View source for Designing Online Channels for Digital Humanitarians


'''* Thesis: [[Participatory Aid Marketplace]]. Designing Online Channels for Digital Humanitarians. Matt Stempeck, 2013'''

URL = http://www.mattstempeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Matt-Stempeck-Participatory-Aid-Marketplace.pdf

Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2013


=Abstract=

"Recent years have seen an increase in natural and man-made crises. Information and 
communication technologies are enabling citizens to contribute creative solutions and 
participate in crisis response in myriad new ways, but coordination of participatory aid 
projects remains an unsolved challenge. I present a wide-ranging case library of 
creative participatory aid responses and a framework to support investigation of this 
space. I then co-design a Marketplace platform with leading Volunteer & Technical 
Communities to aggregate participatory aid projects, connect skilled volunteers with 
relevant ways to help, and prevent fragmentation of efforts. The result is a prototype to 
support the growth of participatory aid, and a case library to improve understanding of 
the space. As the networked public takes a more active role in its recovery from crisis, 
this work will help guide the way forward with specific designs and general guidelines."

Thesis supervisor: Ethan Zuckerman


=Contents=

"This introduction will discuss my motivations and overview of my contributions. 

Chapter 2 explains the spectrum of ways we, as a society, respond to crises. It 
dissects formal and mutual aid and introduces a new phrase, participatory aid, to 
describe the dramatic democratization of crisis response. 

Chapter 3 offers a framework 
for understanding participatory aid projects and a deep case library of examples. 

In  Chapter 4, I review related work, introduce my technical intervention, the Participatory 
Aid Marketplace, and discuss how it seeks to support various actors in the 
participatory aid sector. 

Chapter 5 discusses next steps for the Marketplace and 
additional research questions to investigate in participatory aid. 

Finally, Chapter 6 
concludes the work and summarizes the key findings and limitations of this thesis."

=Excerpts=

From the introduction:

"This thesis examines the many ways the public can contribute to help others in 
times of crises, be they man-made or natural disasters. I introduce the growing trend of 
participatory aid: mutual, peer-to-peer aid assisted by information and communication 
technologies like the World Wide Web and the smartphone. My inspirations are the 
many creative ways people have used the internet and related technologies to aid 
others in need. Remote online volunteers have used the internet to develop 
crowdsourced maps for decisionmakers and translate victims’ requests for aid, to give 
two successful examples. 

The spectrum of what individuals and groups can achieve online is wider and 
richer than our conventional imagination allows. Technology's advance over time 
continues to expand the realm of the possible. Knowing -- and signaling -- what can be 
done, where to get involved, and, crucially, how such an effort maps to others’ needs 
are unsolved problems. A central clearinghouse of opportunities and active efforts 
could reduce barriers to communication and collaboration."


==On [[Ad Hoc Mutual Aid]]==

"In recent decades, there has been significant sociological research into “helping
networks” to investigate the power of informal social networks in our lives. Donald 
Warren’s 1980 book, Helping Networks, studies how these informal aid systems sit in 
society: “They are not groups. They often do not know each other. They are the 
combinations of people we turn to.”

There is also a wide collection of literature studying “pro-social behavior”, and 
the forces that drive individual and collective altruism.18 René Bekkers and Pamala 
Weipking completed a thorough and useful literature review of empirical studies of 
philanthropy and identified eight mechanisms that drive charitable giving. One of the 
most referenced works discussing pro-social behavior in society is Dynes’ 1970 book, 
Organized Behavior in Disaster.

The literature on “helping networks” and studies of offline social networks have
analyzed how people solicit and receive aid from a wide range of others in their lives, in 
times of acute crisis as well as daily life. There are “[s]ystems of help, not simply those 
with which bureaucracy and professionalism are associated, but also a vast set of 
almost invisible threads of human contact used in times of crisis and need for everyday 
problems.”20 In the context of mental health, neighbors rely on one another naturally for 
social services and resources rather than seek professional intervention.21 Shirley 
Patterson’s exploration of “Natural Helping” found that social contacts provide mutual 
aid support to their neighbors out of altruism rather than expectations of future 
rewards.

Mutual aid is also a significant force in the context of acute crises. When there is 
a crisis, people want to help, and will often go to great lengths to provide meaningful 
aid themselves. Sarah Vieweg finds collective intelligence in the aftermath of the 
campus shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.23 In Facing the Unexpected: Disaster 
Preparedness and Response in the United States, Tierney, et al., analyze 25 years’ 
worth of disaster data and strongly support the finding that “disasters engender pro-
social, altruistic, and adaptive responses rather than negative reactions like panic.”

