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Welcome to Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. This is a place to learn about the art of the possible. Using technology in some of the most difficult environments in the world, assisting people in their most vulnerable time. Want to learn more? Let's dive in.
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Foreign.
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Hi, everybody and welcome back to this new series. I'm super excited to get it started. It's Chris Hoffman here with Humanitarian Frontiers. This series, this year we're going to be focusing on humanitarian frontiers on the edge, and we're going to use that as a double entendre. Edge can mean a lot of different things. Edge can mean, you know, on the mobile device at the last mile. It can mean a lot of other things in terms of experience on the edge, trying new things, doing new things in the humanitarian sector and using technology. And I couldn't be more excited to kick off this series with my two guests. So today we've got Camille Crittenden and I'll allow her to introduce herself. And then we've got Carlos Pignotero, formerly of Cisco and of so many other things, a very long list. I'll let him introduce himself as well. But it's quite a team that we've assembled for this first episode, so I'm super excited. So welcome, Camille. Welcome, Carlos.
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B
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. Right now I'm the executive director of Citrus, which is the center for IT research in the interest of society. We're a multi campus research center at the University of California. I'm headquartered at UC Berkeley and we have partnerships at UC Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz. Before I came to Citrus, and part of my entry into this conversation, I think, is that I was also executive director of the Human Rights center on the Berkeley campus. And so we did a lot of work gathering information in conflict areas and those parts of the world affected by conflict. So some of the tech tools that we were introducing and experimenting with back in Those days, that was 2006 to 2012 when I was there, had since gone on to evolve and flourish in different ways. But that's one of the ways that I was introduced to the humanitarian sector per se. So my background hasn't been specifically in that area, but more in the tech tools. And as you mentioned, Chris, I also led the California Blockchain Working Group a few years ago and through that got to learn a lot about blockchain capabilities. Especially in that case, it was not so much for currency, but more for these other kind of distributed ledger applications, which has some crossover, of course, into the humanitarian Sector, so I'll stop there. Thank you.
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A
That's awesome. Yeah, Carlos.
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C
And over to you, Carlos Pignataro. My accent is from Argentina and I did the thick of my professional career in the US in corporate, first as a distinguished engineer, then as a CTO chief technology officer for a number of businesses within computer networking. And my professional ADHD doesn't let me do one thing. So in parallel I was an adjunct professor at NC State University, mentor in residence at Duke University building startups from the IP of the university. I have done. Meaning and intention is really a lot of what guides my passions. I have passion for technology. Chris, you mentioned a number of patterns. I love tech, I'm a geek, but drives me what we can do with tech and the purpose. Because of that, I did a couple of years as the lead architect for what was Cisco entity WWF's Connected Conservation, which was protecting endangered species using technology. I've done my fair share of social with tech directly finger to keyboard, as well as indirectly as a port chair of nonprofits like Code the dream that we teach technology and IT to marginalized communities, to environmental. I was head of data and technology for Cisco's sustainability engineering team and that's I think the longest introduction that I've ever done. So sorry about that. But at least you know where my thoughts are coming from.
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Yeah, absolutely. Thoughts and heart. Absolutely. So it's really great. You know, this is a tough subject that we're going to talk about today, and tough not because there aren't a lot of opinions, there aren't a lot of options, there aren't a lot of ideas behind it, but tough because it's sometimes when technology comes into the humanitarian sector, it's sometimes a square peg in a round hole or it's too big of a round peg for a round hole or it's too small and it's always really tough to find that right fit. But you know, when we talk about edge tech and we talk about offline, we talk about smart tools, we talk about, you know, data and all these things, we know that the sector, the technology sector is moving fast. We know that the humanitarian sector has been completely decimated really in the last year and is having to come up with new ways of doing things. And so today we're really going to try and look at the art of the possible. That's really what this whole series is going to be about is what is the art of the possible. And so as we look at different systems that are designed for humanitarian workers where Internet connectivity is unreliable Power is scarce, infrastructure is damaged. What are some of the design principles that we need to be thinking about when we start building digital tools that can function during blackouts, network outages, crisis that are escalating? What does it look like when these devices can make decisions locally on their own without waiting for headquarters or the servers to come back online? What does that really look like? And what are some of these design principles that we need to think about as we start to develop these things or even start to think about it and sensitize the humanitarian community around these things? Maybe Camille, over to you just to kick us off.
