ICT for Humanity
Information & Communication Technology for Human Rights, Humanitarian action, and social change
“Sustainable, Affordable Support to Stressed Populations
TIDES is a research project dedicated to open-source knowledge sharing to promote sustainable support to populations under severe stress—post-war, post-disaster, or impoverished, in foreign or domestic contexts, for short-term or long-term (multi-year) operations. The project provides reach-back “knowledge on demand” to decision-makers and those working in the field. It helps catalyze public-private, whole-of-government, and trans-national approaches to encourage unity of action among diverse organizations where there is no unity of command. TIDES maintains this website, where anyone in the project’s network (called STAR-TIDES) can publish their work for feedback and critique.”
“This research project is coordinated at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) at the National Defense University (NDU), which is part of the Department of Defense.”
InSTEDD integrates social and technological processes and applications for humanitarian relief, crisis, disaster response, and disease detection. “InSTEDD’s mission is to harness the power of technology to improve collaboration for global health and humanitarian action.” After listening to InSTEDD chief engineer Eduardo Jezierski‘s keynote at The Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) conference in May 2010, I later met Luke Beckman who runs the response operations in Washington D.C.
These experts are part of an innovative team developing open source solutions to respond to complex humanitarian issues. InSTEDD runs their iLab in Cambodia that both develops technologies and educates users in the Mekong Delta and South East Asian region. There could be a preparedness strategy here - educate communities on technological practices and usage before a crisis such that afterwards the response processes are already in place. See an overview of InSTEDD’s tools and technologies.
