“All we need is information. Why can’t we get information?” A quote taken from one of many focus groups conducted by the evaluators. “There was little to no information exchange between the international community tasked with humanitarian response and the Haitian NGOs, civil society or affected persons / communities themselves.” Information is critical for effective humanitarian assistance, which should include two objectives: “preventing excess mortality and human suffering in the immediate, and in the longer term, improving the community’s ability to respond to potential future shocks.” This longer term objective thus focuses on resilience, which the evaluation team defines as follows:

“Resilience is the capacity of the affected community to self-organize, learn from and vigorously recover from adverse situations stronger than it was before.”

This link between resilience and capacity for self-organization is truly profound and incredibly important. To be sure, the evaluation reveals that “the humani-tarian response frequently undermined the capacity of Haitian individuals and organizations.” This completely violates the Hippocratic Oath of Do No Harm. The evaluators thus “promote the attainment of self-sufficiency, rather than the ongoing dependency on standard humanitarian assistance.” Indeed, “focus groups indicated that solutions to help people help themselves were desired.”

I find it particularly telling that many aid organizations interviewed for this assessment were reluctant to assist the evaluators in fully capturing and analyzing resource flows, which are critical for impact evaluation. “The lack of transparency in program dispersal of resources was a major constraint in our research of effective program evaluation.” To this end, the evaluation team argue that “by strengthening Haitian institutions’ ability to monitor and evaluate, Haitians will more easily be able to track and monitor international efforts.”

I completely disagree with this remedy. The institutions are part of the problem, and besides, institution-building takes years if not decades. To assume there is even political will and the resources for such efforts is at best misguided. If resilience is about strengthening the capacity of affected communities to self-organize, then I would focus on just that, applying existing technologies and processes that both catalyze and facilitate demand-side, people-centered self-organization. My previous blog post on “Technology and Building Resilient Societies to Mitigate the Impact of Disasters” elaborates on this point.

In sum, “resilience is the critical link between disaster and development; monitoring it will ensure that relief efforts are supporting, and not eroding, household and community capabilities.” This explains why crowdsourcing and data mining efforts like those of Ushahidi, HealthMap and UN Global Pulse are important for disaster response, self-organization and resilience.

]]> http://irevolution.net/2012/05/23/haiti-humanitarian-evaluation/feed/ 0 Patrick Philippe Meier Total humanitarian funding in Haiti bio http://irevolution.net/2012/05/23/tracking-the-2012-egyptian-presidential-candidates-on-twitter/ http://irevolution.net/2012/05/23/tracking-the-2012-egyptian-presidential-candidates-on-twitter/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 09:04:40 +0000 Patrick Meier http://irevolution.net/?p=7890 Continue reading →]]> My (future) colleague at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have just launched a new platform that Al Jazeera is using to track the 2012 Egyptian Presidential Candidates on Twitter. Called Rayesna, which  means “our president” in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, this fully automated platform uses cutting-edge Arabic computational linguistics processing developed by the Arabic Language Technology (ALT) group at QCRI.

“Through Rayesna, you can find out how many times a candidate is mentioned, which other candidate he is likely to appear with, and the most popular tweets for a candidate, with a special category for the most retweeted jokes about the candidates. The site also has a time-series to explore and compares the mentions of the candidate day-by-day. Caveats: 1. The site reflects only the people who choose to tweet, and this group may not be representative of general society; 2. Tweets often contain foul language and we do not perform any filtering.”

I look forward to collaborating with the ALT group and exploring how their platform might also be used in the context of humanitarian response in the Arab World and beyond. There may also be important synergies with the work of the UN Global Pulse, particularly vis-a-vis their use of Twitter for real-time analysis of vulnerable communities.

Morison details in intriguing fashion the challenges of using light artillery at sea in the late 1,800′s to illustrate how new technologies and new forms of power collide and indeed, “bombard the fixed structure of our habits of mind and behavior.” The first major innovative disruption in naval gunfire technology is the result of one person’s acute observation. Admiral Sir Percy Scott happened to watched his men during target practice one day while the ship they were on was pitching and rolling acutely due to heavy weather. The resulting accuracy of the shots was dismal save for one man who was doing something slightly different to account for the swaying. Scott observed this positive deviance carefully and cobbled existing to technology to render the strategy easier to repeat and replicate. Within a year, his gun crews were remarkable accurate.

