The Humanitarian Futures Programme is one of the most interesting initiatives out there, taking a longer-term view of the sector than most other policy and research groups. Originally I thought that they were going to be developing the humanitarian equivalent of the Singularity, but it’s more about building dialogue with key partners and getting people to think.

The Programme is looking for a part-time consultant to work to research the future of humanitarian collaboration.  The work is part of a two-person team, initially home-based but with some travel in the last quarter of 2008 and into 2009. Desktop review, interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, simulations - you know the score.

What’s interesting is that they are looking for someone interested in bringing non-traditional perspectives and new ways of thinking about collaboration into the humanitarian community (networks, social media and so on). This sounds a lot like the sort of thing that Aid Workers Network was supposed to promote and that ECB has been doing work on, so I’m all for it.

If you’re interested, send a half-page application letter with CV to Rosie Oglesby [rosie dot oglesby at kcl dot ac dot uk] by COB Thursday 12th June. There is a TORs available, if you ask really, really nicely.

As some light relief from the news from Burma and China, it looks as if the One Laptop Per Child project is falling apart under the weight of - well, mainly under the weight of Nicholas Negroponte. Ivan Krstic explains in a fascinating essay on his reasons for leaving his position as security director of OLPC:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yes, that’s right - welcome back to Magic Future Kingdom, where technology will solve everything! One thing that’s interesting is that Krstic (and I think many of the OLPC team) didn’t share this view - for them, the public mission of improving education in developing countries was what fired their hard drives up. However I’m not sure that this focus on education is any different in terms of misplaced idealism - even Krstic admits that

As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory.

I’ve never said exactly what I thought about OLPC on this blog, for three reasons. First, my opinion is irrelevant. Second, my opinion is frequently wrong. Third, everybody deserves a chance to test their idea against reality and see if it breaks. However as far as I was concerned, OLPC was broken as soon as it ran into the reality of logistics - actually distributing these laptops to their intended recipients - but nobody seemed to want to talk about this aspect of the project, as if it would somehow corrupt the purity of the vision.

Peru’s first deployment module consisted of 40 thousand laptops, to be deployed in about 570 schools across jungles, mountains, plains, and with total variance in electrical availability and uniformly no existing network infrastructure. A number of the target schools are in places requiring multiple modes of transportation to reach, and that are so remote that they’re not even serviced by the postal service. Laptop delivery was going to be performed by untrusted vendors who are in a position to steal the machines en masse. There is no easy way to collect manifests of what actually got delivered, where, and to whom… Other than the incredible Carla Gomez-Monroy who worked on setting up the pilots, there was no one hired to work on deployment while I was at OLPC, with Uruguay’s and Peru’s combined 360,000 laptop rollout in progress. [my emphasis]

What I don’t understand is that I could have told them about all these problems. Anybody with any experience working in the development sector could have told them about all these problems. Hell, anybody who’s ever been outside of the G8 countries could have probably have told them about all these problems, which raises the tricky question of - why didn’t anybody tell them? There are two possibilities. The first is that the people they asked only told them what they wanted to hear - this seems very likely, especially if they were mainly listening to governments, who don’t like to admit that they haven’t in fact been able to extend basic services to rural areas. The second is that they didn’t bother to ask anybody, which in light of Krstic’s essay seems to be equally likely - he quotes from a memo that he sent in December 2007:

We still have not a single employee focusing on deployment, helping to plan it, working with our target countries to learn what works and what doesn’t. Evidently our “deployment plan” is to send whichever hotshot superhacker we have available to each country such that he may fix any problems that arise on the spot. If that is not in fact our plan, then we have no plan at all.

To his credit, Krstic recognises that the

the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained.

What I don’t quite understand is who he thinks is going to do that explaining. It seems clear - not just from this essay, but from general observation of the way in which OLPC has been built up and the claims that it’s made - that this project was not in fact designed to meet the educational needs of poor children around the world. Instead it was about proving a series of ideological points - about private versus public sector, about Open Source software, about constructivist learning - and the impact that it’s had on the technology sector (and it has had a not insignificant impact) has been incidental to proving those points. Now, slowly but surely, each of those points has been tested against reality - and broken. At least now we know what doesn’t work - but we knew that before.

One Laptop Per Child has been a textbook example both of the worst kind of development (broadly, rich white people believe that they know what’s best for poor black people) and the most egregious kind of technotopianism (broadly, complex social problems can be solved if only we have the right technology). These two strands of thought were summed up in a comment by Guido van Rossum:

I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies.

Amen.

The ConnectivIT lab at the University of Colorado has done some fascinating research in the last couple of years, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but never quite got round to. Such are the workings of the web that these things always come around if you wait long enough. So I’ll preface this blog entry by saying that their work is well worth reading, and that my beef is not with them but with media coverage of technology.

