Bonus Blog #1: Crisis Informatics Speaker 1 - Gisli Olafsson

The first Crisis Informatics speaker was Gisli Olafsson, Emergency Response Director of NetHope. As he described it is an organization charged with the task of emergency efforts coordination in the midst of relief work. This allowed him ample insight into what people in the international emergency relief field are looking for in terms of new and emerging technology, which was the primary framework of his discussion with us. He structured his discourse with us by first giving some background on the status quo within this community in terms of technology, then outlining the key tenets any new technology would need, and closing with his thoughts on innovations existing in this community.  Although the discussion was primarily aimed at the crisis informatics application development course, there were still several useful lessons I gained from the event.

 In attempting to give us some context to his technology recommendations, he painted a short portrait of communication efforts in emergency situations in the past. Specifically, he spoke to the unified perspective in the post Southeast Asian Tsunami humanitarian world that change needed to be couple with the ‘new digital generation.’ As most of the old ways did not succeed in creating effective collaboration across several groups, there has been a push in these recent years to look at past failing as remedy them. Out of this effort came the current ‘cluster system’ that the humanitarian world functions on today. Although this system was significantly tested during the Haiti relief effort and performed fairly well, there is still great room for improvement. Therefore, he challenged us to create a discussion regarding what is driving the current changes and couple them with technological innovation. 

In brainstorming how best to tackle this feat, he suggested that we try to follow seven guiding principles: innovation, collaboration, openness, interdependence, integrity, self-organization, and sustainability. Although he talked quite insightfully about each of these principles, one common theme for where he saw possibilities headed was utilizing this next step forward to create a two-way dialogue. In the past a hierarchical structure has been used to disseminate tasks and information from the top down. In this new way of the digitzed citizen, Olafsson feels we can “empower affected communities themselves to work alongside aid organizations,” opening up brand new ways of addressing humanitarian crisis situations. There is the potential to collaborate on a completely different level and allow affected communities to communicate their needs and create a two-way dialogue. There have been occurrences of attempting to tap into this new wave of relief, which he touched on, but there is still a lot to be learned and much innovation to be had.

  

In closing, he attempted to outline some of the key points the application developers might find useful in their brainstorming and design. However, he also highlight what I felt was a very important point; although there may be a bright future ahead in terms of technology assisted collaboration, there are very well-established precedents and methodologies for doing this in the past so it will not be an easy road. He ended with a quote from Ghandi that I felt illustrated this very important point beautifully, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”