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- [00:11]
A
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.
- [00:32]
B
Foreign. Hi everybody and welcome back. This is another episode of Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. I'm your host, Chris Hoffman and I'm here today sitting with some great colleagues of mine, great friends, and I'm really, really excited. We've got a great topic for you today and a hot topic. I think it's a hot topic because it's definitely discussed deep. Sometimes it's discussed without really good knowledge around it. And so I think that it's important to bring this out today. So today we're going to be talking about open source and what I like to say, open source, is it open futures and digital public goods in action. So we are hearing a lot around digital public goods. We're hearing a lot around everything needs to be open source. But what does that really mean and how does that translate and how do we reuse it and how do we know about licenses and all these different types of things? I don't know if we'll get too deep into all of those pieces today, but I think with my guests we're going to have a great discussion. So I've got Sandra Wateng Hart with us today from Mercy Core Ventures. So welcome Sandra. Great to have you here. And we've got Doug Smith, a good close friend from Data Friendly Space, the acting CEO at Data Friendly Space. So great to have you here too, Doug. Yeah, maybe Sandra, starting with you, just go ahead and introduce yourself. What are you doing and why are you sitting in this podcast with us?
- [02:01]
C
Thanks, Chris, and thanks for having me here. So, Sandrontege Hart, I work with Mercy Corps Ventures. I work with a variety of other clients independently and I specialize in the use of emerging technology in humanitarian crisis. And I've been around the block on that. I've been boots on the ground responding to crisis. I've been the organization implementing. I led Oxfam's biggest blockchain project doing that, which was open source, for better or for worse. We can talk about that. I've co founded a startup, a tech startup, blockchain startup, crypto startup, whatever you want to call it. So I've tried to do that and now I sort of work at the intersection, you know, working in between tech startups, especially in emerging economies and humanitarian actors who can use that technology to solve problems on the ground. So it's good.
- [02:54]
B
Super, super exciting, super exciting. Hey Doug, tell us a little bit about why you're here.
- [02:59]
A
Well, Chris, is a very kind invitation by you, of course, which I appreciate. So I'm Deb Smith. I'm really the one leading right now Data friendly space. We are builders and analysts. We've been working in the AI forward platforms and spaces now for really the last four or five years. We started doing a lot of nlp, we built out our own LLM and then in the end we shifted over to a little bit of a rag model and now we're both consulting and building, helping people in the NGO space to really figure out what they're going to do about AI, how they're going to leverage AI and ultimately what it means for local communities.
- [03:38]
B
Absolutely. And there's a huge open source community around AI too. Right. So you've got hugging face, you've got all these things that are out there. And you know, whenever I say hugging face, first of all I chuckle because it's got to be one of the craziest names of any company I've ever heard of in my entire life. The second thing is though, is that when I do say it, I always get kind of blank stares on hugging face. What are you talking about? And understanding these types of things. So I think that the AI space within this is also really important. But look, you know, most of the time when organizations, NGOs are advertising an RFP, in the end it has to be that it is going to be an open source tool that's going to be readily available for everyone. Right? That's kind of a standard. It's not always, but it's kind of a standard sometimes. And as they're doing that, that's really pitting a lot of domain knowledge out of the discussion. So tech companies themselves are then removed from the discussion because of that piece. One, two. It puts a lot of onus on the organization, so it pits them against themselves because now they have to carry that domain knowledge with themselves throughout the process. And NGOs historically really weren't built as tech dev houses. Right. And so why, when we are seeing both of these pieces, right, and we've got the requirement in the middle, which is it must be this, how did we get here? Or why are we here? What's forcing this on everybody and how are we able to, if we want to navigate it, navigate it or how are we able to stand up and explain that that's not really a good idea in some cases. But I mean, it's an open question to either one of you. Feel free to jump in on this, but I know I started with the big one, which might just last until the end of the show, but maybe Doug, over to you first to start us.
- [05:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think it's fair to say that this isn't a new conversation. We've been having this conversation for 20 or 30 years. NGOs generally are behind because they tend to be like super structured, really overly bureaucratic, and they can't quite figure out what adoption looks like. With the rapid nature of technology changing right now, there's just almost no way they can keep up. I mean, what we're finding, we did this great little survey with HLA and what we found is like 93% of humanitarians in the field are using AI. The problem is less than 10% of their institutions have like any framework or policy on really how to use that. And so what that tells us is a lot of people are uploading a lot of data using Gmail accounts. So I mean, there's a challenges here ahead of us. But let's be honest, AI is probably as transformative as the mobile phone camera now. So bear with me here. So it used to be that you had a mobile phone, you used a mobile phone, you might have shot an email. Once we got cameras, people went from being consumers to creators. And I think that's what open source software and what I would argue public goods are really rapidly becoming is. We're going to see more and more people shifting from being consumers of data and reports to now creators of much more targeted products and services that will help them in their situation.