Note that Scott was not responsible for the invention of the basic instruments he cobbled together to scale the positive deviance he observed. Scott’s contribution, rather, was  a mashup of existing technology made possible thanks to mechanical ingenuity and a keen eye for behavioral processes. As for the personality of the innovator, Scott possessed “a savage indignation directed ordinarily at the inelastic intelligence of all constituted authority, especially the British Admiralty.” Chance also plays a role in this story. “Fortune (in this case, the unaware gun pointer) indeed favors the prepared mind, but even fortune and the prepared mind need a favorable environment before they can conspire to produce sudden change. No intelligence can proceed very far above the threshold of existing data or the binding combinations of existing data.”

Whilst stationed in China several years later, Admiral Scott crosses paths with William Sims, an American Junior Officer of similar temperament. Sims’s efforts to reform the naval service are perhaps best told in his own words: ”I am perfectly willing that those holding views differing from mine should continue to live, but with every fibre of my being I loathe indirection and shiftiness, and where it occurs in high place, and is used to save face at the expense of the vital interests of our great service (in which silly people place such a child-like trust), I want that man’s blood and I will have it no matter what it costs me personally.” Sims built on Scott’s inventions and made further modifications, resulting in new records in accuracy. “These elements were brought into successful combination by minds not interested in the instruments for themselves but in what they could do with them.”

“Sure of the usefulness of his gunnery methods, Sims then turned to the task of educating the Navy at large.” And this is where the fun really begins. His first strategy was to relay in writing the results of his methods “with a mass of factual data.” Sims authored over a dozen detailed data-driven reports on innovations in naval gunfire strage which he sent from his China Station to the powers that be in Washington DC. At first, there was no response from DC. Sims thus decided to change his tone by using deliberately shocking language in subsequent reports. Writes Sims: “I therefore made up my mind I would give these later papers such a form that they would be dangerous documents to leave neglected in the files.” Sims also decided to share his reports with other officers in the fleet to force a response from the men in Washington.

The response, however, was not exactly what Sims had hoped. Washington’s opinion was that American technology was generally as good as the British, which implied that the trouble was with the men operating the technology, which thus meant that ship officers ought to conduct more training. What probably annoyed Sims most, however, was Washington’s comments vis-a-vis the new records in accuracy that Sims claimed to have achieved. Headquarters simply waived these off as impossible. So while the first reaction was dead silence, DC’s second strategy was to try and “meet Sims’s claims by logical, rational rebuttal.”

I agree with the author, Elting Morison, that this second stage reaction, “the apparent resort to reason,” is the “most entertaining and instructive in our investigation of the responses to innovation.” That said, the third stage, name-calling, can be just as entertaining for some, and Sims took the argumentum ad hominem as evidence that “he was being attacked by shifty, dishonest men who were the victims, as he said, of insufferable conceit and ignorance.” He thus took the extraordinary step of writing directly to the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, to inform him of the remarkable achievements in accuracy that he and Admiral Scott had achieved. ”Roosevelt, who always liked to respond to such appeals when he conveniently could, brought Sims back from China late in 1902 and installed him as Inspector of Target Practice [...]. And when he left, after many spirited encounters [...], he was universally acclaimed as ‘the man who taught us how to shoot.’”

What fascinates Morison in this story is the concerted resistance triggered by Sims’s innovation. Why so much resistance? Morison identifies three main sources: “honest disbelief in the dramatic but substantiated claims of the new process; protection of the existing devices and instruments with which they identified themselves; and maintenance of the existing society with which they were identified.” He argues that the latter explanation is the most important, i.e., resistance due to the “fixed structure of our habits of mind and behavior” and the fact that relatively small innovations in gunfire accuracy could quite conceivably unravel the entire fabric of naval doctrine. Indeed,

“From changes in gunnery flowed an extraordinary complex of changes: in shipboard routines, ship design, and fleet tactics. There was, too, a social change. In the days when gunnery was taken lightly, the gunnery officer was taken lightly. After 1903, he became one of the most significant and powerful members of a ship’s company, and this shift of emphasis nat- urally was shortly reflected in promotion lists. Each one of these changes provoked a dislocation in the naval society, and with man’s troubled foresight and natural indisposition to break up classic forms, the men in Washington withstood the Sims onslaught as long as they could. It is very significant that they withstood it until an agent from outside, outside and above, who was not clearly identified with the naval society, entered to force change.”

