This is a draft of a blog entry. The idea needs further refinement, and we welcome your feedback!
When a disaster occurs, whether fast like an earthquake or slow like a drought or war, people go missing. As outsiders wishing to contribute to restoring the stability of our worlds, the desire to reunite friends and loved ones through the technology we know so well can be tempting. Making use of our knowledge of social platforms, geotagging, and databases is far easier than addressing the long-term systemic injustices which allow these crises to affect entire populations in the way they do, afterall. But let’s say a typhoon has just made landfall, or that there’s a sudden influx of refugees from a drought-blighted country, and you and a group of your friends have gathered to see what you can do about it. This is beautiful — we need to learn how to work in solidarity with those in other geographies. But it’s also a delicate space. This particular post is about whether or not you should build that missing persons app, or spend your time contributing to something like Google Person Finder, OpenStreetMap, Sahana, or Standby Task Force instead.
The missing persons/reunification domain of humanitarian response is not just about people logging themselves so as to be findable by those missing them. It’s also about those individuals being protected during the process, having support in finding those they’ve been separated from, and the infrastructure which surrounds these actions. Software has a lot to contribute to connection, information security, and sorting through indexes, but missing persons is a delicate space with real humans in the mix.
This is an inhabited space
The decolonized mind starts from:
1) others have always been here, working on this
2) my task is to find them &
3) amplify
There are already missing persons tools and organizations which have been vetted for capacity and integrity for follow-through and security. Here are the few most successfully used ones: American Red Cross’ Safe and Well, Google Person Finder, Sahana, Refugees United, International Committee of the Red Cross’ Restoring Family Links, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Please offer to help improve and maintain these existing tools (code repos and communities are linked to from each name)! If you are uncomfortable or unsure of how to contact them, please let me/Tim know!
However, we also understand that the world changes. We gain access to new technologies, there are new clever people in the world, and our understandings of situations change. There is *always* room for improvement in this space, just as any other. Want to do something substantively “better” or different than what the existing tools and organizations already do? Here’s what you need to know:
A component, not a solution
The software-based frontend and backing database are a TINY FRACTION of the overall system of missing persons reunification efforts. People are often missing for a *reason*, possibly because of political unrest, domestic violence, or displacement. If your platform publishes photos of someone or their geographic location, will someone try to come after them? Can you protect their physical and emotional wellbeing? There are national and international laws in place to protect such individuals, especially children, and your component of the system must be in alignment with those laws (or have a damn good and intentional reason for not being as such). Ethically, you should also respect an individual’s desire or need for privacy. In the Missing Persons Community of Interest, organizations handling missing persons data are reviewed by external parties for their ability to perform long-term maintainence and protection of said data. You and your tool will need to undergo the same rigor before being launched.
Complications versus easing interaction
Your goal is to make finding loved ones easier, right? Think about how many tools are already in play (see “This is an inhabited space” section above), and what adding one more to the mix would be like. Every new missing persons platform is another point of decision-making stress on the missing persons and those seeking them. Imagine being asked for personal information about yourself while under extreme duress over and over and over again.. or having to repeatedly enter in the details of someone you love and are deeply worried about while on a desperate search for them. The listed existing tools have gone through (and in some cases, are still working out) data sharing flows to reduce these stressors while still maintaining their committments to privacy and security of the data they hold. If you launch your tool, you’ll need to adhere to the same levels of empathy, respect, privacy, and sharing. (Side note, please don’t start a “uniting platform,” either, lest we get here. That’s what sharing standards are about.)
We look forward to your heartfelt, well-thought out contributions to this space.
Homelessness is a persistent problem in US cities and elsewhere. Homelessness should not be viewed in isolation, as it is coupled withhealth, career, family and socio-economic context. Recent innovations in approach to addressing homelessness and associated problems in the US, particularly “housing first,” have been hailedas major advances by providing housing and services, without imposed limitations around behavior or curfews. Still, the problem is far from resolved. NECSI dedicated both of our July salons to the topic of homelessness, as well as returning to the topic in October.
We started by building a basic map of the problem/solution space of homelessness — what is the current understanding, strategies to address it and key actors? Participants in our discussion group have contributed to an ever-growing list of initiatives, research, and reflections on this topic.
The difficulties in effective response to homelessness include a mismatch of complexity and scale similar to problems in the health care system. The capabilities of response organizations do not match the scale across the population and complexity of individual circumstances. An industrial one-size-fits-all approach does not address diverse individual problems, but efficiency is necessary in order to address the largest scale societal aspects of the problem at sustainable cost. Moreover, there is limited effort to analyze the underlying drivers and the opportunity to change them so that the problem itself diminishes in scale.
Among the issues that may be exacerbating the problem: weak social support systems of family and community; poor state of mental health care; lack of ready access to adequate medical care; the coupling of poverty, crime and a revolving door prison system; economic developments affecting the relationship of employment opportunities, income and housing costs; geographical dimensions of housing; and the increasing complexity of successful participation in the socio-economic system. We can consider the dynamics of individual participation in society and how it can be disrupted. People may be compelled to depart from established paths of societal participation due to medical emergencies, family conflict, mental health complications, employment problems, or even endemic poverty. Such individuals can get caught in what appear to be similar to the turbulent eddies that accompany rapid flows of fluids, cycling in and then out of jail, halfway houses, homeless shelters or other short-term “solutions.” Escaping these cycles to restore effective participation in society is difficult to achieve without addressing the entire context. The barrier to to such an escape appears ever growing. Prevention may not attract sufficient attention when the limited support programs are available only in extreme cases. In short, by stripping away social support, we’ve made the gaps through which some might fall wider and deeper.