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Sure. Thank you, Chris. I think that you really hit on a lot of the points to consider thinking about the different contexts in which these technologies need to be functioning and you know, ideally functioning within an emergency context or a disaster response. There are a few other things that you touched on, like how do you make the square peg fit in the round hole? There are a lot of different things to think about, like what is the geographic context, what's the scene on the ground? Is it conflict, is it disaster? What is the budget of the organization? Is that a central, like large organization, or is it a smaller, scrappy kind of organization? So there are a lot of parameters, kind of to think think about. But when thinking about where to design, initially you hinted at it there already. And to think about offline first, how can you have devices and data collection systems that can operate really without the benefit of constant connectivity, which we can benefit from in other countries under normal times. So we need to have these systems that already can collect data, can import records, can perhaps be multimedia accessible, so you can include photos or other kinds of data in the data collection in a way that can be done offline, that can then sync up later on when connectivity is restored. So that's just one thing to consider. I'll stop there for the moment.
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A
No, that's awesome. And Carlos, over to you because I think I have a follow up for Carlos, depending on what this answer is. So go Carlos. I want to hear.
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C
Thank you. I'd love to hear the follow up now. So hopefully I go in a direction that reminds you of something. Chris. I think a short term tab, like you say, to talk about the intersection of technology and humanitarian is actually long term, tough not to talk about it. So I appreciate the opportunity to normalize, demystify some of these topics because we need to talk about them a little bit more. And I want to talk about two things. The first one is about assumptions. I want to start with the fact that you ask about design principles and I don't want to let that pass from an architectural standpoint. As an architect, it's wonderful to start thinking about design principles. Number one is what are some of the design principles that we need for the humanitarian place? I'm super visual. The first visual that I had was actually one time when we were in South Africa testing some of the cameras on which we were having some artificial intelligence for image detection like computer vision that we call right now for anti bulging of rhinos. And I would not assume that the hardest thing for those cameras was going to be monkeys and spiders. Spiders that would actually put a gray spider web on top.
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And
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it was a complete misassumption not to know that because Camille, like you said, knowing the environment, but I did not grow up or in that environment. So one of the design principles is the principle of co designing both top down as well as bottoms up. Top down we can actually talk about architecture and we can all. Camille, I can learn from you describing the benefits of a hybrid architecture, centralized plus edge and this and that. And those are great top down principles of design, right? And if we want to have resiliency, we can have redundancy in the data center, but we can have autonomy at the edge and all of that. But then there's the bottom step which is doing that co design with the users themselves and with people who actually live in the environment. It's not an afterthought, it's not a test. It's actually sitting down with the first proverbial napkin because we would have learned that actually monkeys are part of the constraints in that specific environment. So I have a couple more thoughts, but Chris, let me pass it to you first.
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A
No, I love it. And thanks for the great example because actually I was going to ask you about hardware because I know that you are a good hardware person as well. And thinking about that because as we talk about Camille, as you mentioned it, you know, tools, how do people, how are they able to do things offline, Right? Caching or all those things from a technical standpoint. But what are they caching on?
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C
Right?
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What are they able to collect that data with? And so I always end up getting to the hardware discussion and we've had to come up with all kinds of different things. Like we're doing a project in Colombia with blockchain and a lot of people don't have smartphones, so how do they get access to their wallet? So we're using NFC stickers that go on the back of a basic phone that that can then tap to the merchant who has a smartphone. So trying to figure out these little pieces to these puzzles I think is really, really important. And I think to your point, around monkeys and spiders, I love that. And I'm sure we have 10,000 of those where we've missed one major design cue that we should have been thinking about as we were going through that process.