- [07:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, Sandra.
- [07:11]
C
Yeah, I think it's, I definitely echo the point, you know, that despite the humanitarian sector, whether it's like the UN international NGOs or local NGOs, you know, whoever it might be, the Red Cross, there is this sort of mantra of like responsible use of technology, use tech responsibly. And that also applies to the request for open sourcing technology. And unfortunately, because these organizations were not built to build technology, right? Or to maintain or to develop it, that means that all of the methodologies involved, you know, in building technology are not part of the skill set of these organizations. And I think it actually impairs organizations capacity to, to use tech responsibly when those skills are not being cultivated and encouraged within the organization itself. And so what you end up with is you sort of end up with these labels like must be open source, without any deeper or long term thinking about the consequences of that, you know, that could be in the organization's mind. Open source means open access for everybody forever, with very little thinking around who is going to maintain this code base, who is going to contribute to it, who is going to keep it updated with the pace of development of the type of tech infrastructure that it's built on or the type of technology that it is. And there's also very little thinking around, well, why not open source? Everybody talked about using cash as a new humanitarian approach to aid. If not, why not? And I think the same needs to be applied to open source. Why? Because there's an additional discourse around localization and there are a lot of local tech startups that need income, they need capital investment, they need a business model. And when we request that everything must be open source, you're creating very narrow funnel that is preventing the engagement from more diverse actors in their ecosystem and arguably handicapping local tech startups from growing enough to be able to develop locally appropriate tools for the populations around them. So I think it's really tricky, but there's definitely this gap sort of in deeper knowledge around tech that is leading to some of the unintended consequences of requesting things to be open source, in my view, 110%.
- [09:43]
B
Yeah. And look, there's so many things. So firstly, open source, what happens is everything gets open sourced and then you get GitHub graveyards of code that's just sitting and doing nothing, right? And then in that GitHub graveyard, then they start forking into something that was built 10 years ago that nobody's touched for a while. But because it was open source, the organization, no name names, says, oh yeah, use this. But we don't even. You look at the versioning and the last time it was touched was 2020, right? So it's not up to snuff with security and everything else. So you get that level. But this is the thing, is that the one major piece I think that is missing from this conversation in NGOs is, is the community piece. Because all open source, the only thing that open source makes it successful is that you have the open source community where people are feeding back and forth, they're sharing back and forth, they've got a discord channel. I mean, how many NGOs have a Discord channel, right? You know, nobody, you know, so these types of things, I think. So we want, we know what to say. It's like we want cash programming, like you said, right? But we don't hire bankers to tell us about foreign exchange rates. And when's best to do that, et cetera, in the organization. We want open source, but all of our IT people are hardware people. Yeah, right. And we're all hired to do on prem hosting, so not even cloud people. Right. They know how to do the backups, you know, on the server. So, so we, we, we. Yeah, it's it. There's cognitive dissonance, as my wife likes to say. Right. One thing, Doug, and I'm going to point back over to you, but one thing you said hla and just for, for, for the new listeners or the people that aren't, I, I believe that's Humanitarian Logistics association, is it not?
- [11:20]
A
The Humanitarian Leadership Academy.
- [11:22]
B
Yeah, hla, the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. There's more than one, I guess. We really love our acronyms in this section.
- [11:28]
A
We love acronyms.
- [11:28]
B
Yeah, of course, Perfect. But maybe Doug, you know, over to you. I saw you chuckle with the GitHub graveyard comment, but you know, what do you think?
- [11:38]
A
Yeah, I mean the elephant in the room here is quite frankly donors. Right. So donors have created this really byzantine system of competition where, you know, for the last five years donors felt like shark tanks were the most exciting thing that they could do, which is to really just litter the road to products with zombies. Right. So you have a great, you know, proof of concept. You might have an MVP and then you have software rot within 18 months because no one's willing to take these things to scale. The value of open source is that you can do some scaling with reuse. I do want to make a distinction between public good and open source. These are, these are two very different things. I think donors are finally coming to the realization that this unnatural obsession with open source to everything is actually only going to put a burden on organizations to either maintain software or within two or three years the investments that they have made are simply just going to go by the wayside. They just become zombies. And we've seen that in our own work.
- [12:51]
B
Yeah, for sure. I mean, Sandra, you brought up an important point that I think is super good, which is not just the localization agenda, because we've heard that drum beaten many times. Right. But it is around grassroots, local. And grassroots is not even fair to say national. You know, tech companies in the countries where we're working in. I think that's the best way to put it, let's frame it in that way. Because it's not Global south, it's global majority anyway. But you know, it's. It's these tech companies that are burgeoning in Nairobi. We all know Nairobi is a tech hub and we all use it as kind of the baseline for things. But Kigali is the same. Kigali has the Nordskin, you know, hub that's there as well. Uganda, I'm sure, has the same. We're talking East Africa, but any, any country that we operate in. And so we're actually, we're hurting the market by creating some of these things. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think that's, that's super important to think about.