The resistance to change thus “springs from the normal human instinct to protect oneself, and more especially, one’s way of life.” Interestingly, the deadlock between those who sought change and those who sought to retain things as they were was broken only by an appeal to superior force, a force removed from and unidentified with the mores, conventions, devices of the society. This seems to me a very important point.”  The appeal to Roosevelt suggests perhaps that no organization “should or can undertake to reform itself. It must seek assistance from outside.”

I am absolutely intrigued by what these insights might imply vis-a-vis innovation (and resistance to innovation) in the humanitarian sector. Whether it be the result of combining existing technologies to produce open-source crisis mapping platforms or the use of new information management processes such as crowdsourcing, is concerted resistance to such innovation in the humanitarian space inevitable as well? Do we have a Roosevelt equivalent, i..e, an external and somewhat independent actor who might disrupt the resistance? I can definitely trace the same stages of resistance to innovations in humanitarian technology as those identified by Morison: (1) dead silence; (2) reasoned dismissal; and (3) name-calling. But as Morison himself is compelled to ask: “How then can we find the means to accept with less pain to ourselves and less damage to our social organization the dislocations in our society that are produced by innovation?”

This question, or rather Morison’s insights in tackling this question are profound and have important implications vis-a-vis innovation in the humanitarian space. Morison hones in on the imperative of “identification” in innovation:

“It cannot have escaped notice that some men identified themselves with their creations- sights, gun, gear, and so forth-and thus obtained a presumed satisfaction from the thing itself, a satisfaction that prevented them from thinking too closely on either the use or the defects of the thing; that others identified themselves with a settled way of life they had inherited or accepted with minor modification and thus found their satisfaction in attempting to maintain that way of life unchanged; and that still others identified themselves as rebellious spirits, men of the insurgent cast of mind, and thus obtained a satisfaction from the act of revolt itself.”

This purely personal identification is a powerful barrier to innovation. So can this identifying process be tampered in order to facilitate change that is ultima-tely in everyone’s interest? Morison recommends that we “spend some time and thought on the possibility of enlarging the sphere of our identifications from the part to the whole.” In addition, he suggests an emphasis on process rather than product. If we take this advice to heart, what specific changes should we seek to make in the humanitarian technology space? How do we enlarge the sphere of our identifications and in doing so focus on processes rather than products? There’s no doubt that these are major challenges in and of themselves, but ignoring them may very well mean that important innovations in life-saving technologies and processes will go un-adopted by large humanitarian organiza-tions for many years to come.

My mission over the past five years has been to catalyze strategic linkages between the technology and humanitarian space to promote both innovation and change, so this new adventure feels like the perfect next chapter in this exciting adventure. I’ve had the good fortune and distinct honor of working with some truly inspiring and knowledgeable colleagues who have helped me define and pursue my passions over the years. Needless to say, I’ve learned a great deal from these colleagues; knowledge, contacts and partnerships that I plan to fully leverage at the Qatar Foundation.

It really has been an amazing five years. I joined the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) in 2007 to co-found and co-direct the Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. The purpose of the program was to assess how new technologies were changing the humanitarian space and how these could be deliberately leveraged to yield more significant impact. As part of my time at HHI, I consulted on a number of cutting-edge projects including the UNDP’s Crisis and Risk Mapping Analysis (CRMA) Program in the Sudan. I also leveraged this iRevolution blog extensively to share my findings and learnings with both the humanitarian and technology communities. In addition, I co-authored the UN Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Report on “New Technologies in Emergen-cies and Conflicts” (PDF).