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C
Yeah, I love Joe Chris, that you're talking about hardware, because with hardware, one of the constraints that we have, additional constraint, is that we don't have field replaceability. It's not a push of a button and a software push or a CI CD pipeline or an upgrade. So it's something that we need to think about with a lot more. Proactiveness, preemptiveness. And to do that, I'd love to borrow a lot of the principle from IoT designs. Those are constrained environments, Internet of things, constrained environments by design, on which you have to design something that runs on battery for five years on itself. I have learned a couple of hardware principles that I think are very applicable here. One of which is graceful degradation. You know, instead of having a system completely tumble down, there's ways in which you can continue working with limited connectivity, you know, with intermittent connectivity, with, you know, intermittent on and off. You know, I guess part of the principle is that there's no black and white. But we need to embrace the grace when we are in the field because we may have no connectivity, we may have. And listen, we also have users on which we cannot assume they even have a single language. One app that we built in northern India, in Assam, was with the assumption that there were something like 10, 15 tribal languages with zero intersection among the user. So we ended up, you know, what are the visual, the graph that. The icons that, you know, that can actually convey. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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A
Yeah, I know for sure. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to make the joke about graceful degradation, I am sure. So I was just thinking to myself, yeah, that's exactly what my goal is. Yeah, go ahead.
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Yeah, for sure. Well, thinking about this discussion on hardware, it would be great to go back also to the networking itself. And Carlos, I know you know a lot about this too, but in some of these contexts we can't rely rely on 5G, but rather 2G or 3G. So thinking about designing for that kind of low bandwidth, high latency kind of context. And also in some cases you can't even rely on terrestrial Internet, but rather thinking about satellite. What can you do with satellite Internet? I was reminded of that reading of some of the stories about what's happening in Iran right now and how the protesters had already, in advance, anticipating government shutdowns of the Internet, had placed Starlink satellite communications in place precisely to get around these kind of shutdowns. So that can apply to a number of different contexts where the reliance on regular cable, Internet, wireline Internet might not be available.
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A
Absolutely. And looking to the edge side of things. Right, though, like mesh and mesh technologies in these areas. Right. So when we're looking at an area where you might only have one point of Internet access, so it could be the satellite, it could be the Starlink, whatever it is, that then you can farm that out to everybody else and then allow it to build and build and build and looking at those types of things too. I mean, obviously there's security questions, et cetera, around some things like this, but again, it's the art of the possible. Right, Carlos, go ahead.
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C
It's always a trade off. And I'm sure we're going to talk about security, but, Camille, you just put another visual in my mind and reminded me of, you know, asking a friend, or you're going that way. Can you carry this for me? You know, that, that type of, you know, backend, if you will. We used in a forest in South America on which we actually had no connectivity. We had Lora for specific things. But, and, but we actually did have a lot of people that would actually go buy the sensors and they had mobiles. So even the opportunistic, you know, oh, I have something to send and finally I have someone on ble, I'm going to dump it and you're going to carry it until you are connected. Right. So this idea of actually having multiple ways, the array of potential from Lora to satellite to WI Fi to be able to do to whatever it is, and that opportunistic element of I need to get there, maybe I'll hop on the phone of someone who's going to take a truck and offload that. Eating in a restaurant under WI Fi.
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A
I love. I mean, so many visuals come to mind. I was just thinking of contact tracing during COVID Right. Where we had Bluetooth. And so we could actually know who was around us and be able to tell us who was around us if we had the apps on there. So, yeah, that's super. I love that conversation. Camille. I want to bring it to part of this design principle again, but focusing on a lot of your work with Edge and not Edge tech, but Edge, the expanding diversity and gender equity, especially in the tech side, because Just doing some hiring this week, luckily, which is a good thing in a startup, that I can actually say that I'm hiring someone. But trying to find female candidates with diverse backgrounds, not easy at all. Right. And out of 700 applications, I had two females.
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B
Wow.
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Yeah. Yeah, I would look at that stat. I couldn't believe it. I was really shocked. And I even put, you know, on the thing, people should apply, be better. So it's really tough. But when we talk about these design principles, and there's a lot of different folks out there that have been talking about how it applies to men, how it applies to women, when we talk about this type of technology that we're talking about, where already females tend to have less access to technology than the males in the family in a lot of cultures that we work in, how can we make this an inclusive accelerator, if you know what I mean? And I don't have an answer, I don't even have a suggestion, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. How can we stat jump some of these barriers in the space by using technology in a new way?