Many cities and organizations are engaged in solving the problem of homelessness, demonstrating a variety of approaches with lessons about what is and is not effective under different circumstances. These initiatives address: access to housing, work, food, healthcare; specific needs such as mental health, addiction, youth & family services; support networks including mentors, social contact with wider community, support for marginalized groups. Enhancing coordination among various types of activities may increase effectiveness. From a complex systems perspective, separating different types of activities may limit their ability to address the complexity of individual circumstances, and perhaps also the scale of the problem across many individuals, but may also enhance innovation. Innovation is particularly helpful if there are opportunities for subsequent integration or scaling up of these efforts. Few efforts are focused on addressing underlying societal drivers, such as reforming the mental health, legal or prison systems. Recent attention to minimum wage can be considered part of the larger framework of economic issues that impact homelessness among other societal problems.
The benefits of resolving these issues are massive — ethically, as well as pragmatically. Ethically, housing can be linked to basic human rights. The rights of the individual, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, cannot be viewed independently of the systems that enable them to have or exercise those rights. Society also benefits by providing systems that enable individuals to contribute to collective advancement through economic activity and social participation. Pragmatically, the cost of effective safety nets that enable individuals to be productive members of society are lower for many individuals than the alternative — providing housing and rehabilitation for marginalized individuals. Resulting costs include food and shelter, uninsured health care, law enforcement, prisons, etc. When individuals are marginalized, multiple problems reinforce each other. This is compatible with the mathematical model of an attractor in which multiple interacting components self-consistently reinforce a system state.
Cities across the country are renewing their focus on this topic. The White House’s ‘Opening Doors’ initiative asked cities to make 2015 the year ending veteran and chronic homelessness. This time of renewed attention may provide a chance to apply complex systems theory locally, in practice. We are seeking partners with whom to develop a program of engagement, analysis and policy recommendations in our area, and beyond.
These notes were taken at the 2014.Dec.18 New England Complex Systems Institute Salon focused on Ebola. Sam, Willow, and Yaneer contributed to this write-up, and 20 people were in attendance. We hope you’ll join us in future. We’ll have unstructured meetings each Wednesday from 18:00 to 20:00 (6p-8p) starting Jan 21st, with the fourth Wednesday of each month structured towards contribution towards a global challenge. The next such structured event will be on January 28th, on the subject of ethnic violence. You can see notes on this and potential future subjects here, and can register here.
About Ebola at NECSI [briefing by Yaneer]
NECSI has a history of studying Ebola models, and has predicted something similar to what is currently going on in West Africa for some time now. NECSI started with a model of pathogen evolution in which the most aggressive stable state has virus constantly passing slowly through populations, creating islands, dying out as people expand into areas with no disease.
Aggressive diseases plus long-range transport
Then if you add long-range transport, you get more and more aggressive strains. The more long-range transport you have the more aggressive the strain can be without dying out; and eventually could kill an entire global population. Paper published in 2006, mentions risk of Ebola.
As transportation becomes more pervasive, vulnerability increases.
Early warning and preparedness
Presented to the WHO in Jan ‘14. They were respectful and excited by the work. Discussed other public health issues faced by WHO, however didn’t return to pandemic models.
Since then: outbreak happened. Lots of discussion. Why don’t we engage in risks in a more serious way? Everyone thinks their prior experience indicates what will happen in the future.
Look at past Ebola! It died down before going far, surely it won’t be bad in the future.
Models of outbreaks look at existing conditions, which prove to be too limited here.
Example: with flu, people take exactly that disease and known circumstances, and simulate an outbreak, ignoring changes in the disease or in the conditions (and: nothing has to change in order to have huge risk). the same properties could remain, but a low-probability event could unfold, “fat tail distribution” — past experience isn’t necessarily a predictor of what will happen in the future.
Individual and community
Contract tracing, the standard public health method, doesn’t work well when there are more than just a few cases. Stop thinking about the contacts of the person, think about the community. Travel restrictions so new communities aren’t infected. Now that people go door to door for symptom screening, the cases have decreased dramatically in Liberia.
People were saying: “The beds are empty!” Authorities responded: “We can’t figure out why. We think people are still sick!” Why are the hospitals and authorities waiting for the sick to show up? Going door-to-door in the neighborhoods shows what’s going on, and is what is effective.
Once you know the right question, the answer is clear.
Interests
We then stated our interests — each person said one thing about the topic or intro talk they’d be interested in diving into more during breakout groups
Collective understanding, action
Educating people, also incentivizing doing the right global thing
Organizational Inertia — shifting mindsets
Look at reactions of the press
some people saying it’s foolish to talk about Ebola, it doesn’t cause enough deaths — measuring car accidents in the city reqs a small sample; to rule out ebola you need a larger sample.
Treating the community vs individual
Medical risks and questions
Question about door to door: hospitals can be a place for transmission; when you move door to door how does this spread?
Who goes door to door? (send teams. food, &c. they got neighborhood reps to do it)
Marshall / LBR implementer
Medical decision of how to respond
Interrelationships & measurement
Multidimensional; interrelated
Appreciating flexibility of complex analysis to provide new angles
How can we gauge effectiveness in real time? / control groups
General questions:
Building plans over time: how do we share understanding over time
Sharing practice across diseases
? what happens to ‘ECFs’ after the outbreak?
Breakout Groups
We then broke into small groups to continue speaking about these various aspects. The rough notes follow.
Collective Action
Medical response is an individual response.
Go to where the problem is. Impacting people at different stages. Less disruptive to do at a community level. Leaves people where they are and acknowledges that there’s a problem, with a beginning, a middle, an end. Fear is enormous, people begin to see what they might be able to do. 6 years of war isn’t just psychological, it’s structural. So when it goes to the community, it changes that abandonment. Shifting a system
Active demonstration of care. Not just “you have to go to the hospital.”
Have to give up crucially important cultural burial practices.