Vieweg, et al. write, “Disaster situations, throughout history, have demonstrated that 
people rise to difficult challenges to help others, often through remarkable innovations 
and adaptations of their own abilities and resources to meet needs.”

Professional emergency response managers like Pascal Schuback understand 
that the affected population itself begins responding to a new disaster long before 
“first-responders” from formal aid groups can arrive.26 The informal aid offered by 
citizens in these first hours can be critical to saving lives. One exemplary recent 
example is the unplanned evacuation of lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. 
Kendra, et al. document how ships of all kinds, from tugboats to ferries to private 
pleasure boats materialized at the site of the most devastating terrorist attack in US 
history to help evacuate between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians stranded at the 
southern tip of the island with little direction from the Coast Guard.27 Writing about this 
type of ad hoc mutual aid in emergencies, Stallings and Quarantelli argue that formal 
aid actors should facilitate these “emergent citizen groups”, not just in crises that 
trigger a clear survival consensus, but also in divisive crises like riots.28
Mutual aid may be a natural inclination, but it is also at least partially driven by 
the limits of formal aid actors:

“Self-help or mutual-aid groups have developed, in part, as a reaction to various limitations of 
professional organizations. Such limitations included an “unwillingness of professionals to deal 
with certain problems, a limited reach with regard to various populations, an overly intellectual 
orientation, and monopolistic credentialism.”

One directly relevant example of mutual aid rising to meet a population’s needs 
when the formal aid system fails is Gregory Asmolov’s work launching the Russian 
Fires Map30 (which has evolved to become Rynda.org). When wildfires consumed large 
areas of Russia in 2010, the ineptitude of the government response and paucity of 
state-influenced media coverage inspired citizen-driven aid efforts, coordinated 
through an Ushahidi map.

The mapping platform was repurposed to connect citizens 
in need and citizens seeking to help. Citizens used participatory media to hold the 
government accountable, but also to organize and collaborate on ways to respond to 
the fires to take the action that the formal state actors had failed to take. Asmolov has 
since launched Rynda.org, an 'atlas of help', to match peer donors and beneficiaries 
under the romantic symbol of the rynda, the bell Russian sailors would strike when they 
were in need of help. (For an extensive treatment of affected communities’ own abilities 
to respond to crisis, see Humanitarianism in the Network Age report by UNOCHA)."


==On [[Civic Groups-Based Mutual Aid]]==

"In addition to the ad hoc aid found throughout human history, mutual aid 
includes semi-formal groups like religious congregations, citizen clubs, and other
community groups. These civic groups often serve critical organizing roles in alerting 
and structuring mutual aid within a community. 

Like many dichotomies, the distinction between formal and mutual aid has 
always been somewhat artificial. Formal and mutual aid are in no way mutually 
exclusive, except that we may sometimes focus on the former at the expense of 
developing the latter. Formal aid sector workers do the best they can to save as many 
lives as possible, but they do not pretend to have every answer, or the resources to 
sufficiently help every person in every crisis. Mutual aid is recognized within the formal 
aid space as a powerful force.

A community’s ability to manage crisis itself has been described as resilience.
The concept has been popularized in recent years to describe “the capacity of the 
affected community to self-organize, learn from and vigorously recover from adverse 
situations stronger than it was before.” In Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery,
Daniel Aldrich argues that the strength of (traditional) social 
networks themselves can predict a community’s resilience and ability to recover in 
times of crisis. He pulls together data from four different large-scale natural disasters to 
prove that “social resources, at least as much as material ones, prove to be the 
foundation for resilience and recovery.”36 A community with a more densely connected 
social network and deeper social capital may prove more adept at providing mutual aid 
to one another, because it can more quickly share critical information, aid resources,
and better stem population losses due to migration away from the affected area. To 
illustrate his argument, Aldrich compares the stark difference in post-Katrina recovery 
between different neighborhoods in New Orleans. The Vietnamese community 
centered around the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Church is deeply interconnected and rich 
in social capital, and was able to recruit back 90% of homes and businesses within a 
year of the hurricane, in addition to establishing a charter school, urban farm, and 
medical clinics.37 The community was also able to organize itself to rally for official 
resources, like the restoration of electricity from the local utility. Other neighborhoods 
are still visibly suffering from the unemployment, poverty, and structural damages 
delivered by the storm years later. Aldrich argues that the great disparities in recovery 
between neighborhoods or cities are not the result of variation in official government 
recovery funding but rather the degree to which the responding community has 
information, collective action, and social connections."


=More Information=

* [[Participatory Aid]]



[[Category:Participation]]

[[Category:Resources]]

[[Category:P2P Solidarity]]

[[Category:Security]]

[[Category:Collaborative Economy]]

[[Category:Research]]