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B
Yeah, thank you for that question. You're right. That is an area that I care a lot about and has sort of woven as a theme throughout my career trying to help to advance especially women's access to technology, familiarity and aptitude, interest and curiosity about technology in a variety of contexts. So for example, at the Human Rights center when I was there, we did work doing research on sexual and gender based violence in conflict situations. So we were trying to gather Data, helping the NGOs to understand what the situation was, while also then making recommendations to local service providers as to how they could expand their offerings to women, as you indicated. And it's true that in a number of contexts, women may not have firsthand access to the phone. There may be a family phone that they aren't always able to use. And that's especially tricky then if they're trying to report, say, gender based violence, if it's the husband and the family who has access to the phone. So those are definitely constraints to think about. We have found in some cases, and this is somewhat of an obvious answer, but to go to where the women are. So if there are reproductive health clinics, if there are mothers circles that are sharing information about other kinds of things in their lives, parenting, nutrition, those kinds of aspects of, say, family life, family planning like those can be opportunities for technologists to come in and demonstrate whatever they're trying to show, whether it's an app to report different things, an app for women to get information, say, about family planning. In some cases, as you know, women are often the entrepreneur in the family, and so they can use their phones and a number of these contexts also to send and receive money to get information related to their small businesses that they're trying to help prosper. So I would say that's one, one recommendation on the immediate service side. Now, what you point out about the representation of women in the humanitarian sector, especially in these technology roles, that's a tough one. And we have tried to get more women in leadership, you know, to be examples and role models in these roles, but it's going to take somewhat of a change of culture, I would say, to, to make sure that women are at the table. Because, as you know, diverse teams bring a lot of more variety of perspectives and you're less likely to miss things that you might not have thought about that teams in general might not have thought about when you go to deploy in the field.
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Absolutely. I mean, for my family, we're three and three, so we've got a 50 man. Exactly. So it's so important to have that diversity of discussion from the design phase, from the use phase, from the testing phase, all those different things. And I would say, and maybe, Carlos, I want to turn this over to you, given that you've launched a lot of different products, done a lot of different things, is around that uat. Because what we're talking about here is first is new, right, to a lot of the people that are going to be using it, not only the B2B, so the humanity link to the NGO, but to the NGO and to the customer. And then the NGO has to change their whole culture on how they work because they've never done something like this before. The people themselves might not have ever engaged with this. And so UAT is something, user acceptance, testing is something that is. It's kind of like monitoring and evaluation. When it comes to a project. It's the first budget line that gets cut. You know, it's, you know, they want all the money to go to the program, and then they don't look at the evaluation, the monitoring. They want all the money to go to the product, and then they didn't budget for the three weeks or four weeks or five weeks of UAT that was needed. And so as you've gone through this process, is there a way or is there an approach that you've taken that you've found that really made uat, it's already useful, but. But made it effective, made it efficient and helped you get across the line faster.
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C
You know, the first thing that comes to mind is over budget. But that's not the answer, of course, you know, or promise another deliver. No, that's a joke. I do. And you know, to me the UAT is extremely, extremely, extremely critical. One of the approaches, there's a couple of approaches that I think have been effective in different projects or in my work. The first one is blur a little bit the distinction between a developer and a tester and instead of actually have that functional demarcation, have other type of demarcation, whether it's time based, whether it's. So you develop this code, you're going to test it and you're going to actually develop the test and you're going to run the test, et cetera. So making horizontal. Making horizontal. I don't know how you say that with a single word. Horizontal.
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A
There we go.
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C
Thank you. Yeah, I was thinking verticalizing. Horizontalizing. No, making horizontal. The area of responsibility. The second one is actually doing maybe similar concept but with time division multiplex on which people have time based roles. You're going to be testing for this week, you're going to do UAT for this week and then rotate around in the spirit of diversity. That also adds diversity of understanding the value of different functions along of the development continuum. If you're a program manager and you actually never sat on the chair of a tester, of a coder, et cetera, you may not have the most efficient view of what that entails. And third, one keyword that keeps resonating with me and Camille, you mentioned this is role models every single time. How we can actually elevate specific role models. One time we actually have prices for uat and those awards were actually more visible than the, you know, other awards that, you know, for roles that are, you know, more that have more natural intrinsic visibility to them.