Their latest research, published in New Scientist magazine under Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you, suggests that Facebook “is more effective than the emergency services“. This is the sort of headline that makes newspapers and blogs in Magic Future Kingdom soil themselves with excitement, so it’s received wide coverage, which is good - more people interested in these issues means more visibility, more activity, more resources. Unfortunately the coverage in the Daily Telegraph shows the problem with this coverage:

Within just 90 minutes of the first deaths, however, a web page accurately describing the events appeared on web encyclopedia Wikipedia. Twenty minutes after that, Facebook users had set up a group called ‘I’m OK at VT’, which allowed students and staff to reassure the wider world that they were safe. A Facebook discussion was also begun which authoritatively listed the victims and whether people were feared dead rather than confirmed dead.

I’m fascinated to know how we judge the “accuracy” of the Wikipedia entry. Since Wikipedia policy is that nothing should be posted without a citation from a reliable external source, the “accuracy” of that entry must have been wholly dependent on - guess what? That’s right, reports from the media or emergency services. Check the wikipedia page if you want to see for yourself - and if there weren’t any citations, then how on earth can you tell if it’s accurate or not?

We can chalk these statements on journalistic shorthand. The real problem with this is that there is absolutely no accountability for Wikipedia, Facebook or other social media. If those reports weren’t accurate - if you went to Facebook, read that your son was dead and later found he was alive, for example - then that’s a lot of trauma that nobody will ever take responsibility for. For the emergency services, it’s a bit more serious than that - if they get it wrong, they get sued to oblivion, people lose their jobs and their credibility goes out of the window.

How do you know when somebody is dead in a situation like Virginia Tech? When they’re officially declared dead. Who officially declares them dead? A medical professional, a member of the emergency services. The idea that in Magic Future Kingdom we’ll just automatically know when somebody is dead is ludicrous - maybe their Twitter stream will stop or something?

The article does make good points, more rooted in the research. People on the ground are the source of a lot of information, and technology makes it easier for them to get that information out. It’s also likely that the more people you aggregate, the more accurate the information will be, which I think is Leysia Palen’s point about how these events show “socially produced accuracy”, i.e. a version of the wisdom of crowds. Yet there are limits to that accuracy, and there is a question about how useful that information in terms of actually dealing with the emergency - of which notifying relatives is only one small part. The need for a central authority that can route all this information is a foundational point of effective disaster management - so what are the implications of these developments for effective disaster management?

Sanjana also makes a point which I’d agree with entirely:

Of course, what it means is that Facebook, in the US, with reliable broadband wired and wireless coverage, with a ubiquity of PCs, where everyone speaks, reads and comprehends English, where Universities are well connected, where everyone has laptops and where everyone and their pet Chihuahua have a Facebook account, the platform can on occasion get more information out quicker than emergency services.

Time for us to shell out a few bucks for a New Scientist subscription and read the actual research article, rather than the press coverage. Plus, I need to get back on Medication 2.0 or something.

In Science News, Julie Rehmeyer writes a short piece on Humanitarian Statistics, with a focus on the “controversial” Iraq war studies carried in the Lancet. I haven’t posted about the Lancet studies before; I recognise that the Lancet studies have an important role to play in tallying the cost of the Iraq war, but anything I could add to the debate would be largely redundant, since it’s been driven by political rather than humanitarian interests.
Although Deltoid characterises the article as being “about the Lancet studies” - and fair enough, that is his particular interest - it is thankfully wider than that, noting the increase in the use of statistics in the human rights (and to a lesser extent, humanitarian) sector while also being aware of the limitations:

But humanitarian crises pose huge challenges. Little information may be available—even from before a crisis—about how many people live where. Even if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated. Areas within continuing war zones can be unsafe for survey workers.

Examples from Sierra Leone and East Timor are referenced in the article. The latter case is particularly interesting because it wasn’t just based on a straight survey - which is what we generally think of when we think of statistics - but on pulling together separate and incomplete datasets to build a bigger picture, which is the norm in humanitarian crises, particularly in developing countries.

In the comments section at Deltoid, commenter Jeff Harvey laments

I can only shake my head in disbelief. Who will do the survey? The US and British governments, who are responsible for an illegal invasion that has turned Iraq into a country of wreck and ruin? This is the bitter irony. Aggressing nations do not tally the numbers of their victims. Ian Gould summed it up in the thread below this: because the real death toll of civilians conflicts with the well-cultivated myth of US benevolence, western crimes are not a part of history because they are never allowed to become a part of history. They thus get sent straight down the memory hole.

Jeff misses the point that (I think) Julie was trying to make. Although he gives many examples of past victims of war who have been lost to history, we don’t live there any more. There are more people working on these issues than ever before, and we have a better idea of how to approach these problems. However it’s this attitude - that information gathering and analysis should be a political project - that is likely to prove the biggest obstacle to moving forward.

The only way to do justice to the victims and to persuade belligerent parties to accept the results is to treat these issues as impartially as possible - and to do so with the perspective that our work is at the service of the beneficiaries, rather than of our own political interests.

