Aid and Technology Innovation Intersect for Haiti

I sat in on a conference call today with Forum One and OneWorld U.S. concerning the use of technology to direct earthquake relief and recovery funds to Haiti. There were some innovative orgs on the line, many of which have already been covered extensively in the media, so I'll just summarize some of the main points here.

Michaela Hackner of Forum One emphasized the transformation we're witnessing as charities reach out to people online and through their mobile devices. She said the crux of the new paradigm is money, connections, and awareness. You could also add speed: Michaela cited stats from the Red Cross indicating that they raised $10 million in 48 hours via text-message donations.

There is also software springing up to assist aid workers, such as the Ushahidi Haiti map, and a Creole translation app emerging out of Crisis Camp. Of course with the new frontier that digital technologies make possible there is also room for abuse, such as the false rumor that American Airlines would be donating relief flights.

Michaela's key conclusion was that humanitarian and development aid and technology innovators need to get in the same room to understand challenges and share data. This would not only make the current response more effective, but could also help with longer-term questions of planning, transparency, and sustainability.

Andy Carvin of NPR presented a high-resolution map of Port-au-Prince that volunteers have helped build from satellite imagery, tagging hospital locations and other useful data. He said the map is downloadable to GPS devices for navigating the city. He also mentioned the Google People Finder tool, which the State Department has embedded on their website.

Jacob Colker of The Extraordinaries described a crowd-sourced system whereby global volunteers help process missing persons data from their home computers. Haiti earthquake images are pulled from news stories and Flickr and uploaded to a system where volunteers tag the photos with various characteristics—female, living, etc.—to populate a search engine. Matches in the search engine are then used to try and identify or connect people on the ground. He said that of 750 potential matches generated this way they had tried to reach out to 60 families, but had found it very difficult to get in contact.

Clearly some of these collaborations and projects are in early stages and rapid response mode, but there is a lot of potential for funding long-term, innovative crisis management strategies and technology infrastructure.

[PHOTO CREDIT: Georgia Popplewell (CC).]

Open Education, Open Markets

Over on Policy Innovations, two extremely succesful innovators are making the case for open markets.

No wait. Er. Make that open education.

Jimmy Wales and Richard Baraniuk, the brains behind Wikipedia and Connexions respectively, outline their hopes for a new movement toward what they call Open Education. By applying the dynamics of open source platforms, the duo are trumpeting an approach to education that allows "anyone, anywhere [to] write, assemble, customize, and publish their own open course or textbook."

The language they use got me thinking about the dynamic cycle of "creative destruction" that underpins the economic case for capitalism. In many ways the open source application is the ultimate free-market; constantly groping for equilibrium in an environment of competition and choice.

Consider the similarities between the following quotes:

"The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates." (Joseph Schumpeter, taken from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy)

"Open Education promises to turn the current textbook production pipeline into a vast dynamic knowledge ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and improvement." (Wales and Baraniuk, taken from The Open Education Revolution in Policy Innovations)

Now, admittedly, the comparison is not perfect. But, in spirit at least, the two concepts are very closely related.

For one thing, open source and open markets are positively related in their potential to maximize gains. Didn't your mother ever tell you that two heads are better than one? Well, that's the rationale behind open source. The open source mechanism self-corrects in much the same way as the market searches for equilibrium.

On the downside, open source platforms can't guarantee accuracy any more than open markets can guarantee equity. In both cases, however, advocates claim the overall gains are worth the cost.

To some, both open source and open markets are characterized by a dangerous tilt toward anarchy. This has lead to a perception of unreliability; open markets and open source platforms must be tamed to be useful. Unsuprisingly, both deplore the interference of government regulators. "Leave us alone to do our thing!" they scream. "Don't interfere with our platform/market. You'll only ruin it."

Lastly, both open source and open markets reward innovation. Read the article by Wales and Baraniuk and try replacing every reference to Open Education with open markets. It kind of works.

Where do you come down? Do you trust open source platforms? Are you wary of free market capitalism? Do you disagree with the comparison? Let me know. According to Wales and Baraniuk, "Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn. Together, we can all help transform the way the world develops, disseminates, and uses knowledge."

photo of an open source car by fringehog

One Laptop Per Child Shows Nonprofits' Power

Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of One Laptop Per Child and one of the founders of Wired magazine, was featured this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. In 2005, Negroponte unveiled his plan to design a 100-dollar laptop and get it in the hands of 150 million of the world's poorest schoolchildren. Read the transcript of his Nov. 2005 presentation "The $100 Laptop: The Next Two Billion People to Go Digital" to the Carnegie Council in New York City where he talks about open source, relating it to Wikipedia:

Open source is a very controversial subject. If you have not seen the Wikipedia, I urge you to do so. The Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, written by the readers. When you do Google searches now, very often the Wikipedia entry comes up.

You say, how could that possibly work? Somebody can go in there and type complete garbage. But the truth is that it is self-cleansing. Somebody else reads it and finds out it's wrong and corrects it. It is so current and up-to-date that within 24 hours after Bush nominated my older brother for director of national intelligence, it was in my entry. It said, "Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of the nominee for director"—and I didn't put it there; he didn't put it there. How did it get there?

Encyclopedia Britannica can't compete. It is not that this is a free encyclopedia; it is a better encyclopedia. And that is what open source is about.

(By the way, you can read the Policy Innovations article here where we coined the phrase "Wiki Influence." That article has been one of the most popular articles in Policy Innovations this year.)

The Wall Street Journal article describes how companies such as Intel have been ramping up efforts to build a laptop that would compete for those emerging markets.

Blogger Matt Asay makes the case that open source means more freedom:

The good news, of course, is that developing nations win as competition ramps up, even if One Laptop Per Child isn't the organization ultimately selling the laptops.

The bad news, however, will be if these vendors use their cheap laptops to entrench themselves in developing markets, such that choice is dampened for decades. This is where open source needs to flex its political clout and stress that price is not the only consideration for countries looking to adopt technology for their children. Freedom should also be a critical factor. This means open source.

I think the cool story here is that a nonprofit, albeit one headed by a person with great ideas (Negroponte calls himself an ideas guy), influence, and contacts, was able to change the market, forcing the big technology companies to compete or lose out. This story is a great example of how NGOs and nonprofits are changing the world, just as Carnegie Endowment head Jessica Matthews predicted in her famous 1997 article "Power Shift" in Foreign Affairs. Here is a pertinent excerpt:

The most powerful engine of change in the relative decline of states and the rise of nonstate actors is the computer and telecommunications revolution, whose deep political and social consequences have been almost completely ignored. Widely accessible and affordable technology has broken governments' monopoly on the collection and management of large amounts of information and deprived governments of the deference they enjoyed because of it.