Close to social unrest in Spain because of the nurse with Ebola.
Treating it as a community problem lets you treat things better on an individual level.
A village in SLE had 7 RC volunteers killed. So who goes door to door? If it’s someone from the community who knows, that’s great. How do you get the communication out there? how do you convince people? how do you get the thermometers out there? There’s an emerging best practice, how do you get the supporting best practice tools out there?
Would opening up internet access to more than first responders be “good” in that people could communicate and self organize, or “bad” in that people would aggregate to the area with wifi for easier transmission?
How is media doing on this? If effective community response is about people having the same idea of the problem, what would US fear-mongering media deal with this?
We live in an information junkie culture. Public health issue at the level of action.
Everything old is new again. We created our public health systems around Cholera, which is twice as infectious and terrible. But our additional systems and structures take us away from our roots.
Social democracies in Denmark, Sweden come out of the Cholera outbreak; the class warfare in England and Russia is in part because they didn’t figure it out.
Want to know how the communities had people going door to door
Burn down Alter incentives for mainstream media to get it right (even if they’re being sensationalist). PRI is doing it right. Build from that.
We need to learn from history
Medical
Vulnerability by transmission, what about transmission that can counter vulnerability?
Propagation of disease and information. Overlap with media issues.
Risk assessment from door-to-door, does it introduce a new transmission risk?
Are community level interventions only diagnostic, or also educational?
Given the dangers of connectivity, how do we exploit those dangers to expose them? Model for hostile agents to move place to place. Immunity at a
Good information and bad information. Effective and ineffective. How do we not just track the disease but the information about the disease? Door-to-door.
Ask Lyre if the above covers all that should be brought back to the filed
Get the word out: on the necessity of contact tracing
Interrelationships & measurement
How do we know the impact of door to door work? or the evaluation of a particular model?
use confidence intervals. widely, to clarify what isn’t yet known.
find data you can measure quickly everywhere; see what you can learn from them
set up systems measuring this continuously; or on demand when risk rises
find alternatives to controls (where traditional c. is immoral)
(had a real control here: in opinions about how authoritative to be and act) define how [a place?] to set up and publish about such experiments
it’s hard to measure where things start; focus on where thing are transmitted. that changes less over time.
identify and track possible levers in this area
Can’t observe causality. Could say, under model A it’s more likely that things went down because of change C.
Be sure to include confidence intervals, not specific propbabilities find the parts of the system that don’t change. find where decisions have to be made, and which ones make a difference
Need broad spectrum activity: you can’t simply test one action at a time, you are often hedging
Trade-offs: problems with running a pure control. There’s risk aversion; morality; and uncertainty about how harmful both activity and inactivity would be.
Closeout
How to act?
How do you get such a bound when statistics are small? Perhaps you only have 4 distinct outbreak regions.
How do you know treatment regimes (social as well as medical) work?
Are there moral ways to run a control? Looking into the past, before you applied it; or in regions where you can’t do it for some reason. find systemic shocks, other forced variation real-time understanding is still a problem reporting is complicated as well. who and what gathers data?
find data feeds that can be gathered quickly (and learn ways to extract what you want from that sort of data) Try to iterate: to get enough statistics to say something meaningful Fever sensor (for flu) — can be used at a distance.
How do you prevent it?
YB and NT have written a paper saying it’s a fallacy you see a lot of false positives if you overfocus
Related past discussions
Systemic v. idiosyncratic risk
Lots of diseases that may come from Ebola (different imprint)
Wei (from Hong Kong): Makes me think of swine flu.
Even the govt didn’t really mention transmission; and people immediately started to cover themselves and put on masks. Distributed response and decision-making is possible There are things about disease that we can learn, so it’s clear how to react / how to avoid overreacting.
Compare computational effects in finance. Similar distributions: fat-tailed. Don’t have the option to cut transportation (there: of data, here: of medical personnel)
The # of pre-panics is monstrous. This is dealt with using circuit breakers. Consider creating similar circuit breakers. That’s the only way to avoid the fat tail.
Final note on false positives (making people not take alerts seriously). Find a non-binary approach. “If X occurs here, it will be due to amplifying factor Y” — so you can target a response that way in each environment.
We could know in W Africa: there’s a risk from having too few clinics & community centers. Early disease: 1900s. John Snow knocked on doors to find cholera. Early crisis maps.
We started a war with journalism over ebola: empiricism of the idiot: saying that more people X than die of ebola. overreaction irrational; we had to fight to say it is rational: panic, but early and in the right spot, not late and everywhere else.
Think about framing the conversation when publishing to social media. Bypass the press, since they focus on naive issues. And set up a relationship for future communication
Reflection on the Salon’s Structure
Distribute info beforehand: compile readings, slides.
More flipcharts, sharpies, sticky notes. Up on the walls.
Not enough disagreements. Invite a journalist. Someone from other sides. A non-complexity person.
Invite more practitioners.
Return to the topic: revisit, learn, apply.
Multiple breakouts, idea transmission between them
Skepticism makes it easier to take decisive action? The more uncertainty there is overall, the more conservative.
We’re in a time of great risk. How do we respond?
Our current vulnerabilities are growing; without a better avenue for global response, we won’t survive. We have to build those mechanisms.
How do we engage with these problems, how do we discuss them?
How do we develop and propagate these ideas, and welcome more participants?
Expand the community engaged here. We dont need to coordinate a UN meeting to bring about global consequences.
Connected world. if we do stuff here, it can have global consequences.
Renew the way we tackle problems.
Ongoing structure
Once a month — targeted at doing something.
Weekly discussion → action. (what could be done, with whom, how to communicate?)
Rather than looking at one problem per week, look at one type of action per week and look at how it applies across problems.
