know if your contact list and your mobile has a little picture of wherever it is and you you poke that and it makes a phone call so you're right that things are moving very quickly but i keep thinking okay it's 1900 let's think about this for a minute it's 1900 and what's happening well somewhere around 1898 or 1895 somebody discovered uh radiation right you know uranium and then in 1898 uh all mobiles start popping up in some weird places and three years from now the Wright brothers are going to fly a thing that's heavier than air five years from now Einstein's going to blow us all up with his unbelievable four papers little short you know two three page things that utterly changed the view of physics and then of course the the physicists come along and the quantum guys come along they blow up Einstein and then the quantum guys get blown up by the guys who are doing string theory i would venture deal there's television there's radio me all those things were happening after 1900 in an agrarian society and so i think of myself put i try to project myself back and i think holy moly what would i have felt about the rate of change the pace the the utterly impossible things that i was seeing jets and television and so on i'm not persuaded yet that everything is running faster than it was before i think that the pace of technological changes is very much the way it has been and we've all managed to adapt to it for the most part so this is so interesting i i was listening to someone the other day he said you know all of us actually should be dead um you know all of us who like came of age in the 60s should be dead because of you know either through nuclear confrontation or smoking or polluting our water and you know the you know spread of unchecked diseases and things like that and somehow we're not um so there is this constant catching up you know there there there is a correction that's going that's going on um i was had a very interesting conversation in europe recently with colleagues over the snowden revelations and they said to me you know why aren't americans outraged you know you know the difference between europeans and the americans that the europeans are outraged i said there's plenty of outraged americans number one number two most of us believe our system will correct itself i mean you know they're they're proven to be some excesses our system will correct itself and they said yeah that's the difference we don't have that faith in our governments when our governments move to extremes they stay there it's fascinating there is no corrective so it's not just so we have only one set of problems are the people who are left behind there's people who are leading the way we need to worry about as well you know the scottish vote shows that that system is at least self-correcting 55 to 45 it's a little scary on the other hand it was the public site it was the people who helped to introduce the correction fact and a pretty gracious acceptance of the reality of the vote a question here um my native american father always told me if you want peace work for justice now you can you can see why a native american would think justice was an issue but um i also think that justice is in the eyes of the beholder you know if you see all those rich people who don't pay taxes or you see all those people who don't believe in your religion or whatever it is and i i just want to know what you think about the relationship between justice and peace and how you think social media might help with that well lack of justice will surely interfere with the peace um i think i want to make one comment about technology and justice uh it's been drilled into me by a good friend of mine down horowitz who's a former superior court judge in the state of washington that access to justice may be denied unless you have access to the internet and its technology and the information that's available we don't want anyone to be denied access to justice because they don't have access to the information that could be available to them and so uh your question triggers uh for me anyway a kind of imperative that says at least with regard to information that's needed to achieve justice we have to assure equality of access and if that means investing in infrastructure to do that then it's incumbent upon us to do that jane may have a much more profound no i i um you know this is something that's it's at the heart obviously of a durable piece it's a it's a sense that most of the time we get most of the issues mostly right um and it's it justice isn't isn't a state of nature i mean it's an it's a conversation it's a negotiation it's an it's an evolution it's a society it's a society coming to grips with its sameness and its differences i mean we talk about the rule of law all the time sort of in interchangeably with the notion of justice they are separate but our our notion of you know justice um is you know it's it's not currently a jump ball i mean i think there's a there is a great deal of the institution of the institutionalization of the rule of law that's given us a a finally an ability to have a conversation about justice what are those things i mean it's it's a corpus of laws that have been legitimately derived widely promulgated understood and accepted it's a set of institutions to uphold the law um and it's a transparent process through which you know which is sort of an energy absorbing institution for disputes so you know we have alternate ways of resolving our differences and and we call that justice being done um is it is it right all the time justice doesn't equal right doesn't doesn't equal just i mean it's there are i don't think there are easy answers i think it's deeply embedded in the notion of a durable piece that there are processes for just resolution of disputes one of the most insidious factors that impede impede the creation of conditions for peace is impunity is you know there are factions who can act with impunity and and so certainly your question brings out the heart of of a durable piece which is the presence of of what a society can roughly call justice for its members so i have an example that i just saw on youtube right it was two chimpanzees and the and the keeper what it goes to is the notion of justice and fairness and the fact that this is not just a human artifact okay so here's the here's the