SocInfo

Haiti does not need soldiers. What Haiti needs from the world is a genuine desire to help and work hand in hand with its people. As long as outside assistance continue to come with an attitude of arrogance and superiority, we will continue to perpetuate an us versus them divide where we know better and the Haitian people are viewed as helpless and incapable of rebuilding their own country.

Haiti is a deserving nation full of capable people and community organizations. We should be working with them to rebuild the country from within and from the bottom up, not from the outside and from top down.

At a meeting of volunteers exploring the risks of resource allocation amidst reports of violence and the various alternatives for action, Jon Katz, a person with decades’ long track record working effectively in remote communities, remained silent during the course of the discussion and then offered these remarks:

Do not get me wrong. I have the utmost respect and appreciation for aid organizations and everyone trying to provide assistance to those who need it ihere.

It probably has nothing to do with the people or the institutions, as their intentions are good and they are doing enormous efforts.

It is the system, or lack of, or the resulting system that cripples initiative and the ability of individuals and individual organizations to be proactive and effectively help.

Or perhaps it has everything to do with the organizations, the top and middle management, the chain of command and those in charge.

Dunno for sure, dunno yet, for almost everyone I see and meet is busy or trying to get busy. But once this is done, I hope we can all work together and break the whole thing down and come up with proposals for improving immediate response in crisis situations.

I mean, lots of people are busy, but because of the inability of working together to achieve immediate impact, they are going to be able to become effective, late this week, early next week, a week and half or two weeks after the earthquake hit. By then, it is going to be too late to too many.

This is a collection of notes to document the activities of independent individuals interested in providing relief assistance to Haiti.

As we arrive home, after the second wake after the earthquake at Haiti, I wanted to share a quick log of activities undertaken by the independent volunteer teams that joined us this week. All of this was done with no budget and any coordination than mobile phones, facebook posts and twitter messages. No central organization and no hierarchy.

(read from the bottom up)

Fri. Jan 29, 2010

7pm Drive back to Santo Domingo. Stop by Good Samaritan to pick up 2 physicians from Vermont who have just spent 10 days in the field. I learn there are over 25 doctors from Vermont, doing voluntary medical work at Good Samaritan Hospital. I also learn their hospital made it very clear to them that what they were doing was a personal choice and not related in any way with the hospital and that their volunteer days would come out of their vacation days! their hospital also informed them that whatever they do here is not covered by their malpractice insurance.
4pm I drive PT Donna back to Good Samaritan.
3pm I meet with Harvard's team to discuss the iphone application for patient data gathering.

Haití no necesita soldados. Necesita una verdadera voluntad de ayudar y de trabajar mano a mano con la gente. Mientras se les quiera seguir tratando con arrogancia y superioridad se seguirán creando abismos de diferencia.

Haití es un pueblo digno lleno de gente capaz y organizaciones comunitarias. Es con ellas que debemos trabajar y reconstruir el país desde dentro y de abajo hacia arriba, no desde fuera y de arriba hacia abajo.

En una reunión de voluntarios analizando los riesgos de la distribución de recursos y reportes de violencia, y las distintas alternativas de acción, Jon Katz, persona con décadas y un valioso trayecto de trabajo e impacto en comunidades remotas se mantuvo callado largo rato hasta pedir la palabra y dijo algo así:

"Lo que debemos hacer es ir primero donde la gente y convocar una asamblea con ellos. Preguntarles qué quieren y que sean parte del proceso de transporte, recepción y distribución. Que coordinen ellos la necesidad y la distribución. Así ellos mismos proveen la seguridad y no hará falta ni siquiera seguridad, ya que es algo propio de ellos de lo que son responsables."

Without bragging or believing we are any better than anyone else, after today's experience I would just like to ask the question of how come, me, a guy without a car and without money, without material resources and belonging to no institution was able to get 4 teams safely into Haiti in one day and had food, supplies and medical and volunteer personnel delivered directly to those who needed them?

Would I be more inefficient if I had a title, a budget to spend or resources to spare?

How is my dream of helping others different from the commitment to help those getting money and resources to do so?

Think about and accept no excuses from no organization. We just proved today that it can be done, as it was done not by me, but by Laura, Fernan, Alejandrito, Erica, Jon, Paul and the others who were candid enough to join us.

And by the way, I met Erica two days ago, Fernan one day ago, and Paul and the others today, yet we all made it through the border and reached out to people "together".

How come those that work together and should cooperate by mandate can not accomplish the simple task of getting things and help out there to the people.

You know a company is way way way lost and without a clue when all they have to show at the most important consumer electronics show is: a keyboard, Windows 7 on automobiles, mobile phones and home theaters, a couple of touch screens and body motion based video game technology...

Has Microsoft consolidated itself as a follower? Even worse, do they really feel that comfortable being one? Do not take my word for it, see how dull their innovations look in the very own website they created to promote their participation at CES 2010. And do the excercise: all their products are not either first or breakthroughs or revolutionary in any of their respective fields.

(Note: This is still a very early draft. Feel free to comment and make suggestions, corrections and excuse the errors.)

The Internet Archive and Google Books: Why can't they be friends?

The Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available for free for a little longer than Google (it was founded on 1996 with the primary goal of archiving all web pages for posterity, since they change constantly and disappear for ever eventually). Google Books program for scanning books in major libraries starting with Oxford University was announced on December 2004 and making them available to the public for free.

Both projects seem like a blessing and well meant and one would think they would even be happy to cooperate with each other. Well, not so. As it turns out, the Internet Archive is a non-profit initiative, founded by technology entrepreneur Brewster Khale and Google Books is an initiative of Google, a commercial operation. Yes, both aim to make all books in the universe available in digital format for free to everyone, but one, given its nature expects to profit from this.

I just got a Kindle 2 for Christmas (thanks, Cathy). And it has been amazing experience, as I posted in my BibliotecasVirtuales.com blog:

I am inspired, I am motivated, I am excited. Finally, books, content, knowledge are not trapped in the dungeon-like shelves of bookstores or temple-like halls and walls of libraries. Content is free (well, almost) to go anywhere, to be taken anywhere, to be shared, accessed and used by anyone. Anyone with a Kindle that is...

It took me a while, but I was able to discover plenty of sources for digital books both in text and audio format available in the public domain and/or under Creative Commons licenses (listed in my other post). These books are not only available to the Kindle or any particular e-book reader, but can be read (or heard in the case of Audiobooks) on any computer, smart mobile phone or even MP3/MP4 player. So one might be tempted to think there is finally no digital divide when it comes to open and public access to culture when it comes to books and digital texts. The truth is quite the opposite. As matter of fact, there might be even greater digital divide in this field than in any other field of knowledge and culture.

I am now happily running Ubuntu in a window (or full screen) on my 17" Dell Windows 7 notebook using Sun's Virtualbox, getting the best of both worlds... copy/paste to/from both operating system and any application.

It went so well that when I showed it to my colleague at the office, he downloaded Sun Virtualbox and installed it and got Ubuntu running on his Mac computer running Leopard in a matter of minutes while we were speaking!!!

For me it was a couple of clicks and downloads, but think about the layers and thousands of hours/people/discussion/work/knowledge and innovation involved, independently unrelated to each other:

A closed proprietary commercial operating system (Windows 7), running a competitor's commercial open tool available for free (Sun Virtualbox) which enables you to run a user-friendly graphical distribution (Ubuntu) of an open source distribution (Debian) of an open source operating system (Linux).

Ain't open knowledge, open standards and open source great?