- [13:44]
C
Yeah, yeah. And you know, this, some of this has been informed, you know, by my own engagement, you know, on a project where the tech was eventually open sourced with Oxfam. So Oxfam's biggest blockchain project, the Unblocked Cash project, scaled up considerably for a blockchain project in 2019, 2020. It was tested out in six countries, worked very, very well, but then got an enormous EU grant that required open sourcing of the technology. And although it wasn't a local startup, it was an Australian startup, Sempo, who built a beautiful platform. It then brought it away in GitHub because of that open source requirement. But it also made me realize that actually the question around open source is nuanced and I think like moving towards a digital public goods discussion allows us to have a broader conversation where I didn't even realize me like the humanitarian practitioner, a cash person, that you can open start source parts of your code. You don't have to, you know, like lift the whole hood, you know, and let the rest of the community run away with what you've worked so hard with. And you know, for local startups. And this is where Mercy Core Ventures comes in. Mercy Core Ventures invests in emerging economies, in local startups, all across these emerging economies. And oftentimes these local startups are developing products that fit most of the criteria for humanitarian actors in the sense that they're like contextually adapted. But like any technology, right, that technology needs to continue to adapt to its users and its environment and that requires resources. So in a really, you know, ironic way, the technology itself cannot be developed to the point where it performs well enough for a humanitarian program if it's open sourced from the get go, it requires sort of that investment to be able to grow and mature within that environment. And I think as humanitarian actors, right now, you know, the whole sector is in crisis. And finally crisis means disruption. Disruption means all of a sudden everybody's open to thinking differently. And I think what's emerging now is that there are actors like Mercy Corps ventures as an arm of Mercy Corps that are recognizing the need for interlocutors. Right. You need people that are sort of in the middle. You need teams that work in the middle between tech and the humanit to recognize the needs of local tech ecosystems and what they need to develop and mature alongside the need to translate that technology and sort of like cultivate the engagement with humanitarian actors and also sensitize those humanitarian actors to multiple things. Of course there's a lot to learn, but a, that they themselves are users and will benefit from the continuing evolution of that technology if it has the resources to do so, you know, but also informing humanitarian actors about what it means to invest in local ecosystems holistically. And that means the local tech sector in addition to, you know, civil society organizations and community based organizations, you know, and the other usual suspects that are part of this sort of localization argument that you hear in humanitarian aid. And so I think that in between space, you know, is where we can start to maybe develop a different means of engaging. You know, that's just sort of like getting a foot off everybody's neck and saying, okay, you don't have to fully open source now, but let's talk about how to develop this in a way that's mutually beneficial.
- [17:30]
B
Yeah, I love it. I mean, Doug, now that we've kind of already pivoted into this digital public good conversation that we're having and I think it's important to get there. I mean, I know at HumanityLink we're developing or attempting to develop digital public goods. We know that other people that are out there that are in the social impact tech sector are developing digital public goods. I know Dimaghi has been looking at some different things and so on like that too. So, so when, when you look at a digital public good as Doug, and you say, okay, we're going to tr. Not that you have or not, but you're saying, let's say, okay, this is what we're going to offer as a digital public good. How do you define that yourself? And, and how do you pay for it? Right, so that, that's the other thing.
- [18:12]
A
Yeah, well, we're better at defining it than pay for it. Right. You know, this is, I mean, and let's be honest, this isn't just because of, you know, we're in this odd humanitarian winter where 2025 became this just terrible funding situation and it's going to bleed into 2026. It's really that the donors themselves are not aligned at all with the end user. The end Users are accustomed to access at no cost. You heard me mention Gmail earlier. I mean, Gmail just pretty much won the email wars, right? Chrome appears to be winning the browser wars. There'll be a winner of the AI foundational model wars as well. The end users are accustomed to these types of tools at really no cost. Somebody's going to pay for this stuff. And so when Sandra is talking about these inter locators, the people in the middle that are doing some enablement, you know, I, I very much resonate with that. That's very much who like kind of DFS is. But right now nobody's funding the people in the middle, right? You've got the large traditional institutions, they're looking at headcounts and they become absolute competitors with everybody else, you know, out of Geneva or the scandalian companies or in the States. And then you have this localization agenda. There's a whole lot of like missing middle here. And that's where we find ourselves when we think about.