Towards the end of HHI’s program in 2009, I co-launched the Humanitarian Technology Network, CrisisMappers, and have co-organized and curated each International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) since then. The Network now includes close to 4,000 members based in some 200 countries around the world. Last year, ICCM 2011 brought together more than 400 participants to Geneva, Switzerland to explore and define the cutting edge of humanitarian technology. This year, ICCM 2012 is being hosted by the World Bank and will no doubt draw an even greater number of experts from the humanitarian & technology space.

I joined Ushahidi as Director of Crisis Mapping shortly after launching the Crisis Mappers Network. My goal was to better understand the field of crisis mapping from the perspective of a technology company and to engage directly with international humanitarian, human rights and media organizations so they too could better understand how to leverage the technologies in the Ushahidi ecosystem. There, I spearheaded several defining crisis mapping projects including Haiti, Libya, Somalia and Syria in partnership with key humanitarian, human rights and media organizations. I also spoke at many high-profile conferences to share many of the lessons learned and best practices resulting from these projects. I am very grateful to these conference organizers for giving me the stage at so many important events, thank you very much. And of course, special thanks to the team at Ushahidi for the truly life-changing experience.

Whilst at Ushahidi, I also completed my PhD during my pre-doctoral fellowship at Stanford and co-founded the award-winning Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) to provide partner organizations with surge capacity for live mapping support. I co-created the SBTF’s Satellite Imagery Team to apply crowdsourcing and micro-tasking to satellite imagery analysis in support of humanitarian operations. I also explored a number of promising data mining solutions for social media analysis vis-a-vis crisis response. More recently, I co-launched the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) in partnership with a UN colleague.

The words “co-founded,” “co-launched,” and “co-directed” appear throughout the above because all these initiatives are the direct result of major team-work, truly amazing partners and inspiring mentors. You all know who you are. Thank you very much for your guidance, expertise, friendship and for your camara-derie throughout. I look forward to collaborating with you even more once I get settled at the Qatar Foundation.

To learn more about QCRI’s work thus far, I recommend watching the above presentation given by the Institute’s Director who has brought together an incredible team—professionals who all share his ambition and exciting vision. When we began to discuss my job description at the Foundation, I was simply told: “Think Big.” The Institute’s Advisory Board is also a source of excitement for me: Joichi Ito (MIT) and Rich deMillo (GeorgiaTech), to name a few. 

Naturally, the Qatar Foundation also has access to tremendous resources and an amazing set of partners from multiple sectors in Doha, the region and across the globe. In short, the opportunity for QCRI to become an important contributor to the humanitarian technology space is huge. I look forward to collaborating with many existing colleagues and partners to turn this exciting opportunity into reality and look forward to continuing this adventure with an amazing team of experts in Doha who are some of the best in their fields. More soon!

First: blog, blog, blog! The blog is the new CV. If you don’t exist dynamically online, then you’re not indexable on the web. And if you’re not indexable, then you’re not searchable or discoverable. You don’t exist! Blog-ergo-sum, simple as that. Chris and I have been blogging for years and this has enabled us to further our knowledge and credibility, not to mention our network of contacts. The blog allows you to build your own independent brand, not your advisor’s and not your program’s. This is critical. We’ve received consulting gigs and keynote invitations based on blog posts that we’ve published over the years. Do not underestimate the power of blogging for your professional (and yes, academic) career. In many ways, blogging is about getting credit for your ideas and to signal to others what you know and what your interests are.

Second: get on Twitter! Malcolm Gladwell is wrong: social media can build strong-tie bonds. Heck, social media is how I originally met Chris. If the blog is the new CV, then consider your Twitter account the new business card. Use Twitter to meet everyone, everywhere. Let people know you’ll be in London for a conference and don’t underestimate the synergies and serendipity that is the twittersphere. Chris currently follows around 1,200 people on Twitter, and he estimates that over the years he has met around half of them in person. That is a lot of contacts and, frankly, potential employers. Moreover, like blogging, tweeting enables you to connect to others and stay abreast of interesting new developments. Once upon a time, people used to email you interesting articles, conferences, etc. I personally got on Twitter several years ago when I realized that said emails were no longer making it to my inbox. This information was now being shared via Twitter instead. Like the blog, Twitter allows you to create and manage your own personal brand.

