Reflections: Limits and Implications of V&TCs beyond the Case

The first responders on the ground are not the international humanitarian rescue teams such as the WFP, The Red Cross, Save the Children, and so on who fly in 48 hours after a disaster has struck. The first respondents are the local population, or the crowd, who live where the disaster happened. These are the people V&TCs often collect the data from. These are the people who are on the location- both before and after the disaster have been dealt with. However, it is important to bear in mind the risk of over exaggeration and lack of balanced judgement some people may have. It is easy that an individual may abuse V&TCs in the future and over

64 exaggerate a tweet or message only since they know it would help them to receive assistance quicker.

V&TCs adhere to the belief that volunteers who work together can through small individual efforts make a big difference in a wider community. It is paramount not to view the volunteers as free labour, but more as technical humanitarians willing to utilize their knowledge for a greater good. V&TCs should also be seen as actors that could contribute to complete the picture of a disaster and should not be viewed as the sole information management actor. This has been made evident throughout this thesis since it highlighted the added value V&TCs can contribute to the information management process in sudden disaster onsets, but also shed light on some of the issues related to the inclusion of outside actors in such a closed domain. Collaboration with a large humanitarian organisation also allows V&TCs to become more credible and viewed as more professional. Through this collaboration they are enabled to operate in an environment open to innovation and growth in the upcoming decade. This will in turn not only benefit traditional actors in sudden disaster onsets, but also allow V&TCs to experiment with new and interesting technology which can have the possibility of benefiting others outside of the humanitarian aid domain. If the V&TCs would not have been in such a unique sort of partnership, they would have been limited in their ability to test new innovations since their products would not have been delivered to a specific partner. This is something which makes this case and diffusion rather unique; especially when dealing with a traditional bureaucratic actor such as the U.N.

I personally firmly believe that by outsourcing products to V&TCs, the entire humanitarian community could minimize duplication efforts and save not only time, but also money by utilizing the efforts made by these communities. If only one or a few mapping actors operated on behalf of the entire international humanitarian aid domain during a sudden disaster onset, then I believe that the efficiency of the operations would be able to increase which could subsequently reduce the costs of humanitarian interventions. It may be seen as utopian; but if V&TCs can collaborate with each other, then why cannot humanitarian aid organisations do the same?

For V&TCs, it is also essential that they understand how humanitarian aid organisations work. Organisations, such as the U.N, which have existed for decades are not known for adapting to new innovations in a fast pace, nor are they known to re-invent themselves in any way. But as

65 this case has shown are new tools and practices possible to be utilized by established actors with the assistance from newer actors in the domain. But for V&TCs, this entails delivering the details of the information in a format which is easily consumable for the humanitarian relief organisations. For OCHA, this means to not spend hours and hours sifting through tweets, but rather to be provided an easily comprehensible snapshot from which decisions can be based upon. Here the future of machine learning may come in handy. Within a foreseeable future, computers may be able to automatically sift through the information by itself and map out points of interest on the behalf of aid organisations.

Some of the limitations of this study have been the limited number of interviews used to the analysis. It is important to take into account that less than a handful of interviewees cannot be representative for the entire humanitarian aid domain, although their input was valuable for the analytical section. But in order for any wider conclusions to be drawn it is important to include a wider array of multiple people. Furthermore, a single-n case study is also not necessarily producing results which are generalizable, neither is it necessarily the best for testing a hypothesis. Therefore, future research should be conducted in which the results of this thesis are compared to other cases. Although this thesis is meant to be an exploratory one which later work can be based upon, it is important to take into account the difference in organisational structures that may affect the rate of adoption in other aid organisations.