Why should the humanitarian aid worker care about mobile technology?
Last year my colleague Benny Law and I hosted a session in London for 12 large International NGOs, the ICRC, the IFRC and some UN agencies. Our goal was to help transfer knowledge to our counterparts on the capabilities of mobile technologies using our in-house developed humanitarian software applications.
At the conclusion of the session, we asked all participants from these 12 agencies, a few simple questions to ascertain the perceived value of the systems we had developed.
Q1: Did they see value for the humanitarian sector in the mobile technology software that we had developed?
Consolidated Responses:
Q2: Would they see immediate application of the software system we developed within their own operations (i.e. had we modeled the software in a way that had application for different humanitarian actors)?
Consolidated Responses:
Q3: Should we stop developing and growing the system or do we forge ahead with new features and functionality that are within the scope of what LMMS is designed for?
Consolidated Responses:
The last question was particularly interesting, because it also led so many of the trainees (even the few that weren’t coming with a technical background) to ask about deploying the systems on consumer-grade devices over our existing commercial grade hardware devices (as you’ll see later, this did not have to be an either-or scenario). Moreover, those that had technical backgrounds were vocal in identifying the Android smartphones as the preferred platform of choice.
In our diverse group of aid workers, here was living proof that technology matters. Many of the trainees may not have been able to articulate why Android over other systems or to fully explain the pros and cons of consumer versus commercial grade devices. Yet all of them knew that mobile was important and could be applied inside the humanitarian domain. So why would (or should) humanitarian aid workers care about mobile technology?
Why Care?
I think the answer, lies in the fact that these people had correctly put their fingers on the pulse of the new world reality for humanitarianism. Namely a world in which the mobile technologies are presenting a paradigm shift in how we work, a world that is becoming increasingly networked, and a world in which the potential to access lots of data offers tantalizing opportunities (as well as a zillion risks – but that’s another blog entry in itself).
