Humanitarian Data
XXI century brought many challenges including challenge of mapping and understanding the world from various perspectives: non-ego centrist, non-anthropocentric perspectives. These new perspectives bring new challenges of putting focus away from past focus of humanity on consumerism to bringing it towards.
Lack of good (data)-sharing paradigms and fundamental issues with privacy, governance, and responsible use bring even more challenges [Omodei J.Phys.Complex. 2022]. For humanitarian and development the data sharing practices still remains unexplored, with a disbalance between research and applications.
Some services such as Missingmaps, Youthmappers are great examples of how communities are mobilising for mapping services. Yet for such activities often the main questions to be answered are: “How to protect the most vulnerable populations through making the data open? How to make the data still reachable for people who need access to it?”
Data ethics and more
Data ethics questions arise in various settings, such as mapping of humanitarian data, conveying analysis of humanitarian conflict data such as war in Ukraine. Various issues on what is to be done with the data, how it should and should not be analysed arise. One can start with dividing questions into several levels:
How to keep and share the data?
is it protected, is it possibly sensitive, is it very sensitive, example of semi-sensitive data is data on conflicts which is constantly updating and needs to be rearranged quickly https://data.humdata.org/visualization/ukraine-humanitarian-operations/
How to analyse the data?
Many resources are openly available now on github, yet not all of the open code is well documented. Hence pipelines for this are needed as well.
(more to come).
There are recent projects all around the globe, which are working on the topic of humanitarian data and response to humanitarian crisis by Missing maps, Young mappers and CHA with recent event in 2022 in Berlin:
https://cha.lineupr.com/cha2022/schedule