deal the the zookeeper hands one of the chimpanzees a little food pellet okay and he hands the other one a food pellet and they both eat the food pellet that's all cool then the next time he hands one of the chimpanzees a grape and the other one he hands the food pellet and you know that works the first time and then he does it again he keeps giving grapes to the one chimpanzee and these crappy little food pellets to the other guy and eventually the other chimpanzee is throwing the food pellets back at them this chimpanzee has some sense of fairness it's not just that he should get the food pellet when the other guy gets the grapes and so he was reacting really badly to that and i thought wow that tells us something about how core in our psyches and our you know where brains work that this notion of fairness must be buried really really deep which is why i think we all resonate with the notion of justice so but i think it's really important to understand who who are you with respect to the the issue in dispute you know it mentioned earlier that you're not going to solve conflict unless you get to the root causes you know i've got kids i've solved lots of conflicts without understanding the root causes you know i don't and and what do i say i don't care why you are fighting stop stop okay so so you have to be able to enforce that though because otherwise i've been confident in my ability to do so but but but but but i think it frankly function our our search is outsiders to a conflict we we and we develop we develop opinions on the justness of a solution um when frankly we have neither the equities or the incentives or the comparative advantage for an even an opinion on the justness of underlying solutions to a conflict but can we create the conditions so that the parties themselves can address it that's i think our greater role it's also i mean you coming back to just how technology information can help us actually in a way either amplify that in just or enable the the finding of that just solution we've got time for one more quick question why don't we've got one up right up here here we are um so uh my name is jessica deer and i'm founded an organization called social media exchange and we're based and work in the middle east and so throughout fascinating conversation but throughout i keep hearing governments governments governments as if all governments act the same and all governments are um you know have come to some agreement about rule of law and i can state pretty categorically that that is not the case in the region where we work especially with regard to digital rights with freedom of expression and privacy things that are very important in the online space that we're talking about in the piece in the technology space and specifically um there have been with with regard to cyber security and sort of the conversation around that in the middle east in the past three years there have been um at least a dozen either draft or laws passed um that are doing exactly what you were saying they can't monopolize um cyber um control in cyberspace they're trying and they are doing it through cyber crime laws through things and so what's interesting and the question i want to pose is actually a much bigger question which is cyber crime is this sort of manifestation of the globalization of law somehow and and the idea that we're moving to another paradigm of of um of law of rule of law when we're talking about cyberspace so i'm wondering what the implications you think are for a couple of things one sovereignty and governments responsibilities to hold other governments accountable for creating peace for intergovernmental institutions responsibility for holding other governments accountable and i asked this because i was reading recently or and i and i believe this strongly having worked a lot in the region um that it's it's an impossible situation to ask activists to advocate only on their own for these rights when these rights are when when all the tools that they need to be able to do this advocacy are being stripped away so how can we as these big corporations big governments intergovernmental institutions um sort of go with this trend of of all things changing so we save the the quickest question for the last one maybe i'll go and then give vint the last word i would say a couple of a couple of things um i talked about the global cyber awakening um i've been has spoken before about the power of the internet i mean governments are moving in all over the planet to try and take back the internet in some way i mean you know it's and it's not restricted to that region i mean it's happening sort of everywhere you know that's the bad news the good news is there's 193 members of the united nations no two of them are approaching it in the same way so it's but they're all they're all moving into the game in some significant way they will alter the landscape as governments move in with the power and authority that governments have they will alter the landscape of the internet but i talked earlier about the global cyber awakening and it's happening against the backdrop of four very powerful norms that i think have been moving through the global population for 150 years the norm of inclusivity transparency reciprocity and accountability inclusivity nothing about me without me people are demanding to be included again and again and again and if i'm not i don't have voice there will be people around the world who will give me voice that's a very powerful norm people want in on the action i mean that's in part with the globe the arab spring was all about nothing about us without us anymore i mean transparency and it's not that everybody gets to know everything about everything all the time it's it's how is how is what are the processes i want to be able to see how you arrived at your decision because it's no longer enough for me to be presented with with a decision i need to know how it was made and so transparency very powerful norm reciprocity if you're going to make me do it are you going to make him do it and if and if you get to do that do i get to do that as well very powerful and accountability i mean we are seeing levels of accountability countries are now not only accountable to each other but for the past 20 years easily they've been accountable to each other for what's going on inside