Innovating on the Trailing Edge of Technology: Why Humanitarian Technology Sucks, and How to Fix it

[@knotfun1164]

“Yes, 9 kids, so I never stop preparing for disasters.” Stealing this, even though I only have 4. Awesome presentation!!

[@kueifengtung]

ty for the presentation, had personal experience working in the non-profit sector removing land mines, and we were using the grant model. i personally saw a lot of what you said about competition actually ruining not helping to solve the greater problems. too many non-profits fighting for funding solving the same problem leading to a downward spiral of lowering costs for the Funder at the expense of the beneficaries. in my example, this is where we had to lower costs and fire staff and efficiency in order to inversely ‘outbid’ another land mine removal non profit with the same Funder. I was in charge of tech and had explored the getting scraps part model you mentioned. this entailed working with government organizations to buy equipment that they were going to retire for pennies. We got literal mountains of 10-year-old tech, only half of which still worked, almost for free, but the effort and time to strip apart dusty desktops, test every hardware component, strip out the working parts, and frankenstein together refurbished desktops was barely worth the trouble. we only could do that with the help of volunteers which we took on with the promise that they’d leave the experience with valuable hands on experience. this still wasn’t sustainable with many volatile factors. perhaps the future of operating broken markets still lies in transforming beneficiaries back into paying customers, like with a small universal stipend perhaps limited to spending on necessities or such somehow

[@rostar1234]

🤔😍