The last couple years have been one frought with crises. Social media platforms have also been developing to coordinate in response to these problems. Nearly a year after the earthquake rocked Haiti, a new report from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative analyzes the interaction between the humanitarian, volunteer and technical communities (V&TC). The report recommends five specific ways to improve coordination in the future.
- A neutral forum to surface areas of agreement and conflict between international humanitarian system and the V&TCs.
- An innovation space where new tools and practices can be explored as experiments, allowing for the failures that are a necessary component of learning new ways of working.
- A deployable field team with a mandate to deploy the best available tools and practices from the V&TCso the field.
- A research and training consortium to evaluate the work in the field and to train humanitarians and V&TCs alike in the best practices for information management in a humanitarian context.
- A clear operational interface that outlines ways of collaborating before and during emergencies, with agreed procedures for communication, shared standards for data exchange and an understanding of roles, priorities and capabilities.