Third: decide whether you want an academic career, a professional career, or both. The path you chose will require you to take different turns to excel and get ahead. Chris and I chose the combined scholar-practitioner route, which we personally find the most rewarding, flexible and exciting path. If this route appeals to you, then be sure to use the research papers you write for your coursework as an excuse to interview individuals and organizations that you may want to work with in the future. This allows you to learn more about the organizations themselves and to actively network during your studies. Moreover, your resulting papers will be stronger and more interesting, not to mention policy-relevant. This means both your professional contacts who your interview and your professors will gain from your research. Indeed, being in graduate schools gives you more time to think and explore issues in depth—a luxury that many practitioners simply do not have. You get to delve into the literature and fuse those insights with those gained from your interviews and hands-on research. The result is a solid and unique research paper, both academically and policy-wise.

Fourth: Consult on projects outside of academia and be sure to pro-actively identify and attend interesting conferences. And yes, do so even if it means skipping a few classes and getting a lower grade. But do let your professor know why you may be absent. In my case, profs were always supportive of external engagement. In your consulting projects, be strategic and explore how you can combine deliverables with required research papers in your coursework. This will yield both stronger consulting deliverables and research papers. Be sure to blog about your consulting projects and the conference panels that you find most interesting. Going to conferences will set you apart and these events are often important fora for new ideas that have not yet made it to the peer-reviewed literature or even blogs.

Fifth: Teach, whether formally or informally, whether in person or online. The process of creating the ultimate syllabus on the topic you’re most interested in is highly informative and educational. Think about taking an independent study course to do this. Having teaching experience will also set you apart and be good fodder for blogging as well. Like conferences, teaching a course exposes you to others who you wouldn’t otherwise connect with and can thus be an excellent  source for new ideas and insights.

Sixth: Selecting a dissertation topic is probably one of the most important steps in the PhD process. We can’t stress enough how important it is to select a topic that you yourself are personally excited about. The topic you select should be one that you are most likely to remain passionate about for years to come. I actually changed dissertation topics after taking my comprehensive exams. And while this may have set me back a year, I have absolutely no regrets given how excited and I’ve been regarding the topic I wrote about. If you’re taking the scholar-practitioner route, than the topic should be one that figures in the media from time-to-time (preferably on a regular basis). Why? Because that ensures you’re working on something that’s relevant and of interest to wider community than just fellow academics. Plus, if you’re doing a PhD on a topic that is of interest to the media, this increases your chances of getting visibility, especially if you’re also blogging. This can be rewarding and a great way to remain excited about your topic. Indeed, be sure to use your blog to flesh out the concepts you’re exploring for your dissertation, especially vis-a-vis the literature review. This is a very productive way to get feedback.

Seventh: The right dissertation committee can make all the difference to the PhD experience. And “right” here can mean different things. Do you want strong hands-on support from your committee or your Chair in particular? Or are you someone who works best with minimal “interruption” from said committee? Obviously, you’ll want to select each committee member carefully. Avoid at all costs any faculty members with attitude problems and those who feel like they have something to prove. What you’re looking for is a real mentor, particularly for the Chair of your committee, and someone who not only approaches the PhD process as a partnership but who will also be your ally long after your PhD. In building your committee, think about diversity. If you’re taking the scholar-practitioner route, be sure to have a good mix of strong academics and policy folks. In other words, be strategic and deliberate. In our opinion, the best committee allows you to do your own thing. The worst shoehorn you into following their career path.

So there you go, some (hopefully) straightforward advice from Chris Albon and yours truly. Best of luck on your career path if you do go for a PhD!

I recently visited my alma mater, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), where I learned more about the free and open source KoBo ToolBox project that my colleagues Phuong Pham, Patrick Vinck and John Etherton have been working on. What really attracts me about KoBo, which means transfer in Acholi, is that the entire initiative is driven by highly experienced and respec-ted practitioners. Often, software developers are the ones who build these types of platforms in the hopes that they add value to the work of practitioners. In the case of KoBo, a team of seasoned practitioners are fully in the drivers seat. The result is a highly dedicated, customized and relevant solution.

