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I remember 10 years ago, seeing images of US Naval Ship Comfort arriving in Port-au-Prince in response to a catastrophic earthquake. I hadn't thought of the day it would be docked in Manhattan.
I was in Haiti later that year to research technologies used in crisis response for over 1 million displaced people. I saw text alerts, incident tracking systems, and mobile charging stations. And I learned a lot about the benefits and risks of humanitarian tech.
This led me down a windy path to research the contexts that give rise to surveillance humanitarianism - wherein the deployment of large-scale data collection technologies during crises can increase the risk, vulnerability, and insecurity of people in need. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/opinion/data-humanitarian-aid.html
Also how good intentions are not good enough when designing tech for complex global problems. The same patterns and risks to human rights have arisen in the COVID-19 response. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ai-for-good-is-often-bad/, https://www.wired.com/story/big-data-could-undermine-the-covid-19-response/
Surprisingly, one of the lasting lessons I learned in Haiti had nothing to do with digital tech. Our team arrived in Port-au-Prince in October 2010 around the start of the first cholera outbreak in over a century, which ultimately led to 665,000 cases and 8,183 deaths (ref. CDC)
While visiting a camp, I noticed a mother and son washing their hands methodically in unison for what seemed like a long time. They were demonstrating effective hand washing in a way that I had not quite learned growing up in New York.
I took this picture to document the power of public health messaging to change behavior. Today, we have an urgent need to effectively communicate and apply the lessons about tech, which we have *already learned* over the past decade, to the digital response to COVID-19.