their countries which some people say sovereignty is changing to me sovereignty is exactly what it's always been not what you say you are but what we say you are sometimes in spite of what you say you are so i i mean yes is the work getting easier because of technology yes it's also getting harder wow well it'd be hard to add a lot to that so let me try just a bit uh first of all i think in the with regard to cyberspace we are in a post-westphalian environment the things that happen on the internet have impact wherever the internet goes and it doesn't stop at any borders in fact the design was intended intentionally done to be borderless so this causes us to need cooperation and agreement about what harms occur on the net because the perpetrator may be in one jurisdiction and the victim in another to the extent that we can do anything about redressing harms that occur in this online environment we're going to need lot of multilateral agreements among countries to respond and if we don't do that it will be very very hard to do anything about it that's why you see all these various cyber attacks coming from countries that don't actually have a great deal of uh or willingness to deal with the problem a lot of attacks come from china they come from russia they come from the ukraine and they probably come from the us too and the problem here is that we don't have agreements to deal with that problem so i also believe that this is not just a government problem to deal with you use the word cyber crime i want to be very careful about the term because not all harms that occur in the net are necessarily crimes and more important just because it happened on the net doesn't create the crime i mean if i commit fraud it's fraud regardless of what means i use to to commit it but there is a shared responsibility here for dealing with these harms and problems that arise if you are if you choose bad passwords and people crack into your account and then do harms with it you're partly at fault for that you should have been more aware of or we should have helped you be more aware of how to do a better job with passwords or provide you with something else like two factor authentication the people who write the software that has bugs they have a responsibility to not not make the bugs or fix the bugs the people who should be you know doing updates on their software who don't do that or also respond this is almost like um uh public health in a way if you're infected and your machine even if you didn't cause the infection but your machine is infected and you're now going around doing nothing about it then you're like typhoid mary you're causing a bad problem we need in the technology world we need to help people actually act on that view it's not the way just point the finger at you and say your machine's infected so you know you're you're all at fault and you're saying what should i do and you should get a good answer back to that as opposed to we don't know too bad but you're infected so you're bad so we have a lot of work to do i think in this space to make it more um more settled than the wild west and so we do need the rule of law in this space and it's not entirely settled at this point so thank you both tremendously i mean for any number of insights i've sure i know i've taken i know our audience has taken i particularly am grateful for the the inspiration the insight around the notion of creating these spaces to bring people technology and imagination together it just was impressed and a lot of what you said that really seemed to be the key and i'm also happy that i think sheldon is going to say a little bit about that when he talks about the peace tech lab before we get to that please join me in thanking vent surf and i want to join robin our thanks for this absolutely fascinating and deep and insightful conversation i have to say i felt sorry for any of the usip interns who might have been in charge of the twitter feed for this for trying to to capture this as we went along so so thank you all so much and this is really the moment that i've been waiting for all day which is to introduce sheldon himlfarb though many of us in this room know and love him the breadth and the depth of the conversation today the people that you've had in the room the intersections of all these different fields are just a little taste of what will come in the peace tech lab and i just want before sheldon comes up to thank him for this vision that for the last at least five years he has been talking to so many communities corporations governments activists entrepreneurs scholars and i was really struck this morning by the idea of a white space or third space and our field needs that these ideas are so important and yes often they do proliferate in wonderful ways around the world as we've seen but our field needs a dedicated space where we can test these ideas in a safe way build the connections we've been talking about hammer out the new kinds of principles around sovereignty accountability reciprocity that our panel here was just talking about and sheldon has us in his mind he's been perfectly i think equipped through the course of his career to do this as a scholar at oxford he has studied in academia he has been in one of the most creative companies the corporate advice corporate yes executive board helping catalyze the change that they've made was at search for common ground one of the most innovative peacebuilding organizations and then here at usip and the creativity of all those spaces is in large part due to sheldon so he will come and talk with you about peace tech lab this is something i think will be crucial for the peacebuilding field i feel deeply responsible personally to making this happen um sheldon also also said to let you know that uh we won't have further questions that he will really be inspiring us with his vision but there will be ways to continue this conversation um certainly through usip did you say there'd be a url coming up there'll be a url i would mention the publication building piece which is a joint publication of afp and usip the current issue that came out just yesterday is on conflicts of the future many of which we talked about today the next issue is on peacebuilding and technology so many of the ideas we've talked about that will come up in the first stages of the lab have a