Imagine farmer group leaders accessing geospatial information using smartphones to advise members and answer questions such as: What affects my productivity (soil condition, weather patterns, and infestation)? What crop varieties are locally available and appropriate? How much seed and fertilizer do I need? Where are potential suppliers and buyers? What are their current prices? What profits can I expect? Imagine supervisors viewing this data on a map to understand which populations are being served and which advisory services are effective and make adjustments accordingly.All of this is rapidly becoming feasible with today’s technology.

Emergency Response–Mobile technology, cloud services, and geographic information have been invaluable in responding to recent natural disasters. Take a note of San Diego County’s online emergency map. During the recent wildfires, citizens were kept apprised of the location of fires and shelters and were able to avoid evacuation zones and road closures in their daily commutes. Now add a “9-1- 1” service such as Ushahidi established in Haiti in the hours following the Haiti earthquake. Citizens used mobile devices to report locations where relief services were desperately needed. Relief workers viewed these reports on an online map and responded. Now, picture relief workers from different organizations using that map to coordinate their activities, as they did in the Philippines. Hundreds of relief workers assessed the devastation caused by the Haiyan Typhoon using mobile phones, tablets, and even unmanned aerial vehicles to capture information and shared it using cloud-based mapping platforms.

Matching Technology with Needs. Where should one start in planning to use geographic technology in humanitarian work? In some ways, it is no different from planning to use other technologies. You start by identifying:

• The problems and issues to be addressed (e.g., low farmer productivity and income),
• Current and desired practices(e.g., pest control, financial planning, market opportunities),
• Change management strategies (education, advisory services),
• Key stakeholders (e.g., field agent supervisors, extension workers, farmers),
• Related information needs (e.g., disease resistant varieties, input sources, market prices, changes in yields and income levels).

You then determine:

• Potential information sources (e.g., research institutions, supply companies, market information services, field data collection),

• Processes to gather and disseminate that information (e.g., beneficiary registration, baseline and impact surveys, advisory services, publication of online geographic information products),

• Data standards needed to support data sharing (e.g., standard definitions for plot size, varieties, yields),

• Integrated technology solutions that can support these processes (e.g., mobile devices, local network services, cloud-based data collection, management, reporting, mapping, and analysis services, cloud-based portals for sharing geospatial information).

Given challenges in the environments in which humanitarian work is carried out, however, here are a few additional tips:

(1) Whenever possible, plan to collect data using mobile devices with an integrated GPS capability to easily capture the location of data samples.

(2) Don’t depend on persistent connections for data exchange - there are areas where full network coverage does not exist or where network quality is sporadic.

(3) Use cloud-based software services to collect, map and share data. Most humanitarian organizations do not have facilities like those of commercial hosting centers which meet robust security and privacy standards or the IT resources to build and maintain applications.

(4) Develop a strategy for sharing data that takes advantage of open data standards and embodies data privacy and security controls and respects local regulations.

We are only beginning to see the transformational impact that geographic information has on humanitarian work when integrated with mobile technology and cloud services. And the growth in the use of such technologies will be likely to continue to outpace everyone’s expectations over the next few years. What an exciting time!