Phuong and Patrick first piloted handheld digital data collection in 2007 in Northern Uganda. This early experience informed the development of KoBo which continues to be driven by actual field-based needs and challenges such as limited technical know-how. In short, KoBo provides an integrated suite of applications for handheld data collection that are specifically designed for a non-technical audience, ie., the vast majority of human rights and humanitarian practitioners out there. This suite of applications enable users to collect and analyze field data in virtually real-time.

KoBoForm allows you to build multimedia surveys for data collection purposes, integrating special datatypes like bar-codes, images and audio. Time stamps and geo-location via GPS let you know exactly where and when the data was collected (important for monitoring and evaluation, for example). KoBoForm’s optional data constraints and skip logic further ensure data accuracy. KoBoCollect is an Android-based app based on ODK. Surveys built with KoBoForm are easily uploaded to any number of Android phones sporting the KoBoCollect app, which can also be used offline and automatically synched when back in range. KoBoSync pushes survey data from the Android(s) to your computer for data analysis while KoBoMap lets you display your results in an interactive map with a user-friendly interface. Importantly, KoBoMap is optimized for low-bandwidth connections.

The KoBo platform has been used in to conduct large scale population studies in places like the Central African Republic, Northern Uganda and Liberia. In total, Phuong and Patrick have interviewed more than 25,000 individuals in these countries using KoBo, so the tool has certainly been tried and tested. The resulting data, by the way, is available via this data-visualization portal. The team is  currently building new features for KoBo to apply the tool in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They are also collaborating with UNDP to develop a judicial monitoring project in the DRC using KoBoToolbox, which will help them “think through some of the requirements for longitudinal data collection and tracking of cases.”

In sum, the expert team behind KoBo is building these software solutions first and foremost for their own field work. As Patrick notes here, “the use of these tools was instrumental to the success of many of our projects.” This makes all the difference vis-a-vis the resulting technology.

Gene Sharp pioneered the study of nonviolent civil resistance. Some argue that his books were instrumental to the success of activists in a number of revolutions over the past 20 years ranging from the overthrow of Milosevic to ousting of Mubarak. Civil resistance has often been referred to as “nonviolent guerrilla warfare” and Sharp’s manual on “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” for example, includes a list of 198 methods that activists can use to actively disrupt a repressive regime. These methods are divided into three sections: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.

While Sharp’s 198 are still as relevant today as they were some 40 years ago, the technology space has changed radically. In Sharp’s “Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts” published in 2012, Gene writes that “a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.” About four years ago, I began to think about how technology could extend Sharp’s methods and possibly generate entirely new methods as well. This blog post was my first attempt at thinking this through and while it was my intention to develop the ideas further for my dissertation, my academic focus shifted somewhat.

With the PhD out of the way, my colleague Mary Joyce suggested we launch a research project to explore how Sharp’s methods can and are being extended as a result of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The time was ripe for this kind of research so we spent the past few months building a database of civil resistance methods 2.0 based on Sharp’s original list. We also consulted a number of experts in the field to help us populate this online database. We decided not to restrict the focus of this research  to ICTs only–i.e., any type of technology qualifies, such as drones, for example.

This database will be an ongoing initiative and certainly a live document since we’ll be crowdsourcing further input. In laying the foundations for this database, we’ve realized once again just how important creativity is when thinking about civil resistance. Advances in technology and increasing access to technology provides fertile ground for the kind of creativity that is key to making civil resistance successful.

We invite you to contribute your creativity to this database and share the link (bit.ly/CivRes20) widely with your own networks. We’ve added some content, but there is still a long way to go. Please share any clever uses of technology that you’ve come across that have or could be applied to civil resistance by adding them.

Our goal is to provide activists with a go-to resource where they can browse through lists of technology-assisted methods to inform their own efforts. In the future, we envision taking the database a step further by considering what sequencing of said methods are most effective.

• The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a tool for rapid geospatial data collection will increase.

• 3D and even 4D geospatial information, incorporating time as the fourth dimension, will increase.

• Technology will move faster than legal and governance structures.

• The link between geospatial information and social media, plus other actor networks, will become more and more important.