On January 28th, the monthly salon gathered at NECSI to discuss ethnic violence from the lens of complex science. Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of NECSI, gave a brief talk about NECSI’s paper about modeling violence. Marshall Wallace, past director of the Listening Project, also gave a quick talk about his field experience with communities who opt out of violence. Again on Feb 4th, NECSI hosted an informal discussion around the case study of Libya. What follows are my big take aways and Sam’s asides, embedded into the fairly rough live notes from the salon. I call out these take aways and asides specifically because note takers often are lost in the notes, just as a photographer is never in the picture. We hope you’ll join us on Wednesdays of this month to begin exploring medical systems, on ensuing fourth Wednesdays for structured discussion, or on other Wednesdays for more informal times.
I am primarily left with a sense of purpose towards fostering collective intent towards alleviating suffering. In this entry, you’ll see a few ways large-scale violence is posited to be avoided. It is my personal opinion (of which I will opine at the end) that diversity is the key to equality as well as dignity, based on both the complex systems modeling and field experience framing these discussions.
But first, what do we even mean by “violence”? We’re referring to violent events occurring at level of massacres or bombing. These levels do seem to be slightly contextual based upon general violence levels in the area.
When doesn’t violence happen?
Violence doesn’t happen when
all your neighbors are like you, or
all of your neighbors are varied (integration of diversity).
The space between these is where difficulty lies, when not all of your neighbors are like you, but not so consistently unlike you that diversity is the norm. Well then, what do we mean by “neighbors”? It ends up this is very geographically based, and roughly the distance you can traverse in a day by foot or horse (20–40 km), which leads us to believe these tendencies might skew with new travel abilities. Running these models matched up to actualities in Yugoslavia, India.
Some examples
Can either impose integration or separation, intentionally or subconsciously:
Greece and Turkey offered to send each other their people.
NYC has small patch sizes geographically. But we don’t know how things scaled, the density of people.
A third way to avoid violence: boundaries
The distance you might walk in a day-if there are boundaries around this, unlikely to have violence. These boundaries can be either political or physical. The idea behind this is that if there’s a grouping of a people of a given size in a certain space, they start to impose their values on that space. Others coming through, or “encroaching” who don’t hold the same values would seem to be intruding in a way which violates those values.
If we have patches of that size, can we create peace? Tested the models in Switzerland, which both has diversity of values as well as a general lack of violence. It ends up the mountain rages act as boundaries. Where these boundaries are insufficient, as represented in the models, is where the people do enact violence. Switzerland’s response to these rare pockets was to place a canton, which reduced that violence. Cantons throughout Switzerland are thoroughly mixed by demographic or not at all, which coincides with no violence in these models.
Field Perspective
The clashes in India indicated by census-data overlay are also the area called the Red Corridor, where the Maoist insurgency takes action. That doesn’t show up on the census — and so doesn’t show up on the map models. Gujarat in the West has occasional flareups. There patch sizes may be 20–40km, a lot has intense mixing as well. But there’s a lot of political effort to create separation. It’s intriguing to me that patch size [and equivalents, in other jargon] comes up again and again. Population of Kenya is really dispersed, but the patches of conflict is indeed on the 30/40 km range already referenced. In short, there are alternative explanations for what’s going on — which significantly match up with the models, which is interesting.
from Wikimedia Commons
Creating boundaries
In Rwanda, there were many separations as well as integration. What was happening there? There were boundaries — were these simply in the wrongplaces? In India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the borders are in the wrong places. The people who live there will tell you that. It’s nice to have models which indicate the same.
Creating new provinces: Kenya has also tried this. [aside: contrast w/ gerrymandering? -s] Power dynamics come out in these processes — people aren’t putting borders in right places. What are their intentions?
Lots of Marshall’s work is on the unintended consequences of delivering aid. Interventions often see the arbitrary boundaries which exist, and work with those boundaries. As an example, one hotbed of violence in Kenya had a mass migration. Those migrating clustered as the villages they had previously been in, but settled across a border between two states was. One state side was Anglican, the other side was Protestant. As the aid agencies only worked on one side of the border or the other, religious conflict emerged as one area simply got more attention and aid than the other. Religiously-aligned people previously uninvolved due to geographic distance got caught up in the conflict because of the way resources were brought into the space.
This relates so painfully to my experience in humanitarian and disaster response, where funding and support are silo’d arbitrarily or based on arbitrary policy, rather than on actual need and people. Marshall’s experience is in the extreme of how this can play out, and we must be cognoscente of it as we build tools and engage with communities lest we fall to the same fate.
Field and Model
YBY: the largest Swiss canton is also separated into circles, separated by religion.
In Rwanda before the violence, the Muslim population was about 10% of the total. The Muslim community as a whole stayed out of the genocide, didn’t kill others. The Hutu Muslims didn’t kill Tutsis, et cetera. Some people suggested that they didn’t participate because they had clustered themselves. This model would say those patches should have been targets for others… note there was also class-based violence within whatever else was happening. Maoists would tell you this is what’s happening there as well, not linguistic or religious conflict.
Are these patches the right size? Too small? Too far apart? People tell stories afterwards, but want to see the system.
Questions and Answers
Can be found where we took live notes, to be aware of attention spans and word counts. My favorite bits include:
Can we us stories to change a zero-sum mentality to a winning™ mentality?
MLK talking to white America about their myths of fairness and justice and equality.
Breaking points, with examples from peace demonstrations that devolved into violence after a rock was thrown through a window, often by non-participants.
Breakout Sessions
Conflict patch analysis: what’s needed next?
Many times people make up differences if they don’t exist. So to what degree is this inescapable? How to identify the identity the factors that matter the most at a given time? Again, more in-depth notes exist on our live notes, with top-level thoughts as:
How do we get to predictions or global scope?
