We’re here at the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media conference here at the MIT Media Lab, where the theme is Insiders/Outsiders. Across the next two days, we’re going to be looking at this theme of institutions and innovators across the areas of government, media, and disaster response. Across the event, speakers will be asking if it’s better to look for change inside institutions or try to transform things from the outside.

This session, on Participatory Aid, discusses how disaster aid has gone peer-to-peer. People are organizing over the internet to respond to crises in new ways. In the face of increasingly deadly disasters, how do we integrate creative public responses with formal institutions to create a more holistic aid system?

This post was liveblogged by: Stephen Suen, M.C. McGrath, and yours truly. As with all liveblogs, it constitutes a best-efforts summary of the session; all insights are the panelists, and all errors our own.

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This panel is curated by Matt Stempeck, a recent graduate of the Center for Civic Media who completed his master’s thesis with a focus on participatory aid. Panelists include:

Willow Brugh, Director, Geeks Without Bounds
Caitria O’Neilll, Founder & CEO, Recovers.org
Mischa Shattuck, Program Manager, Open Humanitarian Initiative
Sean Bonner, Co-Founder, Safecast

Matt: The argument for participatory aid, like participatory media or participatory anything, is that we need more people to get involved. When Peter Kropotkin studied people in Russia he introduced the idea of mutual aid, which has been accelerated by the media so that it is no longer geographically limited. If you know of a crisis, you can assist in recovery, whether or not you are invited to by the Red Cross or the United Nations.

The Internet has exploded this idea that there are only three ways you can help: show up in person (which means you have to be sheltered too), send food (which now needs to be stored somewhere), and money (which NGOs love, since it’s liquid, but doesn’t feel great). But the Internet now allows us to help in other liquid ways. We can crowdsource activities, produce crisismaps, assist in situational awareness, translate, donate professional skills, and assist the first responders from far away.

Crisismapping is one of the emergent tactics here. Through crisismaps people can help the first responders actually help people on the ground. There are a couple of axes along which people can help. They can help decisionmakers, or they can help the affected population themselves; they do not only small tasks like retweets, but assist in megawork, like Safecast, where people who are not part of the government can fashion government-scale responses. You can learn more about these tactics, as well as my case librarylibrary from AirBnB to Occupy Sandy, in my thesis

Matt raises a number of examples of innovative participatory aid: the repurposing of AirBnB and Amazon’s Wedding Registry tool, preparedness tools like SF72, and projects relating to Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Bombings. People are contributing to these efforts in a number of ways:

Emergency Preparation – Pro-active inventory of resources, assessment of risk, and education

Basic Survival Needs – Health, hygiene, shelter, and other immediate recovery needs

Communications – People seek information and connection with loved ones and outside world

Situational Awareness – A clear understanding of the critical elements of an incident: locations, needs, conditions

Professional Skill Donation – Volunteers contribute their specialized professional skills

Attention as Aid – Generate awareness and empathy for underreported crises

Software Projects – Developers build participatory aid products

Crowd Cognition and Creativity – People respond to the full spectrum of human needs and generate new recovery solutions

Donation Innovation – Traditional fundraising accelerated by digital connections

With that framework of participatory aid in mind, we now hear from the speakers:

http://i.imgur.com/Br37KOo.png” title=”Hosted by imgur.com”>

http://www.mattstempeck.com/2013/06/24/participatory-aid-marketplace-des…’>my thesis.

Emergency Preparation – Pro-active inventory of resources, assessment of risk, and education
Basic Survival Needs – Health, hygiene, shelter, and other immediate recovery needs
Communications – People seek information and connection with loved ones and outside world
Situational Awareness – A clear understanding of the critical elements of an incident: locations, needs, conditions
Professional Skill Donation – Volunteers contribute their specialized professional skills
Attention as Aid – Generate awareness and empathy for underreported crises
Software Projects – Developers build participatory aid products
Crowd Cognition and Creativity – People respond to the full spectrum of human needs and generate new recovery solutions
Donation Innovation – Traditional fundraising accelerated by digital connections

With that framework of participatory aid in mind, we now hear from the speakers:

Sean, Safecast: What I wanted to talk about was things we ran into – speedbumps along the way. Most of the people involved didn’t have any idea how to measure radiation. We were hackers and web people and people who did hardware. We needed to know the work we were doing was valid, but we also wanted to make sure we had some credibility. We reached out to a lot of academic people to make sure what we were doing was reliable, but a lot of problems we ran into was that we wanted to move fast and that scared a lot of the universities, which wanted to take their time and next year write a report. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to collect data tonight and release data tomorrow, and this scared a lot of universities. There was also a weird issue about proprietary, because we wanted to publish anything, and some of the academics wanted to hold stuff back to get credit for it.

http://www.mattstempeck.com/2013/06/24/participatory-aid-marketplace-des…’>my thesis.