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A
Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. You know, I want to shift, I want to shift a little bit of the conversation to another application, which I think goes a little bit more to this piece as well, which is identity, one of the major things around blockchain. And we can touch on that. Distributed ledgers and so on. Zero knowledge proof. But when we really get down to the nitty gritty, it's being able to have organizations understand who you are, what your needs are and be able to service those needs. Right. Those are the kind of the three main components that an NGO is kind of looking at in this humanitarian sector. And, and what is central to that is your identity. Right. And While many people have an identity, many times it's a physical card, right. There's no digital footprint that they have in a lot of these places, et cetera. And I'm wondering, and I'll go to you first, Camille. Well, A, I'm sure I know the answer to this, but I want to ask it, how important is this piece? You know, B, does. How do we accelerate the opportunity for people to have an identity of which they can control and see what have you seen throughout your time operating in the blockchain space as well in California, et cetera, of what are the barriers to getting this moving? Like, is it understanding, oh, wait, I have my identity on my phone. Oh, wait. And people like, for example, I'll give one small example in the humanitarian sector, right? So one example is that we register people. The humanitarian sector registers people for assistance. And that registration maybe 20% of the time goes into a proper CRM, like a Salesforce or something like that, right. The other 80% of the time, it's in an Excel file, right? So not only is it unsafe, it's not visible. They can't change it. You know, they can't do anything. It's really tough. And, and you. That's. That's how it is. But we know, like living in the Netherlands, where I live today, that my digital identity is, you know, on my phone. I can take it anywhere. I could do anything I want. The government, you know, I can, I can. I have control over everything that's there. Completely different, like really self sovereign. And so, yeah, I just wanted. I'm sorry, it was a long question, but the point is just that we know identity is important, but how important is it? And how do we get more people with the opportunities, using tech to be able to hold their identity close to their heart in their pocket and be able to use it?
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B
Yeah, thank you. Those are all important questions. I think identity and having the user have control over that information is very important. We have seen a variety of experiments in the nonprofit and NGO sector about how to go about that. I think some of the stumbling blocks there are around interoperability. So how can you have a single platform that is going to serve different agencies, even for, say, with refugees in different countries? Those would be things where the tech sector perhaps could get together and have more unanimity around the way that they're collecting and designing that information? Because you're right. I mean, once you have that established, then that can unlock a whole lot of benefits. And there can be also benefits on the NGO and humanitarian sector side and trying to decrease fraud or corruption. If you have that kind of traceability that's on a permanent ledger, then that can help to do that sort of auditing, having a stronger audit trail. Some of the obstacles that I've seen, and here, this is really in California, but I think IT can scale to other contexts as well, is partly around getting the IT staff on board. So there's a question about budgets. What is this going to mean for our IT budget? What is this going to mean for training IT staff? And those are investment infrastructure questions that the NGOs have to answer. How much do they want to, you were saying the trade offs between like product delivery and evaluation. This is another thing, a piece of infrastructure that how much are we going to invest in building out this new program, this new platform versus actually buying food, you know, increasing security, et cetera. So those would be some of the, some of the considerations. I think, you know, I spoke a little bit to how IT can help to increase the security of the information. And I think that's true. I do also worry about, and Carlos, I would be interested in. Chris, your opinion about this too is around biometrics. That makes me nervous to have, have one's identity tied to my iris scan. You know, I think there's also a lot of opportunity in uncertain government environments where that could be used against people, especially if they were, you know, human rights activists or others that might not be in favor with the, with the government at a certain period, to have that kind of information all locked down in one place.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Thank you, Chris and Camille. I remember Camille talking about that supporting a program from the world put program from the UN which was actually using blockchain. This is for a long time ago, a while ago, but it was effectively trace payments and food deliveries for refugees. And at the time we actually stayed away or they actually, I was advising they stay away from any type of biometric identification. And talking about design principles. There are a couple of underlying design principles here as well. Because with digital identities we want to make sure we don't create the opportunity for permanent surveillance. We want to create portable agency. That's the goal, you know, permanent surveillance. And particularly with something, you know, I can, you know, if I have a digital certificate, I can actually avoid it and recreate it and do the math again. I cannot, you know, peel off my thumbprint or change my iris. So particularly to me that goes very aligned with the principle of one way door, two way door is I can revoke a certificate. That's an easy one. But sharing biometrics is a one way door. I cannot change them, I kind of revoke them. So that comes from top down from a design perspective, but also from an education perspective. I think education on the value of your identity as an asset, this common place of if something is free, potentially you are the product and that type of concept which are common for people on the tech side, they're not necessarily for the recipients on humanitarian support. So education is a big one. And I want to address something else that you said that I thought was so important. Every time that we move intelligence from the edge. Sorry, to the edge, we need to make sure that the complexity doesn't go to the user. That is exactly the same with the movement that we're doing with identity from paper to digital, that the complexity doesn't go to IT teams because then no one is going to deploy them. Fortunately and unfortunately it comes with a territory just because of how complex math works. Cyber security and protection is complex in nature. So making people aware, making simple for users for it, educating on world zero knowledge proofies. I need to tell you that I'm more than 18 years old to buy this, to buy this piece of alcohol. I don't need to tell you that I'm 52, for example.