place there so sheldon is with great gratitude and love and respect and admiration that i welcome you to talk about the peace tech lab thank you so so much melanie for that introduction i just wish my mom were here to hear it before i talk about the lab i want to make sure we since while we're all still together thank a couple of people who really made today's you know there's a lot of people to make an event like this happen and um let me begin with thanking all of our guests and our moderators who did such a terrific job all day thank you very very much and our partner national academy of engineers uh engineering proctor reed has been our thought partner from the beginning for the last really five years at the round table as well as today's events so thank you proctor and at usip the folks that really organized today fred tipson kelly victor french nancy pain and then they had the help from the whole team so it was a big team effort thank you all um so it's been a long and rich day and this is going to be the last piece of it um at its conclusion as melanie said i'll give you a a way of getting in touch with us to ask more questions i know you're going to have questions to give us your suggestions this is as you heard from steve hadley the chairman of our board at the top of the day it was just uh recently in the end of july that our board approved one of the few resolutions it's ever approved in its history to create the p-stack lab as a spin-off from usip so we've got a lot of support there but it's still very much a work in progress i'm going to put some ideas out here i hope they're provocative thought-provoking and we'll hear from you so keep your ideas and thoughts coming but i am going to try to get us out of here in time for friday happy hour and in the same spirit as our lightning rounds this morning meet ground views a citizen journalism website created by this man sanjana the first attempt in shrillanka to create a way for citizens to share their views on the war call out humanitarian emergencies and security conditions and debate alternatives meet again rachel brown who's right here who was here today yes rachel brown created peace text at sessinia mani um which uses as you heard today mobile messaging to help stop deadly violence in communities in kenya meet louis no robyard who's using crowdsourced mapping in hades city slay slums to place solar powered light strategically to reduce gender and gang violence and deshade who you also met earlier i don't know if deshade's still here today deshade is the brilliant mind behind aimta the um a mobile app that tracks the trajectory of missiles um and sends out a warning to those in its path meet the enough project if you haven't heard it you probably have because it's funded in part by george cloney and it used satellite imagery to track janjui terror in darfur region of sudan and the lord's and the lord's resistance army tracker the lra tracker being used in congo to try and catch joseph coney meet yalla an online network of israeli and palestinian youth to promote peaceful problem solving meet agi who was created by this guy michael best a social media aggregator and monitoring software countering hate speech and election violence in africa meet front line sms and ken banks who created this tool to reach populations in danger front line sms via text message this is peace tech innovations in data in technology and in media born out of the danger of violent conflicts innovate or be silenced innovate or be shelled innovate or be imprisoned innovate or die conflict has often been a crucible for innovation the internet for goodness sakes was born out of darpa in the department of defense but this burst of innovation that i tried to capture in that run in the run that we had at the start of the day this burst of innovation in new approaches to tackling age old drivers of violence is as i think you heard in that panel as well it's unprecedented in human history so you think that these would be the best of times in our field but they are most certainly not from ukraine to afghanistan from iraq to gaza conflict rains and nearly every recent study on the role of technology in preventing or resolving its causes is ambivalent at best so this was a recent n d i study of nine countries the use of technology for civic participation its conclusion little data available when the impacts another study by ipi terrific study on conflict in a conflict prevention and technology potential rather than results another study by transparency international recently about the use of icts for corruption tackling corruption little evidence but positive signs why is this what's needed to increase the real impact of peace tech in conflict zones as the nation's center for conflict resolution conflict resolution and peace building we at usip we have a responsibility indeed we've got this charge from congress that i mentioned at the start of the day to answer that question so for more than five years our team here at usip and it really has been a team effort working in iraq in afghanistan in south sudan in berma with experts and activists alike and their answers to this question how can peace tech be more impactful have provided the inspiration for usip's new peace tech lab and the four pillars on which it will be based convene connect build and inspire let me break these down convene conflict we know is about complex human dynamics which are often culturally specific so we've heard time and time again that effective solutions require deep local knowledge of the conflict the geography and the technology environment so the peace tech lab needs to be a model of radical collaboration across disciplines across technology platforms and across generations engineers and technologists working every day alongside experts on peace building data scientists working alongside social scientists it will have peace tech fellows from the conflict zones themselves and a young engineers program to ensure intergenerational collaboration so we're making sure we're drawing upon the talents of young people like this this is maryan bechtel a 17-year-old who drew upon her piano lessons to come up with a new way to find landmines using sonar young people relate differently to technology and i don't know if any of you saw this study not too long ago by i think it was commissioned