• Real-time info will enable more dynamic modeling & response to disasters.

• Free and open source software will continue to grow as viable alternatives both in terms of software, and potentially in analysis and processing.

• Geospatial computation will increasingly be non-human consumable in nature, with an increase in fully-automated decision systems.

• Businesses and Governments will increasingly invest in tools and resources to manage Big Data. The technologies required for this will enable greater use of raw data feeds from sensors and other sources of data.

• In ten years time it is likely that all smart phones will be able to film 360 degree 3D video at incredibly high resolution by today’s standards & wirelessly stream it in real time.

• There will be a need for geospatial use governance in order to discern the real world from the virtual/modelled world in a 3D geospatial environ-ment.

• Free and open access to data will become the norm and geospatial information will increasingly be seen as an essential public good.

• Funding models to ensure full data coverage even in non-profitable areas will continue to be a challenge.

• Rapid growth will lead to confusion and lack of clarity over data ownership, distribution rights, liabilities and other aspects.

• In ten years, there will be a clear dividing line between winning and losing nations, dependent upon whether the appropriate legal and policy frameworks have been developed that enable a location-enabled society to flourish.

• Some governments will use geospatial technology as a means to monitor or restrict the movements and personal interactions of their citizens. Individuals in these countries may be unwilling to use LBS or applications that require location for fear of this information being shared with authorities.

• The deployment of sensors and the broader use of geospatial data within society will force public policy and law to move into a direction to protect the interests and rights of the people.

• Spatial literacy will not be about learning GIS in schools but will be more centered on increasing spatial awareness and an understanding of the value of understanding place as context.

• The role of National Mapping Agencies as an authoritative supplier of high quality data and of arbitrator of other geospatial data sources will continue to be crucial.

• Monopolies held by National Mapping Agencies in some areas of specialized spatial data will be eroded completely.

• More activities carried out by National Mapping Agencies will be outsourced and crowdsourced.

• Crowdsourced data will push National Mapping Agencies towards niche markets.

• National Mapping Agencies will be required to find new business models to provide simplified licenses and meet the demands for more free data from mapping agencies.

• The integration of crowdsourced data with government data will increase over the next 5 to 10 years.

• Crowdsourced content will decrease cost, improve accuracy and increase availability of rich geospatial information.

•  There will be increased combining of imagery with crowdsourced data to create datasets that could not have been created affordably on their own.

• Progress will be made on bridging the gap between authoritative data and crowdsourced data, moving towards true collaboration.

• There will be an accelerated take-up of Volunteer Geographic Information over the next five years.

• Within five years the level of detail on transport systems within OpenStreetMap will exceed virtually all other data sources & will be respected/used by major organisations & governments across the globe.

• Community-based mapping will continue to grow.

• There is unlikely to be a market for datasets like those currently sold to power navigation and location-based services solutions in 5 years, as they will have been superseded by crowdsourced datasets from OpenStreetMaps or other comparable initiatives.

Which trends have the experts missed? Do you think they’re completely off on any of the above? The full set of predictions on the future of global geospatial information management is available here as a PDF.

Adel also shared some interesting insights on how location-aware mobile tech-nologies are being used to build a new Egypt. “After the revolution, the police force just disappeared, there is no police; and there is no traffic control. But this drove more crowdsourced traffic control, crowdsourced police, crowdsourced services. And this has been happening in the last year alone. Crowdsourcing revolution. But not a revolution to overthrow a tyrant but a revolution to build a developed country. [...] People going to clean the streets, planting trees, repainting the streets. And they are feeling ownership of their campaign.”

Adel shared several other crowdsourcing initiatives in his talk, from OneYad (matching volunteers) and Zabatak (monitoring corruption) to EntaFeen (check-in’s for good), Bey2Ollak and Wasalny (both addressing the problem of road traffic). I’m excited by all this innovation happening elsewhere than Silicon Valley and hope these platforms will go mainstream beyond the region in the near future. Indeed, I just signed up for the OneYad beta because I really think this kind of tool could be used in the West.