• The Economist article Of internet cafés and power cuts was passably interesting on the subject of technology in developing countries, although it takes the usual optimistic approach that the Economist favours. The Economist picked up on this issue was the publication of this year’s Global Economic Prospects by the World Bank, with a focus on technology adoption and a barrel full of blindingly obvious conclusions.
• More interesting is the research that both of those draw on quite heavily, building a Historical Cross-Country Technology Adoption Database. You can download the database itself from that page, but the overview article Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts by Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn is much more manageable. I haven’t dug into the data yet, but the initial Economist article made me suspicious - the data itself may suffer from survivor bias (e.g. the many failed technologies don’t feature), doesn’t explain disrepancies such as the dominance of VCDs in developing countries as opposed to DVDs in developed countries, and the focus on mobile phone uptake doesn’t take account for the nature of that particular technology. I’m not sure I can face the data itself, as the sun is shining.
• Eagle-eyed Declan Butler (a literal description; he’s at the cutting edge of trans-species surgery) quotes short-sighted Paul Currion in Nature magazine. Declan’s article Satellite can spot razed villages in Darfur on the fantastic work of Erik Prins for Amnesty International on monitoring burnt villages using remote sensing. Amnesty used his research as part of their campaigning back in 2004-5, but Erik has just published an article, Use of low cost Landsat ETM+ to spot burnt villages in Darfur, Sudan, in the International Journal of Remote Sensing. The research is right on the mark, although it’s unlikely that the large-scale study that he calls for in the conclusion will happen any time soon; lack of funds, lack of will.
• I’m angry with Firoz, who published his dissertation without telling me. Or maybe he did tell me and I just forgot. Anyway, my revenge for his oversight and/or my memory loss is to link to it here: The Utility of GIS Analysis in Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance. Congratulations, Firoz; now get back to work.

Ed Granger-Happ is taking a sabbatical from his job as CIO of Save the Children US, and spending the next few months as an executive fellow and the CIO-in-Residence at the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. This is great news for Ed, and for the Center as well, since Ed has a track record of innovation that will hopefully encourage some of the Tuck staff and students to get more engaged in our sector. Even better, he’s started blogging as he begins the residency (I have no idea who managed to persuade him to commit to that…) and I hope that he’ll keep posting on a regular basis at his Dartmouth Fellowship blog.

Outside of humanitarian work, I have a passing interest in complexity theory, particularly around ideas of emergence. As a result, I’m deeply envious of Ben Ramalingam at ODI, who shares this interest but has actually found the time to write something substantial about it. The Working Paper that he has written with Harry Jones, Toussaint Reba and John Young - Exploring the science of complexity: Ideas and implications for development and humanitarian efforts has just been published by the ODI RAPID programme.

This line of research is one of the most important developments in humanitarian and development studies in many years, a potentially critical addition to the ideological foundations of our work (such as the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership), the technocratic scaffolding (such as Human Development Indicators) and the technical ornamentation (such as the Sphere Project).

I don’t agree with everything that Ben and his co-authors have written; in particular I share concerns that applying this framework to what is essentially a social science field has many, many pitfalls. In the paper’s terms, I’m a champion of complexity theory in general - but a pragmatist in the specifics of how we apply it to our work, simply because the stakes are so high. If we’re going to hijack a theory from the domain of pure science, we need to make sure that we are rigorous and open about how that works out in the real world.

So, now I just need to get around to applying for that PhD in the role of complexity theory in humanitarian crises. Someday.

(Full disclosure: I contributed to the peer review for the paper, along with some other people whose names will be more familiar to anybody else working in the sector.)

Last year, the first Mobile Response symposium on Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response was held - they’ve published the proceedings in a proper book and everything (somebody remind me why aren’t we doing that at ISCRAM?). Mobile Response is much more along the “emergency management” axis than the “humanitarian response” axis (you know, critical infrastructure, rescue operations and so on), but obviously there’s a lot of crossover (although at some point I’m going to have to write about the distinction and what it means for ICT issues in particular).

So the Call for Papers for Mobile Response 2008 has just been issued. To give you an idea of the topics that they’re interested in, take a look at this list:

• Mobile and wearable computing
• Context-aware applications
• Geographic information systems and location-based services
• Rescue operation management and decision support systems
• Multimedia and multimodal communication systems
• Requirements, design and empirical foundations
• System support for cross-organizational cooperation
• Critical infrastructure protection
• Strategies for involving the general public
• Information systems for environmental monitoring

And then get writing, I guess.

I thought it had gone defunct, but there’s a new issue of Information Technologies and International Development out at the MIT Press.  And the better news is that they’ve made the journal Open Access, which means that you can download all the articles for free.

It’s the first afternoon of ISCRAM 2006 (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management). I’m giving the keynote speech on Tuesday morning - but right now I’m sitting in front of a panel which includes both Hans Zimmerman and Art Botterell, wondering why I get to make the speech instead of them!

ISCRAM has come a long way in just three years, in terms of size and scope. The number of participants this year is up by about 50%, I think, and the papers being presented are more interesting than ever. Last year it was held at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, this year at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, next year - who knows? It would be nice to hold it somewhere outside the Europe / America axis.

Now I have to write my speech.