TOR145: High Tech Humanitarians With Giulio Coppi

Two very common themes in the aid and development community are “resource scarcity” (some even call this resource starvation) and “locally driven solutions.”

The particular resource scarcity I am referring to is a lack of funding. This is a conversation you cannot avoid, because the challenges always seem to be greater than the available pools of money, and one that, unfortunately, will only become more acute as we navigate the age of Trump and the new populism.

Locally driven solutions refers to an ideal that contextualization of products and services results in solutions that are more appropriate, more readily accepted and potentially more durable, or sustainable. By supporting the development of answers at the local level, it is also assumed that we will foster a greater set of unique ideas, which spurs innovation and invention globally.

While these two themes, at least at first blush, seem fundamentally in tension with one another there are a number of approaches that successfully bridge the gap. One of these approaches involves the use of technologies, processes, creative outputs and more that are “open source.” Open source products and services are free, community driven and have a number of incredibly successful examples.

My guest for the 145th Terms of Reference Podcast is something of an open source evangelist. Giulio Coppi is the founder of an initiative called High Tech Humanitarians, which purports to be the first free online platform for collaborative humanitarian innovation on open source technology. He is also CEO of Open Focus, a non profit devoted to open source technology for good and is an Humanitarian Innovation Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University in New York. As you no doubt have guessed, Gulio deeply believes that open source provides a platform to drive otherwise missing, misplaced or misaligned innovation for the humanitarian sector