How do we refine the model / what might be changed?
What other data is possible?
How do we prioritize where to look?
Failed States
Belgium as a stable failed state: little violence, garbage still gets picked up. Libya as an unstable failed state: lots of violence, no civic infrastructure. Often places in distress are able to ask for, and hopefully receive, outside assistance. Bolstering from the UN, outside trade support, etc. Besides this large-scale response, local individuals can also receive training and credibility from well-respected and known entities such as UNHCR, Red Cross, or academic or medical institutions; then return home to increase the quality of life and stability of an area. Groups like ISIS break these models, as any external entity (and representatives of such entities) are met with dangerously high levels of threat.
I’d like to point out that the Kurds seem to be doing pretty well (not to diminish their substantial losses) at responding to these sorts of issues, as a distributed group as well. We just don’t like to pay attention to them, as they’re feminist Anarchists.
Closing thoughts from salon
There are a lot of people working on peace and negotiation in Boston (where the Salon took place). We (NECSI) don’t know them yet, we need to start reaching out to them and offering to engage with them. We have a simple model that provides a deep lens, and would like to help move beyond the meme of “all just get along” to an understanding that this may not always work.
NECSI takes part in ongoing conversations with military groups. Do theytalk about these issues — ethnic violence? Yes, with a focus on anchoring discussions in the sense that we’re really an integrated world now. The US is no longer in “out-group” conflict: we are an integrated system. [socioeconomic; also environmental ++] Military is vey forward thinking, compared to health care.
Strategists tackling complexity are often still constrained by policy. We still believe we’re looking at a whole system. The approach of blaming individuals versus governments in recent conflict is related to this shift, represented in part by things like not being able to work with refugee groups in Syria because they’re classified as terrorists. This also relates to how difficult things are with Dadaab, the Somalian refugee camp in Kenya, based on migratory patterns and tribal tensions.
People also talked about scales and stories. A single person can do a thing that matters, and that’s exemplified in both the model and from the field. Does that make this a universality class? In a similar thread, we wondered what can be done in actuality, within people’s comfort levels? How do we encourage people to understand complexity so it’s in their intuition when they make choices?
Maryam and I joined remotely, and had a discussion in our chat about if it’s ethical to separate people by imposing boundaries, or by opting for the “my neighbors should be like me” model over avoiding violence through going for “all my neighbors are different from me (and each other), and that’s ok!” model. In the social sciences, there’s a strong advocating for integration because of the empathy it forces. People tend to self-segregate (this is called homophily, or “birds of a feather”) as it’s easier to be around people who already “get it.” But it’s also easier to avoid noticing how badly others might have it, if you don’t have to see them on a regular basis. See also gentrification, gated communities, slums, etc. When schools in the US were being racially integrated, that was the point that was made (and what proved true) — ends up “separate but equal” does not, in fact, work. Maryam pointed out that the schools are still gender specific in Iran, and that she fears this adds to tension and lack of understanding on all sides. So, while separating out genders, or races, or religions might make things safer in the short term, wouldn’t this lack of empathy and understanding make things less stable and healthy (read: equal, just, dignity for people) in the long run?
My lingering question is about how to maintain important cultural practices while also advocating for enforced empathy.
When I came on with Aspiration in January, it was clear in my soul why the joining up made sense. But not many folk in the disaster and humanitarian response circles I run in pay much attention to the overlap of activism and response. It took some time to make it clear and explicit. Back in May Anne from Hirondelle asked for a vizthink for a talk she was going to give, and for the staff working on the project to have a common view of all the moving parts of the program. Anne works in the overlap of response and journalistic integrity1, and has far more experience in both DOING and in EXPLAINING this overlap. I hope that by showing you our drawing and by talking about her case study this overlap can become more clear to even more people.
Getting the Word Out
Hirondelle works in radio programming in austere areas. Radio programming can be for music. It can also be to get information out – information about health, politics, and community action. Radio can be used to propagate messages inspiring violence through rumors or outright instigation. Messages can also be used to disseminate messages of truth, care, and empowerment. Radio broadcasts were used to coordinate after the Haitian earthquake. It’s a consistent medium used in a lot of places to a lot of different purposes.
Communication gets more expensive the further away from a radio tower you are, as outreach has to happen about the radio programs even existing and/or install additional towers. Anne also pointed out that “it’s not just a question of expense. If you’re out of range, you’re out of range. Radio silence.”
Enter Bluetooth. The consistently increasing number of people with phones, including the Nokia 1100 and other ‘dumb’ phones have started exchanging media files via Bluetooth. Even when there isn’t any internet, it’s still possible to transfer files directly from one device to another2. But people can only transfer what they’ve already got. And so Hirondelle works with a local women-run NGO Media Matters for Women to set up places called Listening Centers, where media programming is delivered by bicycle. People socialize, listen to a program together, and take the audio files with them to share with others3.
Messaging and Trust
Mostly, these Bluetooth ‘podcasts’ are about maternal health, domestic violence, and education4. Hirondelle’s ongoing dedication to development and humanitarian response (“slow” disasters) means they’re trusted in most of the communities they’re in. Which means when conflict hits, they often continue to be trusted. Trust is more complicated for other groups, as organizations like the UN might also set up a radio tower and offer programming during extreme times, but their transient nature, close alignment with ‘official’ voices, and not being in the local language inhibit the deep bonds associated with trust from forming. Local radio stations which are in the local language often end up aligned with (or coerced by) those instigating violence. Hirondelle being independent while still close to the communities they serve, with newsrooms that reflect the diversity on the other side of the microphone, means the trust in groups like Hirondelle is deeper. That’s vital for effective response5.