Emergency Preparation – Pro-active inventory of resources, assessment of risk, and education
Basic Survival Needs – Health, hygiene, shelter, and other immediate recovery needs
Communications – People seek information and connection with loved ones and outside world
Situational Awareness – A clear understanding of the critical elements of an incident: locations, needs, conditions
Professional Skill Donation – Volunteers contribute their specialized professional skills
Attention as Aid – Generate awareness and empathy for underreported crises
Software Projects – Developers build participatory aid products
Crowd Cognition and Creativity – People respond to the full spectrum of human needs and generate new recovery solutions
Donation Innovation – Traditional fundraising accelerated by digital connections

With that framework of participatory aid in mind, we now hear from the speakers:

http://i.imgur.com/Br37KOo.png” src=”http://i.imgur.com/Br37KOo.png” title=”Hosted by imgur.com”>There was also some assumption we were against the government. But that’s not the case. The problem was that there was no data at all. It wasn’t that the government wasn’t letting the data out so we had to tell people. There were no sensors at all. So we had to go find it. Once the government did start publishing their own data, there was no conflict; the difference is we’ve published 10 million data points, and they’ve published 30,000. We blew past them way before they had a chance to get involved.

Another problem is that with a largely volunteer organization we need to figure out how we fit into the larger world of nonprofits or for profits or whatever. A lot of what we were doing required hardware even for our volunteers. Lots of people wanted to help right away, but as the disaster moved further into the past, people got less excited about helping out, and we had to figure out how to continue to motivate for that. So how can we motivate people to continue to help without money?

Also, solving a problem is interesting but explaining how the problem was solved is less exciting. This means we were left with things that the creators understood but others could not use, so we needed people to come in and do things like document code.

Now we’re trying to figure out how to stay relevant. We measure radiation to a specific GPS point. We’re trying to think about how what we’ve learned about mapping radiation might apply to other things, like air quality, to be able to provide much more granular data. So now we need to tear apart our platform to the very beginning, not only technically, but politically, because it’s a completely different political crisis.

Mischa: I’m with the Open Humanitarian Initiative. We are a conglomerate that is pulling in multiple institutions, academic centers, as well as individual responders. Our mission is quite broad, but we have a strong focus on data sharing and making sure data is transparent. Organizations want to cooperate in theory, but in reality, it’s a completely different story.

How can we learn from previous disasters? One of things that often happens is — we can understand how the disaster will unfold thanks to the institutional knowledge of experts, but once these disasters are over and people go home, there isn’t that space for organizations, communities, and governments that have been affected to come together and think about “what can we do better next time?”

The Open Humanitarian Initiative is interested in fostering collaboration to prepare for the next disaster. My master’s degree is in global health, and I traveled with MIT to Haiti after the earthquake to work with a wide-ranging team of experts. What I learned as public health professional is that a disaster has a lot of similar attributes to a society impacted by poverty or war. So you can leverage your skill set and passion into something that you care about in either large systemic problems or immediate crises. I find this an empowering and comforting thought: I can help, and if a disaster were to happen in my life, and my community, all of you could help.

You’ve gotta play nice in the sandbox. You have all this data and you want to publish it, but you really need to know who’s going to consume it. Trying to find the balance between speed and accuracy. You need to speak with the experts first and confirm that your data is collective. To truly understand “I want to help, this is my skillset, who is going to use this, and how are they going to use this” is to be a thoughtful humanitarian responder and that’s playing nicely in the sandbox. I always encourage people to think that through before you dive in.

Another important thing to consider is two groups that are often neglected in this process. First, the host nation government — disaster response only happens after they have extended an invitation to outside organizations and governments. These governments are completely overwhelmed, so if you run an organization or have an interest, a really useful exercise would be to look at the host nation government and think about how to partner with them or support them. That often trickles down to the people.

Another group that I think is often neglected are militaries. Militaries play a crucial role in humanitarian response. Some people are skeptical, but look at the Indonesian earthquake: heavy airlift, complex logistics, they do it far better than anyone else. Particularly the U.S. military, who helps respond to international disasters. General Ken Keen said the first day he got to Haiti “this will be an unclassified mission” and made all the data for the response open. I strongly encourage you, ahead of a disaster, to consider how your organization might work with the military, access their data, and benefit from their strategic decisions and relationships with the host nation governments.

