Humanitarian responses need reliable communications infrastructure. Equipping municipal staff with the technical skills to repair damaged infrastructure could be crucial as climate change continues to increase the frequency of natural disasters.
Non-profits often create ad hoc policies for managing, storing and sharing data, but they don’t always fulfill legal obligations or allow for the full utilization of important information. Standardizing how data is handled helps ensure vulnerable people don’t fall through the cracks and creates new opportunities for collaboration.
Frontline staff are increasingly using social media and smartphones in their work with communities — particularly while on the move. Co-creating a cybersecurity policy with communities can reduce or remove the need for technical experts, as well as making cybersecurity everybody’s responsibility in an organization.
As artificial intelligence becomes more ubiquitous, the charitable sector is at risk of being left behind if they don’t feel they have the adequate knowledge and resources to learn about AI-based tools and applications.
Location-based, openly available data – which is crowdsourced across a community, or from around the world – can help those working in aid contexts ascertain where the need for resources is most urgent following a disaster. However, constant and preemptive data collection activities – both before and after a disaster – could help aid workers and government agencies proactively plan for such disasters.
Digital identification could alleviate certain accessibility issues, but at the same time, exacerbate inequities when it comes to digital literacy and device accessibility. It’s also unclear how exactly digital identification will benefit or intersect with the work of community-serving social purpose organizations.