This long term investment in community also means that when something as terrifying as Ebola breaks out, there are infrastructural ways6 to distribute trusted messages. The female journalists in their network used the same capacities built up for their physical and digital safety when speaking truth to power for making informed choices during the Ebola outbreak. The skills to think critically about messaging, how to check in with community members, and how to disseminate trusted knowledge outward to others also applied in both contexts. Even the messaging and response to Ebola is politicized, with who people go to for help depending on networks of trust. And in places like Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone with long histories of civil war and authoritarian governments, official messages about how to deal with the spread of the disease weren’t trusted – even if the information they contained was right. Our means must match our purposes, and vice versa, and the capacities we build in calmer times bolster our resilience when the world gets complex and dangerous. By taking care of our present selves, our future selves are better off.
Footnotes
Which has become activist, strangely/sadly, as truth-telling becomes a radical act.
The ability to transfer files to each other directly – something inhibited on many devices through firmware.
Copyright (or Copyleft) activism is vital to our ability to create media which is our own / held in common, so we might share it outwards. Can you imagine “oh, this program might help you teach your abusive partner that what they’re doing isn’t ok, but you can’t share it to your sister who might be experiencing the same thing because DRM.” Yuck.
They also work with locals to create the programming, and have all sorts of amazing stories about how their programming has changed relationships and cultures, but sadly that isn’t the point of this blog post.6
Being trusted by those wishing to disentangle or opt out of conflict has to do with also having a history of truth telling, especially to power. Activists do this. So do efforts like Hirondelle. Ergo, Hirondelle is activist in a very subtle way.
Mesh networks can’t be disaster-only, because people won’t trust them and won’t know how to use them.
Means of production. People are not just consumers of media or of technology… to co-create is an act of empowerment which more closely strikes at the root of societal issues.
Chaos Communications Camp is something that happens once every four years, and it is My Favorite. It’s a few thousand hackers etc camping together in Germany. There’s brightly colored hair everywhere, and a slowly improving gender ratio, and stickers on laptops, and a gigabit to the tent. There are disco balls in trees, and competing soundscapes of German techno and old rock and roll or hiphop, and a giant sparkley rocket ship called Fairy Dust. I’m camping with Norton’s Obscure Phoggy Embassy (the manifestation of a few Bay Area hackerspaces), which is successfully trolling much of the rest of Camp through their assumption we’re being colonial (because Emperors), as well as having an inflated shark Rubin‘s been shouting at people to jump over. Also, NOPE attire are booty shorts.
I was invited to sit on a panel called “What’s the Catch?” put together by nat from Open Technology Institute. Josh (also from OTI), Kate (from tor), and myself were the three panelists. We each attempted to speak for about five minutes, and then we focused on questions from the audience. Our topic was an ongoing debate in infosec (and other) circles : is it possible to take money from governments and corporations while maintaining a project’s integrity? I vote yes, if you work really hard at it. The talk will eventually be up on the CCC wiki (and I’ll likely post it here once it’s up) but for now, this is the rant I put together when I was considering how to concisely state why I think this is the case.
In relation to this, and the other existential questions which I continually struggle with, I refer often to a quote from the Zapatistas, one of the few groups to maintain a governance structure after their revolution: “Caminando preguntamos,” which roughly translates to “we walk while asking questions.” To me, it means that we should move, but let’s analyze as we do. Let’s be in both critique and solidarity with each other.
I’m going to attempt to touch on three points, alliterated for your memory: perfection, pluralism, paternalism. Continue reading →
I’ve started writing about response over on the Aspiration blog, but this one still has cursewords in it, and is very much in my own language, so I figured I’d post it here first.
The problems our planet is facing are becoming more extreme. People and politics mean there are larger populations more densely packed in cities. Nomadic populations traveling along their historical routes are now often crossing over arbitrary (have you *seen* some of the country lines people in Western countries have drawn in places they might never have even been!?) political boundaries, making them refugees or illegal immigrants. Climate change means more and more extreme events are impacting those populations. We have *got* to get our shit together.
In all this, the people who have been historically marginalized often become even more so as those in power see scarcity encroaching on their livelihoods. But the ability to hold people accountable in new ways (through things like social media), as well as (I hope) a real awareness and effort in the long arc towards equality, means there are groups of people seeking new ways to better allocate resources to those most affected by these events. Often, these groups are also in a post-scarcity mentality — that, when we work together, wisely, we can do a whole lot more with a whole lot less. These are folk who think we *can* reach zero poverty and zero emissions (within a generation). These are the folk who see joy in the world, and possibility.
The resource allocation and accountability necessary for these transitory steps towards a world that can survive and even thrive won’t happen in a vacuum. In the organizations, governments, and grassroots efforts there are entire supply chains, and ways of listening (and to whom), and self-reflexive mechanisms to consider. In these are embedded corruption, and paternalism, and colonialism. In these, too, are embedded individuals who have been Fighting The Good Fight for decades. Who have added useful checks and amplifiers and questions. It’s into this environment we step. It is, at its core, like any other environment. It has History.
It’s in this context that I’m so excited about Dialling Up Resilience. It taps into questions of efficacy in programming by using and contributing to metrics for success in building resilience. It assumes good faith in policy makers and implementers by offering up data for them to do their jobs better. It protects against bad actors by providing granular, speedy data aggregated enough to protect data providers but transparent enough to be clear when a program is working (or not, if those we’re assuming good faith in don’t actually deserve that). And, my favorite part — instead of contorting and posturing about what makes people able to bounce back faster after a climate-related shock… we just ask them. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. But the core is there.
We’ll be working with a few different groups in Kenya, including the National Drought Management Authority (and their Ending Drought Emergencies program) and UNDP on their existing surveying initiatives, as well as groups like GeoPoll (SMS), Twaweza (call center), and Kobo (household) on stand-alone surveys about how communities estabilish and track their own resilience. If we get the grant extension, we’ll work more directly with communities using tools like Promise Tracker and Landscape (a digitized version of Dividers & Connectors) to be closer to their own data, and to subsequently be able to have more agency over their own improvement as well as accountability.