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A
Yeah, that's the same example I always use when I explain it.
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C
And imagine.
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A
So let's rabbit hole this just a little bit because look, imagine if you're a migrant and you've had to Register now with five different NGOs and every time they're asking the same questions every place you go now you've got this great place for them just to query based on what their needs are and then they just add to your verifiable credential. So they're adding to your credential, right? So that then when you meet wfp, they're only asking the five questions that WFP needs to know about, right? And so it's building out that, that profile that you have and it's safe and you control it and you can erase it if you want to, you know, and, and I mean, yes, I know there is a lot of discussions in the humanitarian sector on stewardship for guardianship versus self sovereign. Right. And, and, and things. And, and I don't know how long that it's going to take to get down a path and how we find the mix between what is accessible and what's not. I latest conversation we were having on zero knowledge proof it was the NGO still holds the key, right? So it is a zero knowledge Proof, but the NGO that registered them holds the key. And, and so, you know, how do we balance these things? So, so I, I, I love that and I would, I would love to, to hear from, from you guys, because, Carlos, you mentioned the WFP case. And, and I don't know if that was building blocks or not, the one in Ukraine, but you know, that saved well over $100 million in funds by deduplicating on the cash program. And that's a really good base case. But, Camille, we don't always have to talk about humanitarian issues in what I call the global majority, but the Global south, right? There are humanitarian issues that face in the United States even today. And we know that the issues that are happening on there, and I would call it a humanitarian situation. What's happening not just on the border, but across the United States. And so, so let's take it out of the global majority. Let's put it in the global north now. And what are the stumbling blocks that people are facing in the Global north on implementing some of these things?
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B
Yeah. Thank you. So we actually did a study. You are, I'm sure, familiar with the organization Ripple, the blockchain company, and they had provided some funds to UC Berkeley for research projects. So I applied and got a grant to do some research on blockchain applications among the homeless in California and their access to healthcare services. So in that case, we found in talking to some of the healthcare providers that there were a few issues. So one was, yes, it's easier in some ways to have that information on a mobile device rather than a piece of paper. Just because people are transient, things might get lost in the process of moving, their belongings aren't secure. But that can be just as true of, of phones as it is of paper. You know, sometimes they can lose the devices as well. So that's an issue in California. And I think for in much of the US the provision of services to people who are not insured, say, happens on a county by county basis. And so again, having that interoperability among the counties for taking certain information, or especially in an indigent population who's not, not residing in one place for a long time, perhaps, or they might be mobile throughout the state, that those counties don't have a good way to exchange information or to keep track of individuals as they're moving from one location to another. So those were some of the challenges that we saw. I think that it would absolutely be useful because a lot of these people, you know, any of us, by the time we get to a certain age are going to have a health record. You know, there are going to be things that we have been treated for or you know, medications that we need. And for any of us, that's hard to say. Keep in your brain. And to have that kind of electronic health record that would be interoperable or you know, transferable would be very helpful in better serving the homeless population. So I think that's another use case that would be great to see how we can make improvements here perhaps in a more well resourced context that then we could scale more broadly.