- [19:39]
C
Yeah, please, sorry, I was just going to add on that. Even if we put ourselves into the tunnel vision of like hyper traditional humanitarian organization, right? The fact is that they pay for goods and services all the time, right? I'll bet you that somebody is paying more, you know, to like host cloud servers or even are paying more, you know, to furnish their offices than they're paying for, than they're willing to pay for these types of tech products. You know, I think a message that I always give to the humanitarian sector is you're not blinking at using Microsoft Office or outlook or 365.
- [20:21]
B
You heard me say this even a week ago, right?
- [20:24]
C
You're not blinking an eye at that. These are tools that require really, really minimal investment to be a good customer of. So I think that there's sort of this misplaced assumption that it's bad to pay for technology. But at the same time, now is the right time for organizations to say, okay, you know, do we really need to be paying for XYZ unnecessary expenses or can we at least have a budget envelope to pay for locally procured tech services? You know, so. But I do agree that that missing middle, you know, is another place where these resources need to be sort of like restructured but concentrated a little bit more. Because at the end of the day, that's going to give you better products, that's going to give you better value for money, and that's going to give you sort of the guarantee that these products are up to humanitarian standards. So, you know, the middle is Also the middle of a journey to get to a place where we have tools that people are not afraid of and they feel comfortable using in any given context.
- [21:31]
A
I was just going to say it makes me giggle when a donor says to us, everything must be open source. They've arranged the meeting on teams.
- [21:41]
B
Yeah, right.
- [21:45]
A
So there's just a lot of, like, inconsistency there. I also want to just kind of throw one thing out. It might be for a later part of the conversation or another conversation altogether, but we're beginning to see a trend where some donors, particularly foundations, are like, hiring up tech teams. Like they're, I guess they're getting bored with giving money to people that are already established, trying to scale, but now they're beginning to build their own tech products. And that's going to create even more strange dissonance between these actors that are already struggling to scale systems that are already in place.
- [22:23]
B
Yeah, that, yeah, that's crazy to even think about. I mean, just trying to think about how that works. I mean, so to the digital public good piece, right? And the, and the, and the middle. Missing. The missing middle that we're talking about. Look, so I mean, if I would go to an organization, I say, hey, look, I've got this beautiful tech. You can have it for free. Right? And, and I'm just, there's, there's, there's a transaction that happens over the system. I'm going to take a small percentage of that transaction and I'm going to transparently show you that this is how much it costs. Right. And, and because I got to pay to host it. Because you don't have to host it. So you don't have to hire two people to host this, this tool. B, you've got to be able to maintain it, security, all those things. You don't have to worry about that. If we're talking blockchain, it's going to cover your gas fees or whatever else it is, right? So there's. If it's, if it's an AI, it's going to cover your token fees, right? So, so that has to. You don't have to do any of that. I'm saving you tens of thousands of dollars because the reality is you would have to have two or three people doing that. I already have those two or three people that are doing it. But here's the thing, is that you get to use it for free. And all your other organization friends around, you can use it for free too. So you guys can have a standard system that you can use and this conversation, they're kind of like, what? Wait, what now? Hold on.
- [23:36]
A
Really?
- [23:36]
B
That's how it works. And yes, I mean, with digital public goods that tech companies are starting to provide out there, I think it provides a great conduit for adoption, for security, for privacy. And it's all, again, it's transparently there. Right. All the different code pieces you can see. But the reality is the running of it, you don't have to do. And so we save. And. And I'm. I'm not sure. I mean, when I talk about things like this, I get a lot of this. Yeah, that makes total sense. But then I talk to the procurement office, and they're like, no, this doesn't make sense to us at all. This, you know, so the other thing that I'm, I'm wondering so long way around the missing middle, where I think that it's totally plausible and possible and, and positive is procurement. And I always go back to procurement because when I get a contract from an ngo, it's as if I'm selling them blankets. It has nothing to do with the tech or the understanding. You know, when I go and talk to somebody, they're like, explain to me your tool. And I explain. And they said, okay, but now we need three data protection data sharing agreements for every single piece of the puzzle that you've put together here for us. And I'm like, well, hold on. Really? Do you have a data sharing agreement with Microsoft? Back to our Microsoft. No, you don't, Right? Because they take everything that you have. Right. And you're just like, oh, okay, well, sure, it's fine. It's Microsoft. Yeah. So where that's my level of disconnect is the procurement piece. Right. And the antiquated systems for which they are used to procuring things, they try to procure us like they try to procure blankets. Maybe, Doug, from your perspective, what's your experience in there? And then, Sandra, from your experience, how have you guys at MCV tried to flip that script a little bit around procurement? And the reason why, and I want to call this out, is. And I said this to Ken the other day as well, that was the easiest contract I've ever had to read in my entire life. It makes sure where the IP sits. And it doesn't sit with you, it sits with me. And it makes sure to ensure that we are able to do this in a very concrete and consistent way. So I just want to call that out and say thank you to MCV for that. But, yeah. So, Sandra, your Experience, mcv. Doug, your experience on the tech side is procurement. Am I preaching to the choir here or do you see other things that I'm not seeing also that are inhibiting? You mentioned the donor piece as well, but maybe, Doug, your side of the story.