What’s also exciting is that our means and our ends match. I was recently in Nairobi for a stakeholder workshop with not only the project partners, but also with the organizations which would eventually make use of the data. We’ve been conducting community workshops to test our basic assumptions and methods against reality, as well as to be sure community voice is at the core of each component we consider. We’ve thrown a lot out… and added some amazing new things in. We’re hoping to break down the gatekeeper dynamic of accessing communities in the Horn of Africa, and we want to be coextensive with existing programs (rather than supplanting them). It’s feminist and it’s development and I’m kind of fucking thrilled.
For a long time, it wasn’t possible to include everyone’s voice in planning or decision-making without impossibly large amounts of time. There was no way to listen, at scale. So aggregation and centralization became common, especially in times of urgency, even with the troubles these tend to cause.
But now, with the technologies we have, we can *listen*, in high resolution and in high fidelity. But technology isn’t a silver bullet. We also need the political will and the personal values to make that happen. With Aspiration’s new Digital Humanitarian Response program, we get to support some of the rad people willing and able to make these movements happen. In May, we hosted the Humanitarian Technology Festival at MIT. The Digital Response Wiki provides resources and notes, and here are some top-level highlights from the event:
Disaster and humanitarian issues don’t happen in a vacuum
Groups like Public Lab help lay the groundwork (both socially and technically) for fast-cycle disasters, via their ongoing interaction with communities around environmental justice. This also provides scaffolding for handing off responsibilities after an extreme event. Kathmandu Living Labs, a group committed to mapping the infrastructure of their geography, is an excellent case study in this. When the Nepal earthquake hit, they were able to jump into action quickly due to pre-existing Open Street Map communities, workflows, data infrastructure, and (most importantly) social ties. Kathmandu was then capable of making use of (and maintaining) the updated data after the fact. Simply by being (and being allowed to be) active in affected communities on a day-to-day basis, organizations can support communities in becoming more resilient to disasters.
That said, preparing for extreme events before they happen can help mitigate the severity of impact on people lives. We explored the idea of games to make what might be considered dull more fun. No need to start from scratch (though that can be stimulating as well!). Climate Centre makes such games, and publishes them openly over on their website.
We already have much of what we need
One of our spectrogram statements was, “We already have all of the technology we need.” While we were divided in our responses, we acknowledged that the ability of groups of people to make do with what they have in disaster is astounding. And our preferences apply here technically as well as ethically. Distributed, federated systems both for technology and for communities/governance are more resilient than centralized systems (as well as addressing human rights in general). There are a few of these rad systems being built, NYC Prepared being one of my favorites.
Data and consent are deeply linked
Data use with populations that are vulnerable (based on their history, their current circumstances, or both) is still a big question, but not one we need to face on our own. OpenGov, Missing Persons, and other transparency-related initiatives have figured an awful lot of that out, and we should take note. Additionally, while consent is different in high-stress situations than in long-term advocacy campaigns, it should still be a strong consideration in any plan or intervention.
We looked at the Framework for Consent Policies which came out of a Responsible Data Forum in Budapest, and suggested advocating for a “notify this set of people in case of emergency” embedded into social platforms, similar to Networked Mortality or ICE contacts in some phones. This way, people would be consenting and determining who would be their contacting associates in case of disaster (unlike what Facebook recently did). Consent is a component of accountability, both of which highlight how frontline communities might be the architects of their own rescue.
Accountability is just as important in precarious situations as it is in everyday life, if not more so
Accountability is sorely lacking in humanitarian aid and disaster response. Fantastic organizations exist to track where spending is going, but money is often considered misspent. Frameworks exist for deploying aid in ways which alleviate, rather than exacerbate, conflict and tensions. However, these frameworks and mechanisms are still sometimes insufficient, as even well intended groups remain in regions for decades while populations become reliant on them, rather than becoming self sufficient.
Rather than come up with an external group to hold response groups accountable, we figured the frontline community could state whether or not initiatives are working, and those reports could be sent directly to the response organizations, their donors, and relevant constituents. This factors in strongly to the Dialling Up Resilience initiative grant of which Aspiration is a part (Yes, it’s spelled with 2 L’s. They’re Brits). More on that soon.
You can find more thorough notes from Humanitarian Technology Festival on (you guessed it) our wiki. Reach out to us if you have any questions about this ongoing work. Contact us here: humtechfest@aspirationtech.org / @willlowbl00
I was in Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of April participating in various happenings across humanitarian response spaces. From interactive gameplay to resiliency indicators, here’s how we focused attention on frontline communities through digital means.
Facilitating gameplay to model for resource allocation
The game stems from Taarifa, a free software project that has been widely deployed to collect, visualize, and map infrastructure information. The Climate Centre is well known (and appreciated) for their distillations of complex climate, environmental, and social systems into fun-to-play games, which are available on their website.
Often, these games start simply, and then complexity is layered on as each set of rules is understood by the participants. There are additional challenges when designing a “pervasive game” like this one, which is a game that extends play out into the wider physical world. All the details needed to be written on one piece of paper and accessible across languages, and players need to be able to join at any point, and without a facilitation start-session. Phew. We did our best, and you can view our materials here.
Day one was focused on re-creating the system as it is now – everyone had to find the rest of their community, their malfunctioning water points, and engineers. Some would know the problems in space and time, but others had the tools to solve them when and where needed. How to link problem and solution? Communication was intermittent, if it happened at all. Information sharing was consistently one step behind of the facts.
