ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been increasing interest around new technologies that claim to improve humanitarian assistance. Crisis mapping, crowdsourcing and crowdseeding, to name a few, are at the forefront of all discussions about humanitarian innovations. The 2013 World Disasters Report, published by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), explores how technology will influence the future of humanitarian action; it ‘(examines) the profound impact of technological innovations on humanitarian action, how humanitarians employ technology in new and creative ways, and what risks and opportunities may emerge as a result of technological innovations’ (Vinck, 2013). Also in 2013 the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released a report entitled ‘Humanitarianism in the network age’ where it offered its own reflections on the use of new technologies in the context of humanitarian interventions (Chandran and Thow, 2013). Meanwhile other endeavors such as the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) have been dedicating considerable resources to developing tools for representing disasters, as well as various standards for measuring the impact of interventions and evaluating response effectiveness. Because these technological developments are such recent additions to the humanitarian toolkit, little if any research exists as to their actual impact on improving performance of disaster response.