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A
Yeah, I love that, I love that. You know, and, and to this point that you bring up, and I, I'll bring this to Carlos, is, is the business model. Right? Because it's not like it's, it's adoption is the problem.
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C
Right.
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A
But it's not just adoption, it's running it. But the business model is definitely associated with adoption. Right. And, and creating business models in a nonprofit way. Right. So for nonprofits that it's able to be something that they're not, you know, their big. The thing that they always say in procurement is we don't want lock in. Right. We don't want to lock in. We, you know, I'm like, yeah, but you all use Office365. So you know, so I don't know you guys. Yeah, you only want to use that for us small people. But when it comes to the big ones, you're fine with having everything be on Microsoft, but you know what I mean? But it's this idea of lock in. So what are your thoughts, Carlos? Have you ever seen business models that worked for these types of things to get it out there or do you have just some insight or thoughts on how do you think it would work best?
- [40:13]
C
I love the question and I often use the phrase which is not mine and unfortunately I cannot like real time give you the source, but I'll send it offline out of hand. But it's a well known one. Nonprofit is a tax designation and it's not a business model. Being a nonprofit, that means that you have a particular tax designation and that comes associated with a number of requirements on disclosure, on transparency, on openness, on governance, et cetera. That doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a nonprofit business model. And part of my conversation usually goes about, well, I mean, you're a business that needs to have the desire and the goal to, to continue serving the communities that they serve and be sustainable. And that requires a sustainable business model. Many times let me give You a couple of quick examples in techno conservation, in conservation technologies for endangered species. You know, there is a, a potential dual use of some of the technologies to also manage the tourism that are on, on, on certain parks and you know, the same budgeting cycle for a specific revenue stream or for a specific top line, you know, stalls for, you know, having very expensive cameras that are also used for conservation purposes. I always love a duality of purposes. So for example, I mentioned CodeDream. CodeDream as a nonprofit nationally in the US teaches it to marginalized communities and at the same time has also a tech shop on which you can actually create apps. And all of those apps are typically for other nonprofits, for some are for public sector, but they're a for a fee revenue sub entity right within, within the nonprofit. And there's a financial circle there. But that circle ultimately benefits everyone within the chain because the student that just graduated. One of the big challenges is how do I bridge to being in a corporation as a coder, as a software developer? Well, I mean this is like an in between your first job on which you get a salary building apps that actually some of that revenue continues to funding the classes themselves. I started to work with another nonprofit called AI for all. And some of these examples just to make things also a little bit more real.
- [43:41]
A
And
- [43:43]
C
if, if we are advocating for a particular standard of education on ethics, you might as well also build a certification and be the nominal certification so that every company can say that they're certified your ethics AI and you can give those trainings and manage those certifications. Which is why the diversity that we've all been talking about, recycling and having people cycle through corporate, nonprofit and vice versa, is always such a win win because even on the lexicon, we learn from each other. Having someone embedded who was a GM or manage a PNL or manage a business or was a program manager and vice versa, someone on an eng all suddenly, you know, working in, as a program manager in a SaaS company, it's so incredibly enriching.
- [44:50]
A
You know, I agree 100%. And Camille, I wanted to ask you about that because you know, you've sat on the academic side, but you've also engaged with businesses as well through the different things and the nonprofits. And I couldn't agree more with you, Carlos, but the one excuse, and I'll come to you, Camille, the one excuse that I always get from NGOs is that we can't compete the pay scales. So we want to bring in tech people, we want to bring in other People, but we can't compete. And so we're relying on their heart. And the heart works long enough that they're working until it starts to hurt the pocketbook and then it's kind of like, oh, let me go back to corporate now. So it's always a tough one. But Camille, I'd love to hear your experiences around this.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah, that's an interesting question. And you're right, that has often been a difficult contest between those who are hiring in the corporate sector, who can often pay much higher salaries, versus those in the nonprofit sector. I will say that there has been recently a slowdown in hiring among computer scientists in the corporate sector, largely due to generative AI. So perhaps this is a silver lining for nonprofit organizations. So they're going to have perhaps a much broader candidate pool. If you find these really smart kids graduating out of top tier universities and are unable to find the six figure salaries that they had been able to rely on from the tech companies in the recent past, that perhaps they'll widen their scope of what they're looking at and think not only about serving a mission, but also being meaningfully employed. I love that.