On day two, we introduced the ability to SMS update and query, thus enabling a faster and more efficient match between broken pumps and the engineers who could bring tools and parts to help communities have safe water. People now only needed to find each other to make exchanges, and they were able to document and share in real time where water points were and what the status was.
How’d it go? It was confusing… just like life. There was slow uptake… just like life. Only one group used the technical assist (i.e., SMS)… just like life.
This game showed what we think we already know— that having a solid technical tool doesn’t mean anyone is going to use it. But as community-based adaptation practitioners, we often need to (re)learn what we kind-of know, and ask some tough questions, such as ‘why are available solutions not being fully embraced by those who can allegedly benefit from them?’
This game created a space for conference participants to see the same lack of uptake in their own behavior that pervades climate and development work, rather than it being an externalized problem space to grapple with during program design and implementation. It highlighted our collective need to better tap into the social systems around digital solutions, and rethink how to enable genuine embracing by those who can benefit from them. The Climate Centre will be taking the game forward into Zambia, where climate change and infrastructure are already under intense scrutiny.
Supporting community-driven indicators of resiliency
We are taking part in an initiative to build locally-driven strategies for resilience to extreme events such as drought. Our focus within the “Global Resilience Challenge” is on local indicators, or measurements, of resilience.
“You get what you measure,” as systems thinker Donella Meadows once said. When we talk about indicators of resilience, things like gross domestic products, income, and education come to mind. But that doesn’t work for everyone in all places. Actually, we often find that “more” (higher GDP, more trade, etc) is a dangerous synonym to describe “better” when we are trying to evaluate resiliencey.
In response, a few groups have worked on measuring other things, such as the happiness index. Similarly, what matters in resilience is that frontline communities are the ones describing what their own environments look like, what is important to pay attention to, and laying boundaries in how to interact. If communities have the ability to determine their own indicators and carry out subjective measurements within open data frameworks, large-scale understanding can also happen across communities.
What do we even mean by subjective? My favorite “subjectivity” delineation occurs around “framed” and “open-ended.” For example, we could set out a frame of the top five things we think are related to resilience, and then ask community members en masse how they rate their own standing on those things. Or we can ask people what they think is important to their own resilience. Both are subjective indicators.
I came on with Aspiration back in January as the Community Leadership Strategist, to merge the work I’ve been doing in the humanitarian and disaster response space with Aspiration’s practices and team. It’s been a *blast* so far, and continues to be.
Most of the work I’ve done in the last 5 years has been about what social justice looks like when we’re doing response, with a focus on technology (as that opens up paths to conversations we otherwise quit having). With Geeks Without Bounds, we did hackathons all over the world, including Random Hacks of Kindness and SpaceApps Challenge. I’ve been a coordinator for the Digital Humanitarian Network, keynoted the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, was invited to the White House to talk about Sandy response, facilitated the first hackathon IN (not just for) Haiti, etc etc etc. I’ve also had a huge organizational crush on Aspiration since my first DevSummit in 2013, attending as many Aspiration-connected events as possible. When I was able to join Team Aspiration, I was overjoyed — even while much of the work I’ve continued to do on response had already existed, it’s been a slow shift to get those previously-defined objects to be a bit more Aspiraiton-shaped.
The Humanitarian Technology Festival in Cambridge May 9+10 is the first event that is both committed to response and framed on Aspiration ethos. I am SO EXCITED about this it hurts. Let me explain why.
The very way we deliver aid perpetuates the need for more aid, both for fast- and slow-onset disasters (or “extreme events” or “humanitarian issues” or “earthquake” or “famines” or whatever you’d like to say). When people need lodging after a hurricane, they’re either told to evacuate and/or they’re put into temporary homes, away from neighbors and family. There is little impetus to return and rebuild both social and tangible structures. People are uprooted, and must start from scratch. When, instead, we see that people don’t just need lodging but in fact need social fabric, responders (and the technologies used for response) can focus on how to maintain family and neighborhood ties. People are then less stressed as well as being more likely to take their own actions to return and rebuild.
For humanitarian aid, this is even more paternalistic and stratifying… while not actually “fixing” any of the things it aims to. Aid is primarily about making the giver feel better. But like Tom’s Shoes picking up on the “buy one, give one” idea that OLPC actually handled with cultural grace and systems thinking, instead Tom’s put some people out of work while trying to provide something THEY thought others needed. Even if it had been delivered in a less-jerky way, aid often ends up with locations dependant on that aid, rather than internally strengthened. This is one way we keep extracting resources out of other places without actually contributing to those locations. See also this bit of the paper I’m still working on. This allows the worst parts of globalization (erasure of cultures, consolodation of wealth, etc) to continue.
Some might say “fine, let them fend for themselves,” but that’s not ok either. When we don’t have to look at our neighbors (when we build walled housing complexes, or segregated schools), we can ignore how bad things are for them. And that’s also not an acceptable answer.
What we need are ways to listen to what people can offer, and what they need, under the assumptions that we are equals. This is why I’m so excited to see how the participatory methods I associate so strongly with Aspiration come to bear on this space. Just do a search-and-replace for “Nonprofits” to “Affected Communities” on our Manifesto and Participant Guidelines. People in these fragile situations are NOT a population to playtest new tools. Not only do failures have a larger impact in these spaces, but to think of another location and its people as “demo” space is undignified and unjust. We need better ways (not just better tools) for life EVERYWHERE, and to assume that we WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)-o’s have all the answers is downright arrogant. By instead, as we do at Aspiration events, speaking to each other in easy-to-understand language, under the assumption that everyone is bringing something meaningful to the table, and that together we’ll figure it out; we can shift not only how we do response, but the after-effects of that response.
I’m especially excited to speak to people about distributed response, and how the tools we build for ourselves can be welcoming to others using as well. Check out NYCprepared and Taarifa to see what this can look like.