Adel: ”We see a lot of crowdsourced networks built after the revolution because we need to build the country and we want to do this bottom-up, want to do it by the people, you want to empower the people.” The point, for Adel, is to go “from social networking to social working” and thus fill the gaps in services that institutions are failing to provide. This reminded me of Tunisian Ambassador Mohamed Salah Tekaya’s remarks last year: “During the Arab Spring, we have seen the power of Twitter and Facebook… Now we need to use the power of LinkedIn.”

The Digital Operations Center at the American Red Cross is an important and exciting development. I recently sat down with Wendy Harman to learn more about the initiative and to exchange some lessons learned in this new world of digital  humanitarians. One common challenge in emergency response is scaling. The American Red Cross cannot be everywhere at the same time—and that includes being on social media. More than 4,000 tweets reference the Red Cross on an average day, a figure that skyrockets during disasters. And when crises strike, so does Big Data. The Digital Operations Center is one response to this scaling challenge.

Sponsored by Dell, the Center uses customized software produced by Radian 6 to monitor and analyze social media in real-time. The Center itself sits three people who have access to six customized screens that relate relevant information drawn from various social media channels. The first screen below depicts some of key topical areas that the Red Cross monitors, e.g., references to the American Red Cross, Storms in 2012, and Delivery Services.

Circle sizes in the first screen depict the volume of references related to that topic area. The color coding (red, green and beige) relates to sentiment analysis (beige being neutral). The dashboard with the “speed dials” right underneath the first screen provides more details on the sentiment analysis.

Lets take a closer look at the circles from the first screen. The dots “orbiting” the central icon relate to the categories of key words that the Radian 6 platform parses. You can click on these orbiting dots to “drill down” and view the individual key words that make up that specific category. This circles screen gets updated in near real-time and draws on data from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and blogs. (Note that the distance between the orbiting dots and the center does not represent anything).

An operations center would of course not be complete without a map, so the Red Cross uses two screens to visualize different data on two heat maps. The one below depicts references made on social media platforms vis-a-vis storms that have occurred during the past 3 days.

The screen below the map highlights the bio’s of 50 individual twitter users who have made references to the storms. All this data gets generated from the “Engagement Consul” pictured below. The purpose of this web-based tool, which looks a lot like Tweetdeck, is to enable the Red Cross to customize the specific types of information they’re looking form, and to respond accordingly.

Lets look at the Consul more closely. In the Workflow section on the left, users decide what types of tags they’re looking for and can also filter by priority level. They can also specify the type of sentiment they’re looking, e.g., negative feelings vis-a-vis a particular issue. In addition, they can take certain actions in response to each information item. For example, they can reply to a tweet, a Facebook status update, or a blog post; and they can do this directly from the engagement consul. Based on the license that the Red Cross users, up to 25 of their team members can access the Consul and collaborate in real-time when processing the various tweets and Facebook updates.

The Consul also allows users to create customized timelines, charts and wordl graphics to better understand trends changing over time in the social media space. To fully leverage this social media monitoring platform, Wendy and team are also launching a digital volunteers program. The goal is for these volunteers to eventually become the prime users of the Radian platform and to filter the bulk of relevant information in the social media space. This would considerably lighten the load for existing staff. In other words, the volunteer program would help the American Red Cross scale in the social media world we live in.

Wendy plans to set up a dedicated 2-hour training for individuals who want to volunteer online in support of the Digital Operations Center. These trainings will be carried out via Webex and will also be available to existing Red Cross staff.

As  argued in this previous blog post, the launch of this Digital Operations Center is further evidence that the humanitarian space is ready for innovation and that some technology companies are starting to think about how their solutions might be applied for humanitarian purposes. Indeed, it was Dell that first approached the Red Cross with an expressed interest in contributing to the organization’s efforts in disaster response. The initiative also demonstrates that combining automated natural language processing solutions with a digital volunteer net-work seems to be a winning strategy, at least for now.

After listening to Wendy describe the various tools she and her colleagues use as part of the Operations Center, I began to wonder whether these types of tools will eventually become free and easy enough for one person to be her very own operations center. I suppose only time will tell. Until then, I look forward to following the Center’s progress and hope it inspires other emergency response organizations to adopt similar solutions.