Nishant Shah, Analyst, Government Technology

Using connection technologies to facilitate response to humanitarian emergencies has become a well-established and rapidly evolving practice by governments, international organizations, non-profit organizations, community groups, and individuals. Using such technologies in the preventionof violence and catastrophe has been more difficult, owing to lack of political will, operational gaps between receiving warnings and mounting responses, and the difficulty of measuring the results of prevention efforts in the face of more austere budgets.

The first generation of network technologies used in crisis response were primarily designed and deployed top-down by governments. The generation that followed added technical, bottom-up hackers and volunteer groups, such as Ushahidi.

The next wave is being influenced by a broader humanitarian technology community of practice and the growing popularity of open source approaches. These embrace open source tools, put a premium on effective visualizations and maps, and use crowdsourcing techniques to improve …