x | thought

I've worked for several NGO's for the last 10 years. I was very active with environmental groups as an activist and I've had the honor of visiting several jails all over europe for it. And even though I still think it is important and necessary, I have had a shift in thought in the last 6 months and was looking for new ways of being more productive, and I came to the conclusion that one of the best ways of helping is out is by doing what I can do best. In my case, that's in the field of computer engineering. Of course I'd love to spend some time with a cool company like Inveneo out in the field, but sometimes it isn't possible. And not everybody can up with something as cool as Samasource. I had already been donating time to opensource projects, why not donate 5% of my time helping out in different NGO or "opensocial" projects?

We have already seen how technology and the internet community have been reshaping IRL events. In Haiti access to real time information is more than essential and community tools like Twitter have been proving to be more efficient than more established old school platforms in providing access to realtime information.

So what can I do as a software engineer to help out in Haiti? There are some interesting links between the opensource/web communities and its methods, with what I like to call the opensocial communities (if only google hadn't taken the name already). Organic structure, distributed information and asynchronous communication to name a few. We have seen how efficient a open/web community can be fixing software bugs, but how far can organically organized communities provide acute disaster relief? We all know large disaster relief organizations can be bureaucratic, but they do have decades in experience, and there already have been several reports on volunteer groups going in without supplies, hindering the relief effort instead of helping. I have had the honor of working with people who worked setting up refugee camps all around the world. The reality in those environments are not the same as ours.

I guess until there is a well established techies without borders, I will have to do things on my own and contribute to projects like Ushahidi.