Handbook: How to Catalyze Humanitarian Innovation in Computing Research Institutes

This research was commissioned by the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) Innovation Team, which I joined last year. An important goal of the Summit’s Innovation Team is to identify concrete innovation pathways that can transform the humanitarian industry into a more effective, scalable and agile sector. I have found that discussions on humanitarian innovation can sometimes tend towards conceptual, abstract and academic questions. This explains why I took a different approach vis-a-vis my contribution to the WHS Innovation Track.

The handbook below provides practical collaboration guidelines for both humanitarian organizations & computing research institutes on how to catalyze humanitarian innovation through successful partnerships. These actionable guidelines are directly applicable now and draw on extensive interviews with leading humanitarian groups and CRI’s including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UN Global Pulse, Carnegie Melon University (CMU), International Business Machines (IBM), Microsoft Research, Data Science for Social Good Program at the University of Chicago and others.

This handbook, which is the first of its kind, also draws directly on years of experience and lessons learned from the Qatar Computing Research Institute’s (QCRI) active collaboration and unique partnerships with multiple international humanitarian organizations. The aim of this blog post is to actively solicit feedback on this first, complete working draft, which is available here as an open and editable Google Doc. So if you’re interested in sharing your insights, kindly insert your suggestions and questions by using the Insert/Comments feature. Please do not edit the text directly.

I need to submit the final version of this report on July 1, so very much welcome constructive feedback via the Google Doc before this deadline. Thank you!