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The particular resource scarcity I am referring to is a lack of funding. This is a conversation you cannot avoid, because the challenges always seem to be greater than the available pools of money, and one that, unfortunately, will only become more acute as we navigate the age of Trump and the new populism.
Locally driven solutions refers to an ideal that contextualization of products and services results in solutions that are more appropriate, more readily accepted and potentially more durable, or sustainable. By supporting the development of answers at the local level, it is also assumed that we will foster a greater set of unique ideas, which spurs innovation and invention globally.
While these two themes, at least at first blush, seem fundamentally in tension with one another there are a number of approaches that successfully bridge the gap. One of these approaches involves the use of technologies, processes, creative outputs and more that are “open source.” Open source products and services are free, community driven and have a number of incredibly successful examples.
My guest for the 145th Terms of Reference Podcast is something of an open source evangelist. Giulio Coppi is the founder of an initiative called High Tech Humanitarians, which purports to be the first free online platform for collaborative humanitarian innovation on open source technology. He is also CEO of Open Focus, a non profit devoted to open source technology for good and is an Humanitarian Innovation Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University in New York. As you no doubt have guessed, Giulio deeply believes that open source provides a platform to drive otherwise missing, misplaced or misaligned innovation for the humanitarian sector.
I invite you listen to the show and listen to us discuss High Tech Humanitarians, innovation in the humanitarian sector, open source technology, and much more.
You can connect with Giulio here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giuliocoppi/ Tweets by GiulioWolfeIN TOR 145 YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT
- High Tech Humanitarians, a partnership of organizations looking to deploy innovative solutions into the field work
- On Giulio’s history of frustrations about the large-scale humanitarian sector approach to innovation
- The necessity of Open Source in development
- Giulio’s suspicions about the actual position by large international development agencies on innovation, and why risk aversion is doing the sector a disservice
- Why Open Source does not grow “explosively”
- Why the future of innovation on the ground involves Open Source, capacity-building kits
OUR CONVERSATION FEATURES THE FOLLOWING
Names
- High Tech Humanitarians
- UN OCHA
- UNICEF
- Dutch Coalition for Humanitarian Innovation
- UNHCR Innovation team
- International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
- CERN lab
- Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation
- United Nations
Topics
- Open Source
- Risk, risk aversion
- Culture of innovation
Places
EPISODE CRIB NOTES
High Tech Humanitarians 00:03:47,070- Not an organization but a partnership
- It’s a broad initiative that brings together organizations that want to start an open discussion on the role of Technology in humanitarian action.
- “We have as a series of partners and supporting organizations”
- There is a need for open source solutions to the current problems affecting humanity
- In most of the planet, patent and licenses are too expensive
- Or they are not protecting local technologies
- Licenses are not “market dinamyzers”
- Items are just out of the reach of most organization working in the field
- We try to gather the knowledge that is around in terms of schematics
- We vet and put open knowledge online for everyone to share or download
- 3D printing systems, prosthetic arms, excavators, even small satellites
- “All this has to respect three principles: it must be ethical, it must be useful for humanitarian action, and must be open source”
- Giulio spent many years in the field
- International Committee Red Cross
- United Nations
- “I always felt very frustrated because”
- “I felt I was not given the proper tools to answer to those problems I was in”
- Afghanistan. “I was even managing some of the security system using Twitter”
- There was no information sharing system in place that I can use”
- Ivory Coast. “I had to create our own map to follow attacks and to try to understand where people were needing help”
- “I took a step back to do some studies”
- “I started looking around and I found nothing”
- “Maybe I can star something”
- “We started looking around”
- Most of the solution we needed were actually already available open source”
- “I do like things that are born out of necessity”
- “They do give you a set of tools. The problem is that when you need something tailored or different, that is not exactly in the system, that’s where the limits of big organization comes out”
- “If you need something that is not strictly from the book it becomes very very complicated”
- 3 different kind of reactions
- #1 We don’t have the budget
- #2 We don’t have the time
- #3 It’s not a priority
- “We have a GIS system that I can use to map or projects and follow-up a real-time with a mobile based system, not to go to the field every time”
- HTH has energy solutions health solutions, mapping, logistics management, education
- “It pretty much depends on you and your capacity”
- “We try to provide you with all the information that you need to understand if this is the tool for you and especially what kind of level of technology we are talking about”