- [26:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, procurement's always a challenge. As you say that the structures are in place for tents and blankets, and so the licensing and the IP always seems to. We always get there at the end, but you have to kind of like chase these things around a tree a bit. I will say that it's hard for me to know whether this is the procurement office, whether it's like, at the end of the day, the finance folks have to sign off on this and they just don't trust the numbers or to what you alluded to earlier, it's that guy in the basement who five years ago was still hot swapping drives out of a server and feeling like, you know, he's kind of like losing control of this and doesn't really buy into where the technology is headed or maybe doesn't understand it. But clearly institutions are moving much, much slower than the technology and the innovators in the space just get squeezed.
- [27:06]
B
Maybe. Sandra, before you, just one thing I wanted to jump in on this that I've been thinking about also is, is the issue of hosting.
- [27:13]
A
Right.
- [27:14]
B
So, you know, they. They all want to host on there. And I'm like, well, this. You can host your data, I don't have to see your data, but I'm not going to host my platform on your servers. Right. You know, and. And there's. There's difference of understanding on that. I mean, have you experienced that, too?
- [27:33]
A
Oh, God. I mean, it. What we often get is we don't want to host with AWS because the servers are the United States. We say, no, we can actually host you on a server in Zurich. Hey, Swiss agency. And then you can kind of check that box. And in the end, nobody trusts AWS or nobody trusts, you know, Azure or whatever. And they end up going to, you know, a small server farm, who I would argue will never spend nearly as much money as on security as a company like AWS will. So it becomes a scale game. And I will say that we have even in the last 12 months lost multiple potential partnerships because we don't work with this, like one hosting company in Switzerland. We work with, you know, the ones that are standard and putting billions of dollars in disappearing every year.
- [28:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. Sandra, over to you.
- [28:34]
C
Yeah, well, thank you for the shout out to Mercy Corps Ventures you know, we eventually arrived at an easier procurement process as a function of trial and error and trying to fund and support, you know, startups, local startups all over the world, you know, but also Mercy Core Ventures is very unique in the sense that it has sort of like baked in to its own team a knowledge of what does a startup need to survive and thrive and what are the operating parameters for that, while also having a foot inside the door of a bigger NGO and being able to negotiate, you know, a compromise on these types of contracts. And I think not every organization has that, unfortunately. But I think what you see reflected, whether it's like hosting or procurement, is a tendency for humanitarian actors and development actors to sort of like, internalize and centralize everything, you know, and the reality is that we're living in an increasingly decentralized world, you know, but also if we do not. When you start to internalize and centralize the tools that you need to solve problems, which is what technology is, whether it's AI or crypto or whatever, right? And you begin to internalize and centralize those systems within institutions that are not owned and operated by the people in the places where they operate, you start to internalize and centralize power in a way that is extremely counterproductive. So I don't have an answer for how do digital public goods solve this problem, but I do think that it's a space that needs to be recognized as a necessary space to be cultivated to break down these power dynamics. And the more concerned you are about power and technology today, the more we need these third spaces, because that's what a digital public space is. It is a third space with the technology we're using today. It is a decentralized space with AI. It is an increasingly automated space with decentralized infrastructure. It is an accessible space. So then the question becomes, how are. What are humanitarian actors doing to engage with spaces with digital public goods in a way that is constructive and inclusive for the future? And when organizations are deliberately not engaging with those spaces, and I say this to everybody I work with, they're concretizing the same power dynamics that they're speaking against, you know, or claiming to act against. But those same things, procurement, hosting, reflect sort of like this institutional legacy, you know, that is ultimately also what made these bureaucracies very top heavy and now struggling to survive in a world where money is scarce. So this is also about smarter use of resources, you know, and changing sort of like these symptoms of a system that has become barely functional in today's day. And age compared to the days when humanitarian programs were fully funded. But the question I ask myself is how do digital public goods put on a face that is bringing in humanitarian actors? You know, because you need to be drawn in. You know, you can't just be given an abstract concept totally in a third space. You know, come in and join us. There needs to be engagement to sort of like pull humanitarian actors in to help them see where this can be beneficial to them. And that is not an easy process. There is zero donor funding to be able to do this. But if we don't, you know, things are not going to be going in the direction that we want them to as a humanitarian community.
