History & Today
As the ability for people around the world to help disaster victims was enabled by modern technologies, several new types of groups and organizations began to form. However, many of the formal, traditional organizations were not sure how to access and collaborate with this capacity. So, in 2012, the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) was created to raise the awareness of these new organizations, provide a 'connecting service', and develop guidance on how to work together.
Over the years, several activiation requests were supported. But, as both organization types matured, the need for the DHN has diminised (as originally expected). Formal organizations have added information management and digital capacity. New organizations have stabilized and formed lasting partnerships. And, new services have emerged with funding such as the H2H network and FEMA Crowdsourcing.
Although we no longer have formal activation or DHN teams, we can still help connect formal humanitarian organizations with the new digitally-enabled groups. As well, we will continue to publish occasional papers related to new technologies and trends.
Contact
Inquiries can be made to contact@digitalhumanitarians.com.
DHN Co-Founders
verity@un.org
Andrej Verity is an information management officer at the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York and a co-founder of the Digital Humanitarian Network. Between responding to emergencies, he leads OCHA's multi-skilled shared Digital Services team providing strategic end-to-end service development, integrating and promoting standards and taxonomies, and managing platform-as-a-service support to a variety of sites ranging from ReliefWeb to the Humanitarian Data Exchange to the Financial Tracking Service. Andrej openly shares his ideas on his personal site - https://blog.veritythink.com/. Follow Andrej on Twitter at: andrejverity
patrick@irevolution.net
Patrick is the co-founder of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) and the author of the book "Digital Humanitarians." His influential blog, iRevolution.net has received 2 million hits. Patrick presently serves as Co-Founder and Executive Director of WeRobotics. Previously, he served as Director of Social Innovation at QCRI, co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping & Early Warning and served as Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi. Patrick is also a UNICEF Humanitarian Innovation Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation & PopTech Fellow. He holds holds a PhD from the Fletcher School and a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from Stanford. He was born & raised in Africa. Follow Patrick on Twitter at: patrickmeier.