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Caitria: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Recovers.org, a disaster preparedness and recovery company based in San Francisco. I got involved after a tornado took my roof off. Kind of like the Wizard of Oz, exactly like the movie Twister. What the movies don’t show is the skies opening immediately after the event and people dumping aid on you. It’s a wonderful problem to have, but they’re also providing very specific, well-paved responses, like food or FEMA assistance. They are not going to wash your filthy clothes. They are not going to do the little things you need.

My sister and I pulled in all these little things about social media and Google Docs and tried to build a system. The primary goal of this system was to somehow use all the aid coming into the community and use that aid to fill the gaps in the responses of the larger organizations. In Oklahoma we setup a website for the community that is very simple- you have a need, you want to donate, or you want to volunteer.

Principles:
Keeping it local is important. Organizations like the Red Cross come in initially, but they are response organizations, so they leave and after five years they won’t be there.

Immediately after the disaster there is an immediate spike in web searches to figure out how to help and it’s gone seven days later. But if you don’t know what you need seven days after the crisis how are you going to get it when you don’t even know what to ask for?

Another principle of keeping it local is that there is a bond of trust there with your neighbors which is also excellent for fraud protection. If you have someone who is from the area and who knows what streets are flooded they can help detect when someone might be asking for relief they don’t need.

As a disaster response community, we need to remember that people will try to help, and if you tell them to go home, they will just become diffuse and unhelpful. People want the experience of helping, and if you turn that off for them, they may not come back out next time. We need some way to capture that interest and facilitate it. My own community is much more connected now than they were before the tornado.

FEMA and the city also need to see what is going on in this participatory aid box. It can’t be completely opaque. If churches are sending out these volunteers locally and didn’t know they had to collect the hours, then the government comes asking for it later that is a problem.

A final principle is to do what works. A hackathon might get together and plan to build a new tool specific for a situation but if it takes too long it will miss the window of opportunity. If Google Docs are working, roll with it. You need to capture that.

Participatory aid can be applied to mitigation. People want to help when they are seeing pictures of rubble on the news, but if you can use that to mobilize them for another disaster you can use that to make that community safer. You can sit at home and put your skills into a spreadsheet on a website, but you can also go buy a jar of peanut butter for your disaster preparation kit.

People wince when you say things like “disaster preparedness” or “behavior change.” But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s not necessary. We need to tweak things so that they can be, not easy, but possible. We don’t tell people how much a specific action affects the likelihood they will lose their home. Giving people context and the ability to make an informed decision is important. We also don’t target people with the right information. Ready.gov is a great resource for everyone ever, but you assume that I have the time and ability to read through a 30 page PDF and decode everything I need to know.

Education also only provides location-based disaster instruction. Sometimes the only interaction with disaster preparedness people get is through their children.

Resources are shared. If you have a year of food shared and your neighbors know, they will come to you after a disaster and ask for food. Then you only have one week of food for the whole community. Risks are also shared. Your neighbor’s lawn chairs can go through your windows during a disaster. If you have cleared all the brush on your property, but your neighbors have overgrown brush, your house could still burn down in a fire. We need to address these as community problems.

I’m going to run through a few barriers to participatory aid. First is technology — sometimes there’s too much technology. At the bare minimum, you want to have some sort of system you can point people to. It could be a system of binders. It’s a tool that solves a problem. All you need is the institutional knowledge of that system.

Second is trust — people trust their neighbors, so you need to give people in the community the tools. There is a place for local volunteers, but they are often not trusted in the community. For the first few months, people only trusted us when we told them we had lost a home, like “you understand us.”

If you aren’t credible, people don’t trust you. And even if you are highly credible (like the Red Cross), people may not trust you because you may not be trying to solve their problems. Having an organization behind these tools helps. It helps make tools and similar solutions sustainable where people may not be able to set up tools or maintain them.

The last barrier we found is institutional. It is a large barrier at first because institutions like government respect results, but fear change. So mid-level institutions won’t get it for a while, but the top-level institutions get participatory aid.

Just to end by talking about insiders and outsiders for a while, it has been about two years since the tornado. I was such an outsider. I was an outsider of all these big aid structures and institutions. Because I was an outsider, I was successful. Outsiders are uniquely capable of helping the people who have fallen through cracks. And we won’t ever be insiders. They can’t do what we do, and we are better off doing it as outsiders.

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Willow: So I’ve been drawing our conversations while on stage, and I’ve also embedded my own remarks in this Prezi:

Audience Member: Can you conclude by sharing one thing from any of the projects or people you’ve seen at this conference?

Matt: Seth yesterday talking about OpenGov as a way to get more people involved. He was talking about it in terms of the state and society being more efficient, but it’s not just about money, it’s how we help these people get back on their feet.

Mischa: The Levine library of the New South, just because of how amazing their challenges and story are.

Sean: The Erase the Border presentation earlier today was just so powerful.