- [32:50]
B
Well, think about it from a business perspective. What you're, what you're suggesting, because this is an exact space where I am today, right? And that means that I have to hire a sales team for a digital public good that makes no money for me, right? Because it's a digital public good. So then again, the business model, back to that point of the transaction fee, et cetera, is being able to say you use it for free. I'm not going to charge you per user, I'm not going to charge you for this or this. But on every transaction that happens over the platform, there will be a small fee that will be taken, putting into the treasury and you will see that it's been taken out to pay for these teams to grow the digital public good and to maintain the digital public good and all these other things, you know. And so what it ends up being is that sales team on my side marketing to NGOs to use the tool that they need to market it to the people that they're working with so that they're able to engage with the tool, you know. And so what it really ends up being is NGOs stop implementing in some of these cases, for some of these tools. They're actually just encouraging people to use technology. And that's a really strange space. That's a, that's a come to come to Jesus moment. When you're, when you're, when you're, you're sitting there going, wait, that's my job. I just need to go and tell people to use a digital public good. That's going to change the way that they are financially able to engage with economies. Huh? Whoa. This is strange, right? So there is a weird space that we're bringing this decentralized space that you're talking about. And this opportunity, I think it's a very new space for NGOs to, there's
- [34:16]
C
one thing though, that is like a shining star, you know, in this space, which is that small local NGOs and organizations are far more agile and much more able to engage with these spaces. This for way less or not, you know, and I think that's sort of like where the sweet spot is, is that maybe it's not the Save the Children's of the world, you know, maybe it's not the big ingos of the world that are going to enable us in the, in the long run, you know, maybe it's more about them funding local actors and startups to engage and sort of like build out these spaces and digital public goods in a way that is beneficial to them, but in a way that also allows the mercy course and the Save the children of the world to say we're still enabling the outcomes that are ultimately humanitarian and will make people's lives and livelihoods better. So I do actually question who are the key players when it comes to the humanitarian sector's engagement with technology in the future?
- [35:26]
A
Doug, I mean, I mean, I couldn't agree more. I'm trying to imagine that again, I'm going to go back to the middle. Maybe it's because that's where we find ourselves, but just the amount of competition and backbiting of these traditional enablement groups. I mean, we really have moved from Game of Thrones to Mad Max in the last 12 months. And so I'm trying to imagine how it is that we make sure that anything we're doing that supports builders at the local level, even if it's supported by enablers in the middle, doesn't just create a different highway of zombie kind of challenges. Products that just don't get funded. At the end of the day, it is about funding, funding, funding and finding this recipe of how it is that we're able to scale and support. I don't think we cracked the code yet on that.
- [36:24]
B
No, no, no, no. Speaking of two things. Firstly, I want to call out NGO Bingo. Sandra Concretizing. Well done. That was on my bingo card. I appreciate it. That was great.
- [36:36]
A
Love it.
- [36:39]
B
No, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. But the other thing I wanted to do this, Andre, is I just noticed last week there's a new venture kid on the block. Have you seen this? Airbell. IRC has now lost airbell. I mean, airbell's been out there for a while, but now they've officially launched airbell, right? Which is a thing. And you've got Save the Children that has Save the Children ventures. Right? That's out there as well. And so there's also another, another kid on the block, which is the rise of the tech.orgs that are out there.
- [37:18]
A
Right?
- [37:18]
B
So salesforce.org, twilio.org, all of these things that are out there, right? And they're, I would venture they're muddying the water a little bit. Right. Because they have.org at the end of their title. Not sure how they got it, but the reality is, is that they're just the sales team, right? They're just part of the sales team. And so how, where does that fit in this mix? Because they're there, right? And Doug, I see you laughing. Probably lost a few friends just with that last sentence. But, but, you know, the reality is, is that they're, they're there also. And that's weird because they're not an ngo. It's a proprietary solution, but covered in the idea that it's built for humanitarian organizations in some way, shape or form for, or it's focused on them, you know, so to say. I mean, Doug, I know you're laughing. You're in the US and so you, you, you, you chuckled quite a bit when I said that. But what, where, how, how do they, what, what's their role in these things? And then Sandra, over to you for, for the New Kids on the Block. And, and are you guys coming together? Are you discussing the same things, the Save the Children ventures, Airbell and Mercy Corps ventures, playing in the same pool? Or are these completely different pools, different things, doing different approaches? But Doug, first to you, for the dot org. The rise of the dot orgs.
- [38:42]
A
Yeah. I mean, corporations in their DNA is just impatient. And so I think that's part of what's driving this is impatience. They see where some really big challenges in sectors can be addressed. And they're moving into that space because they have the capital to do it. I mean, and I have to be honest with you, they're going to start sucking up really good Talent if, if Nvidia.org calls, hey, Nvidia.org call me. You know, if they call, who's not going to answer that? So I think that's part of it. The other thing is I would, I would point you to the Edelman Global Survey on Trust. Edelman does this great trust survey every year. When you look at those numbers, corporations are much more trusted than nonprofits, certainly more trusted than governments and civil society at this stage. I think corps are just like moving into that space because they think they have value. And it's hard to argue. If you're like super progressive leaning into emergent tech to solve big problems, it's hard to argue against it. I don't always like their tactics, but that being said, I'm picking up the phone if Anthropic calls me.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. And I love that we went from Mad Max and now instead of calling the dot orgs, I'm just going to call them the orgs. And then it sounds like orcs. So then we're in Lord of the Rings. So we're just adding a few more euphemisms. Awesome. Sandra, over to you.