- Also the reliability of the tool
- “We don’t take the ownership of the tools”
- “Each tool that you can find in the toolbox has his community behind”
- Some of those communities are still supporting the tools “so you can actually get in touch with them and ask them for support”
- Some of those aren’t
- We are still in the beta version
- “We don’t believe in explosive growth. Open source does not have explosive growth, only incremental”
- “Of course you can have an explosive moment at a certain moment of your life”
- “But it comes after months and months of tinkering and writing in dark rooms”
- “I know very little open source projects that started in January and in August they became a global trend or the new big thing”
- “We are doing a pilot in this moment we are doing a series of pilots exactly to understand how the beta versions will evolve”
- In the future, Labs will allow people to co-create and to innovate on existing tools by themselves”
- Pedal-powered water pumps
- Cardiological tools
- Is documentation good enough for people
- “We want to have more feedback”
- A sustainability measure: can it actually help organizations
- “Open source doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is for free. You can actually sell your knowledge and your capacity”
- “I do believe that the do-it-yourself culture is quite strong in the humanitarian”
- “But I don’t think that the do-it-yourself culture is very strong in the international humanitarian community”
- “My target is not big organizations”
- “We try to work and get in touch with big innovation offices from big organizations”
- “But we don’t consider them as the real public”
- NGOs and even more international NGOs very rooted in the field, very close to the population, have this kind of driving spirit
- The try to overcome their limits, budget restrictions, very little possibilities
- Big organizations can facilitate this kind of
- “I’m trying and we are trying all together to reach out to those organizations”
- To continue growing and expanding our knowledge
- Fordham University. “I’m working with them as humanitarian innovation fellow”
- Set of trainings and workshop capacity to introduce the notion of innovation and open source innovation
- Integrated with the standard training that is offered to humanitarian actors worldwide
- The Institute of International Monetary Affairs will be driving this process
- To expand the platform in a concrete way
- Involve local groups
- “We’re an open initiative and open platform”
- “We are building partnerships”
- “I do believe there is a lot of resistance from major actors”
- There seems to be some kind of counter movement
- There is “some kind” of resistance from major organizations about reshaping their budget system
- Shrinking resources and increasing amount of humanitarian crisis
- “Some of them are walking back from their commitments”
- “We are slightly slowing down in the discussion”
- “I mean maybe, just a feeling”
- UN OCHA disappeared from the innovation space because of budget cuts
- “As far as I know they are still big on data”
- But in terms of policy for innovation, the office that was taking care of this was suppressed
- “And there is nothing in terms of bringing this discussion forward again”
- “We are we are in touch with them in on a regular basis and there is a lot of good intention”
- “In my opinion there is a problem of approach”
- “Most of these organizations are trying to lead the conversation. The problem is that with shrinking resources leading the conversation, it is not an option”
- “You can’t lead the conversation on if you don’t have enough money”
- “You can’t engage a new challenges”
- “There is a big need for localizing innovative processes instead of centralizing them” and claiming them as their own
- “A large organization wants to keep the budget central and keep the resources within their team”
- “Budget it’s a pretext”
- “Organizations have a big liability problem.They don’t want to engage because they feel responsible for the final users”
- “They don’t want to provide them with less than perfect solutions”
- Risk averse
- “They want to show their donors that their money is well invested”
- “This is conflicting with the idea of innovation”
- “You must make a random result part of your own strategy”
- “We don’t need a perfect product, we need to empower people and humanitarians”
- ICRC was one of the pioneers in medical innovation because their experts were in the field in the frontline dealing with kind of wounds and situation that were never experimented before”
- They were the ones developing new forms of you know transporting wounded people evacuating them from the battlefield, setting up hospitals
- Formula One racing cars or military equipment
- The space shuttle program that we use in our daily life
- “A lot of products and services are thrown off of that weren’t a good fit for the war”
- “Innovation means that you’re not perfect”
- In today’s world somebody can tweet and talk to 10 million people without any sort of filter
- That becomes a real risk
- Real liability issues for those who are trying to help
- Someone who’s looking to get in the humanitarian sector should look at how they approach innovation differently
- The development sector has a long-established approach
- It’s difficult to learn from communities when they are scattered and under a shock of a disaster
- “Twitter is one of the main pools in this moment”
- Dutch Coalition for Humanitarian Innovation
- UNHCR Innovation team
- ICRC, working with CERN lab
- Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation
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