humanitarian.info

I spoke last week with Conor Foley, who’s looking at innovation in the humanitarian sector for the next ALNAP annual report. As any fule kno, innovation is a particularly interest of mine, particularly technology innovation, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that most of his interviewees shared my perspective: that the humanitarian community is not much good at innovation.

I should qualify that. The humanitarian community is built on innovation - on just getting things done despite a lack of resources - but successful innovation is very hard to come by. I define “successful” in this context as innovations that become widespread and enduring - that is, that they spread widely and last over time. I should probably qualify that as well:

1. All innovations have a distinct lifespan, and are often superceded by a new innovation (or more rarely a completely new invention). So if an innovation endures over time, that is evidence of its success; but if an innovation doesn’t endure, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.
2. All innovations are context-specific, and sometimes don’t translate into other contexts. So likewise, if an innovation spreads geographically / organisationally, that is evidence for its success; but if it doesn’t, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.

These two qualifications makes successful innovation sometimes hard to identify - but not impossible. In terms of projects that I’ve been involved with inside the sector, I think the Humanitarian Information Centres, the ECB Project and NetHope all qualify without any doubt (although the innovation in each project is exhibited in very different ways). What interests me more is innovation outside the sector.

I’ve been involved with Sahana for a long time now, and I wouldn’t hesitate to identify it as the single biggest innovation I’ve seen - potentially revolutionary. You can also point to projects like Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS and so forth - projects that, while not “humanitarian” in themselves, have definite humanitarian applications - but the strange thing about all these is that they haven’t managed to get significant traction inside the “traditional” humanitarian sector.

The question is, Why is this the case? What makes the humanitarian community unable to recognise and replicate innovation? And that, my friends, will be the subject of the next post…

UPDATE: To my eternal guilt and shame, I forgot to mention a fourth project that I was involved with, Aid Workers Network - again, work that was well ahead of its time, mainly thanks to Mark Hammersley.

• MapAction and BrightEarth both feature in an article in the Independent entitled “Mapping the disaster zones” - how they think up the intensely creative titles for these articles, I just don’t know. Interesting enough, but these articles always leave me with a sense that the writer just doesn’t get it - apparently “Within 48 hours: The latest field information is combined with accurate 1:5,000,000 “base maps” to form the first complete maps of disaster-zone data”, which is news to me.

• At the bottom of the press release Intel, Grameen Announce Joint Business Venture to Fuel Social and Economic Development Opportunities Empowered by Technology, we learn that Intel have teamed up with NetHope to develop new solutions for the field, the first (and possibly last) of which is the Aid Station, a “rugged, purpose-built, low-cost technology platform suitable for use in harsh, remote locations”.

• Jon Thompson sends me links to two initiatives which mainly force me to ask the question “Why?” NGO Post and Commkit are both well-intended, but both seem to be hell-bent on reinventing the wheel. If Digg works, why not just create an NGO channel on it rather than build an entirely new NGO version of it? If you need “a humanitarian communications platform that is autonomous (works with very little infrastructure) and accessible (anyone can use it)”, then why not use the internet with Sahana running on it? OTOH, it’s standard NGO practice to reinvent the wheel, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised - however if anybody can shed any light on either of these, I’ll be more than happy to revise my opinion.

• Development Gateway have launched two new dgCommunities - one for Disasters Prevention and Response and one for Stabilization & Reconstruction, both with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This partnership seems to have emerged out of CSIS giving up on the idea of launching their own community, the Hub, which explains the inclusion of S&R (terminology which the US military loves and the humanitarian community does not). I’ve nothing against community sites, but I’m waiting to see one in this sector which works as a community (particularly following my own experience with AidWorkers Network).

• The OLPC XO2 is announced. Quoth OLPC news:

On top of that it seems as though a new UN Millennium Development Goal is in the works. The press-release quotes Nirj Deva, Member of the European Parliament, as saying: “One Laptop per Child and the XO laptop are crucial to the fulfillment of the proposed UN Ninth Millennium Goal: to ensure that every child between the ages of 6 and 12 has immediate access to a personal laptop computer by 2015.”

Somebody shoot me. Or better still, send me more news for this section.

It’s the time of year when NetHope like to get together and stare at hardware until it breaks. That’s right, the NetHope Summit 2008 is on again, this time hosted by Cisco - and once again, David Goodman of IRC is blogging from the conference.