- [40:18]
C
Yeah, I. This is tough. I mean, I do think that. So first of all, save the Children Airbell Mercy Corps ventures are. I mean, they know each other, you know, in the usual acquaintance like sense, but have not, you know, I think the organizations that they're attached to have been in their own existential crises. But, you know, if Mercy Corps is anything to judge by, the organizations are sort of turning towards these hybrid mechanisms that have the skill sets in them to comply with humanitarian standards, still be ethical in the type of technology that you use, be very inclusive in terms of the tech ecosystems you develop, but still having the people that know how to pick and choose the right things and to be selective and very careful about what types of technology partnerships they're putting in place to enable this work. Right. So I do think that there is a lot to learn, you know, from these types of mechanisms, you know, or arms of different organizations. And I hopefully more and more organizations, you know, are going to be coming up with these sort of hybrid entities because I think that's the only way we can work in between. And I think that actually is a very practical way to redistribute very centralized resources totally, you know, into a way of working that is going to basically know how to navigate both sides, you know, the technology side and the humanitarian side. So I think it, it gives us sort of like a clue as to what do these new humanitarian models look like, or at least like, what could they look like. As for the orgs, the capital O. This is why I was talking about skill sets. Right. So we, the more you develop teams that are able to sort of engage with tech on its own terms, invest in technology, but then still also participate in like, the design and implementation of technology in a way that's appropriate to humanitarian programs, is that you start to become, you start to scrutinize much better, you know, which of these orgs are actually going to serve your purpose or not. And I think what's very troubling for right now is that a lot of humanitarian actors are jumping at, like, tech foundation money without being selective in terms of, but what's the goal of this foundation or this org? What are they trying to do with this money? But also, like, who are they talking to in terms of how they want to use this money? Because some of these actors do not necessarily have the best interests of the humanitarian beneficiary at heart, but they do have the resources to build safe and secure infrastructure where some of these other ecosystems can coexist with the humanitarian sector. You know, and so I think, like, organizations need to be hyper aware of the fact that they need to be diversifying the skill sets that they have in house to be able to speak the language and sort of, like, read, you know, the intentions of technology actors that they necessarily will have to engage with because the money's not coming from the usual donors anymore, you know, but it does need to be, you know, done in a careful and pretty selective way. But at the same time, I find that, like, a legacy of getting free money in the humanitarian sector means that actors jump at free money, you know, are not very, you know, like, there's not a lot of scrutiny, you know, that goes to that free money. But it also means that, like, humanitarian activity actors have underestimated their own value in feeding back into the tech space by engaging with it to let them know this is what's okay and this is what's not.
- [44:21]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [44:22]
C
And the more we accept that money without scrutinizing, the less we have sort of people in the organization that know how to push for more ethical and inclusive technology with these orgs, you know, the more we can defend our space at the end of the day, but those guys are not going to go away, you know, and at the end of the day, there is going to be a certain level of codependency, you know, as we move forward. Because the thing about being in the middle is that you always have to compromise.
- [44:51]
A
Yeah, I just want to follow up on that really quickly. And that's just to say that the orgs are really clear that they are not funders. Like, these are not funding mechanisms. So I think the NGO community needs to understand that, not with a sense of skepticism, but a sense of strategy in reality. Yeah. And the other thing, though, is we have a great relationship with aws. The value of AWS wasn't that we won their Imagine prize two years ago or three years ago. Now the value is that they have been developing alongside of us when we've built out Gannett. And I've got to be honest with you, the tool that we have today is because we have amazing in house engineers and we have somebody checking our work who's like a multi, multi billion dollar company. But the last thing I want to say on this is an encouragement to NGOs to think that when you have a relationship, you're on the inside. A lot of us come out of the activist community, we're accustomed to being outside with signs telling people like what we think. When you're working with some of the orgs and you're on the inside, you do begin to have an impact on some of that own that kind of sense of social responsibility that is valuable in and of itself. That is part of your mission, whether it's in the statement or not.