- [46:25]
A
I love that. What are you saying? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and everybody talks about the Gen Zs, right? That they do want to work more with their heart than for the money. Right. That's a big thing. A generalization, obviously, but a lot of people do say that. So maybe this is the right time. Maybe we've hit this critical opportunity that we need to get organizations to understand and take advantage of. Maybe I need to get back on the pulpit and start to do a bit more preaching out there and get them to do these things because I think it is really important because it's tough. It's, I mean, well, it goes to show with those 700 applications in our, in our last advertisements in 36 hours, you know, I mean, it's just. Yeah, it's. Yeah. Unbelievable.
- [47:08]
B
There's a lot of need out there.
- [47:09]
A
There's a lot of need. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, hey look, we're coming to a close where we're kind of in the last few minutes of this episode and, and I, I again want to thank you both. This has been really spectacular. Great conversation and, and going back and forth. But what I like to do is kind of, of just ask you a question at the end and give you both a chance to answer it. But it is, what, what is the future you want to see when it comes to tech in the humanitarian space? If there's a low hanging fruit or, or there's something that you think is transformational that really is not being implemented out there. What, what do you think that is? So, Camille, I'll ask you first. It's always hard to ask that question because you didn't have any time to think about it. So, so, so, so sorry about that. But I, I kind of like it to be a bit organic in that way. But, but Camille. Yeah. What is there, the low hanging fruit is, is something out there that we, we could be telling people more about for them to use from a tech perspective on the edge.
- [48:02]
B
Yes. I think there will be opportunities to gain from some of the crisis, military and political crises that we're seeing around the world. So the technology is developing not only from the tech company side, but from scrappy innovators on the ground that, you know, say for drone technology in a military context in Ukraine, we're going to learn a whole lot from that. That could also then be applied to say, surveying crops in Africa or surveying illegal logging and mining in Southeast Asia. So I think for better or worse, some of the technology advances that we're seeing in the military and political context could then be applied in the humanitarian sector. Now what that's going to take is really strong, mission driven, values driven leaders in the humanitarian sector to say that was one application area. Here's a different application area that we're going to pursue and have that be for the betterment of the people that we're going to serve and for humanity.
- [49:09]
A
I love it. Thanks so much, Camille. Carlos, last word. Over to you my friend.
- [49:14]
C
Thank you, Chris. And thank you, Camille. I tend to think sometimes in terms of frontiers or horizons and historically we have talked a lot about Digital Divide as one of those bridges to one of those seams to actually bridge when it comes to connectivity. I think we have because of a
- [49:43]
A
lot of the
- [49:45]
C
advances in technology and low hanging fruit left to others as well. I think we have a different frontier right now which is the one about data dignity and we talked about our own data. When power, funds, et cetera, is so asymmetric. The concept of, of data dignity is one on which I would love for us to have a lot more awareness, to have it more in the forefront all the time. I would love to continue to see work like the ones that you two do and move our set of industries in a way which we do a lot more co design top and bottom, side and side, private sector and nonprofit sector that we design for reality, that we actually go with whatever device we're going to use. And decide on that screen, not on the three monitors that we design for dignity, that we design for longevity. And the way to do that is to do it together. You know, this, you know, set of complementary experience in the diversity that we have of it.
- [51:10]
A
Thanks a lot, Carlos. Thanks a lot, Camille. It's been great having you on here today for our first episode, Humanitarian Frontiers on the edge. Nine more to go. This is a short form 10 episode series. So really loved having you open us up this year and can't wait to discuss more in the future. So thanks again.
- [51:28]
B
Thank you, Chris, it was a pleasure.
- [51:29]
C
Thank you both. I learned a lot. Thank you.
- [51:40]
A
Thanks for joining us on Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. If today's conversation sparked new ideas, new questions, or new ways of thinking about what's possible, then we've done our job. This podcast is brought to you by Humanity Lake, working at the intersection of technology and humanity to help deliver aid faster, smarter, and with greater accountability. Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded, and keep pushing the frontier.
- [52:18]
B
Sam.