by intel it's fascinating it talked about how people over 25 on average ring the doorbell with their forefinger and people under 25 on average ring the doorbell with their thumb the dominant digit is changing but it also talks speaks volumes about the different ways the next generation and i know this from coming home every day to my kids how they connect with technology is totally different from other generations the next pillar of the lab is connect speed matters as you see from those stunning numbers that are coming up and the probability of reaching nonviolent solutions instead of military ones are highest in what's called the early gestation phase of a conflict so imagine the lab as a data hub having partnerships with social media and big data companies developing early warning mechanisms that can alert our in-country partners to imminent threats and lifesaving information so they can take early action and usip has a huge network of in-country partners it's developed over the last 30 years has do so many of the organizations that we've heard about today so that's the vision for the labs open situation room exchange you heard about it earlier from knoll the town this town is full of closed situation rooms and government right white house has one dod has one state department has one ours has to be an open working 24 seven operation that monitors tweets youtube uploads most importantly proactively connects with our civil society partners in the field over video skype whether it's whatsapp or chat or whatever platform works best because we live today in a world where the internet gets uploads from battle zones before the generals themselves know about it and the lab needs to be connected to that dynamic nature of conflict with a working rhythm as urgent as war itself if we are going to really provide timely assistance in our field but we also know we're going to need private sector know how to get there because i'm that's where big data has been influencing decision making for well over a decade we have so far to go to catch up in our field so we need to make sure we're bringing the private sector know how into our work with big data which brings me to a third attribute of the lab and that is the build piece so unlike most tech developers in the west the lab has to be focused like a laser when building solutions for those one g low bandwidth low power and dangerous environments where violent where violence occurs we heard time and time again how local technologists the hackers and the coders in conflict zones are frustrated with technology they really can't use sometimes it's a lack of documentation in local languages we heard a little bit about that this morning and sometimes it's that smartphone app in a dumb phone world right now too much peace tech gets built without intimate knowledge of those local constraints so imagine bringing together a mobile phone specialist for motor role an election specialist from afghanistan to collaborate on using usip's preventing election violence curriculum and turning it into a mobile phone application for voter ed and what we learned doing this for afghanistan we know we can then apply in berm or in nigeria or the next election in a conflict zone because we know that elections are often flashpoints for violence we understand that as one of the causes of violence and this needs to set the lab apart from other innovation labs around the world instead of creating new to the world tools bending electrons like they do and so many other of the new innovation labs we need to be looking for gaps that can be filled by adopting mashing up hacking off the self low-cost consumer technologies for local consumption and we'll also be nurturing other builders to do exactly the same by providing startup grants as well as space for incubating peace tech startups who can prototype this in with this input we can provide from the field finally the fourth pillar of the peace diet lab and really our most important one really the north star for what we're going to be doing and kind of the sub text from so much of what was talked about here today that's inspire as in inspire and industry we're put another way we need to scale this work far beyond the projects that we've got listed there the projects that we showed earlier that we had earlier in the lightning rounds as one of our leading activists in this field help Helena Puge put it co-founder of the build peace conference she wrote pilot projects are popular and common in tech for the in the tech for peace field great for uncovering new ideas but most don't have rigorous measures and often lack the support to scale up so how do we change this and scale up to realize the potential impact of peace tech let me suggest that the answer is not where you'd expect it was about a hundred years ago that the U.S. government turned for help to the private sector and specifically to research labs like those pioneered by Thomas Edison George Westinghouse because the tools of national defense from automatic firearms and mechanized armor to aircraft and missiles they required increasingly specialized knowledge and technology in order to build them and the defense industry was born but today's conflicts require a different kind of strategy and a different kind of specialized knowledge and if you don't believe me listen to what the guys who are fighting these wars are saying secretary gates we must focus our energies beyond the guns and steals a steal of the military admiral mullen u.s foreign policy is still too dominated by the military too dependent upon the generals and admirals general portray us any conceivable operation in the future is still going to have to support the establishment of local governance rule of law capability foster economic development counter corruption train host nation security forces and reintegrate reconcilable belligerence these leaders and many others are asking really tough questions important questions about why we're spending over two trillion dollars in iraq and afghanistan and that's really a fairly conservative estimate and not getting the results we all want they know that conflicts are increasingly localized fragmented and culturally specific and yet how do we seek to resolve them some say follow the money 500 billion for defense 46.2 billion for both diplomacy and development don't forget