- [46:14]
B
Yeah, I would have to agree. And you know, the Gen Zs, having some of them in my house are very much focused on doing good and having the social impact in a lot of the things that they do. Right. It doesn't have to be just humanitarian, but social impact writ large and that's super important. I think that so many points here were brought up that are so awesome. But unfortunately, because we are all such good talkers, we are coming to the close of today's episode and usually I've been trying back and forth, do I spring this on them at the, you know, at the end, do I tell them before so that they can prepare? So, so I'm going to ask you low hanging fruit, what's the one thing, what's your one wish when it comes to this subject that, that you would like to see. And, and I'm going to flip a coin and it's heads. So Doug, you are first. And let's see, I knew, well, somebody was going to have to be first. But what's your, what's your low hanging fruit, Doug? What's, what's the one thing, just your wish that you could have today? It doesn't have to be huge, doesn't have to be big. But even in your space at DFS and in everything else that you do, what is some low hanging fruit that you think you really wish could come to fruition?
- [47:40]
A
Yeah, I think over the next 18 months we're going to be talking a lot about AI agents. I think, you know, we've talked the chat bots, the virtual assistants, which is why we got the Imagine grant when we did three years ago. The thing that I would love for us to do is to start having a substantive conversation, not about open sourcing all of our AI agents, but instead creating this sense of interoperability and mesh networks. I think that's where the debate has to be and it probably needs to be a multi stakeholder conversation about how we are sharing, building intentional mesh networks that kind of give better perspective, breaking down traditional silos in what is, you know, the ag sector, the development sector, and the humanitarian sector. These are all kind of like. These are. Because that's the way the UN is structured going forward. I just don't think that's the right way. We should be approaching some of humanity's biggest challenges.
- [48:42]
B
Yeah, I love that. Okay, Sandra, your big low hanging fruit wish.
- [48:49]
C
My big low hanging fruit wish. I am like the worst person to ask about, like any questions like, what's the 1x, y, z? I don't know. I'm like mixed. I'm biracial. Like, I don't know what's going on. I'm always trying to compromise and see everybody's perspective. So one thing is always really, really difficult for me, Chris, Like, I don't know if your kids have this issue, but like biracial tend to always be trying to, you know, please everybody.
- [49:21]
B
Well, the last episode we did, we had we. Instead we did the Christmas stocking and the Christmas tree because nobody could come up with one. They all had two. So. So don't worry.
- [49:32]
C
I mean, okay, I guess for me, the low hanging. I don't know if you could call it a low hanging fruit, but I do think that times of crisis are times of opportunity. There is no doubt that every single actor within the humanitarian sector is looking at restructuring resources right now. And that is the perfect time to start to think in a very forward way around redistributing resources and investing them in, in the tech capacities, in knowledge, skills and engagement with local tech ecosystems and empowering the use of local tech tools by local actors. It will cost less. It will automate a lot of very expensive processes that, you know, maybe like five UN employees, maybe that work could be done by an AI agent. But the point is not replacing humanitarian workers. The point is redistributing those resources in a more localized way so that we end up with technology that is truly inclusive, you know. And so I do think that the truth is that there are not zero resources in the humanitarian space. Yes, we have to do more with less. But we are very, very lucky to be faced with that challenge at a time when we have technology that can automate a lot of bureaucratic processes, you know, and therefore make those processes easier, you know, for smaller organizations to be able to engage with without completely stopping the train, you know, So I think there is opportunity here, you know, at the end of the day, but we've got to be creative and we've got to get out of, you know, that internalized centralized model that, you know, unfortunately, is a legacy that has a story behind it, but it doesn't have to be the future of the sector.
- [51:24]
B
That's right. Absolutely. Well, nothing better than being on a call with two activists like yourselves on today's call. And yeah, thank you both for joining me. Doug Smith, Sandra Wontegge Heart, thank you so much for everything. It has been a lovely time with you today. This is going to be an exciting episode. I wish we did three more of these together. I'll just keep. I'll do one whole 10 episode thing with just YouTube. That'll be fun. We'll keep that. I would love it. I would love it. Yeah, great. Because. Yeah, because next time we want to talk cider, we want to talk port, we want to talk all the fun things that you guys are.
- [52:02]
C
I'm making cider right now, Rowdy.
- [52:05]
B
Okay. Give a plug, Doug. Give a plug.
- [52:08]
A
Yeah, I'm making cider as well. And so that's amazing. Yeah.
- [52:15]
C
Oh, so, yeah, talk about home brewing.
- [52:18]
A
That's right. USAID goes away and what do we do? We all make Steiner. It makes perfect sense to me, you know, so.
- [52:27]
B
So now you've got your. Your Dutch distributor, Doug, and you've got now your. Your Portugal distributor excuse over there. Yeah, I love it too. Sweet. Guys, have a lovely weekend. Thanks a lot for coming in and great to talk to you both.
- [52:40]
C
Thanks so much. Chris
- [52:44]
B
Foreign,
- [52:49]
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 HumanityLink, 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.
- [53:36]
B
Sam.