the annual appropriations of the nation's global conflict management center usip you see you catch that you see the move if you if you blink you might have missed our 39 39 million there as a nation our predominant method of conflict resolution is still war tech and it hasn't been working the alternative a secretary gates and admiral mullen suggest is to shift our focus beyond the guns and steel to a strategy like p-tech p-stech that is a much lower investment of capital than conventional war fighting that's built by entrepreneurs themselves from the conflict zones that's self organized and mobilized by sheer necessity and that's adaptable and deployable and rapidly deployable according to changing local conditions now some of you might think that what i'm suggesting here is that we redirect monies from the defense budget into things like the p-stech lab and i am not though i wouldn't say no to a billion or two um and i'm quite sure by the way that by demonstrating greater success in preventing conflict as a field than we have to date through initiatives like the p-stech lab that we will attract greater government funding and grow the pie for the p-stech field in general i'm sure of that but more government funding is not a viable strategy in today's world actually we're suggesting something really different that we developed the p-stech lab from the very start in order to learn from what do done do d has done with unparalleled success and that is they spawned an industry what can we learn from one of the most enduring partnerships in history between the military and the private sector in order to inspire this the p-stech industry why for example did governments continue to invest in private sector defense contractors even after the major wars were over one reason i already mentioned it was that specialized technology that was required but the other factor was even more powerful and again it's kind of in the subtext of a lot of things people have said today because the defense industry became a major employer in nearly every part of america and when an industry puts people to work governments and corporations large and small invest in it so let's think of the p-stech lab as a way to inspire an industry where people innovate and build products that both save lives and alleviate unemployment which as you've heard today is currently of epidemic proportions in most conflict zones particularly among young men creating such an industry obviously begins like any other that is identifying critical needs and the buyers who are willing to pay for the products and services that meet those needs so what kinds of critical needs do p-stech products and services meet right this is all about buyers and sellers and what i said earlier the three big business lines would be tech media and data so data think about that the conflict zone data the lab collects in order to analyze and better anticipate violence during the elections in say nigeria or congo that information has a great deal of value to companies like shell or chevron that are doing business there or in hp and intel who need to know about their supply chains and getting minerals out of the ground when it comes to tech the p-stech industry might create mobile devices that can protect local activists from the prying eyes of dictators in fact we're already seeing some really really innovative products coming out of the p-stech field to do that you may have heard of the labrio tablet the guardian project developed the labrio tablet to allow activists to surf the web anonymously and safely why not think about making those products available in best buy media the p-stech field has already launched a number of successful tv radio shows just ask search for common ground about their hit show nashimalo in the Balkans or the team in kenya usip has one village a thousand voices our radio drama in afghanistan is doing very well in sawish abab in south sudan and we've got a reality tv show in iraq why not think about marketing strategies behind them just like those used by other nonprofit media companies that are intent on social change and making money sesame workshops come to mind national geographic is another i could go on and on because these three business lines have countless products and services within them and customers who are willing to pay for them we just haven't thought about it this way yet and that's one of the things we will be doing in the lab so now you see our plan for world domination and it begins with a p-stech lab that's designed specifically to bolster the impact of the p-stech potential that we know we all know is there a lab that's designed for specifically for the nature of conflict today a world where anyone can send information around the globe with a push of a glut with a push of a button using those cell phones that it are nearly ubiquitous even in afghanistan where there's 65 percent illiteracy 72 percent cell phone penetration folks have been talking about that all day a world where not only are mobile phones ubiquitous but the barriers to entrepreneurship are fall are falling you heard about the use of kick starter to raise money i saw 35 000 kickstarter campaign to start a hacker space in bagdad a lab that's designed for sorry a lab that's designed for those four principles convene for radical collaboration connect for speed and agility build for local adoption and inspire a global industry we actually have a good foundation the team here has already begun to build the largest online network of young iraqi peace builders to design they've also worked on designing tools to crowd map attacks on journalists they're working with local burmese to develop systems to track and counter hate speech but we know we have a long way to go to scale this kind of work as we've been describing and we're going to need a lot of help to do that so we invite you go to that url you'll be able to see how to get in touch with us to provide your input to provide your ideas to ask questions contact us about the peace tech lab as i said we need you to join us in creating the peace tech lab as well as in starting to create a global industry thank you all for listening thank you all for being here it's been a long day i know that thank you all for being here today and with that i hope i'm going to get you out for happy hour thanks very much