I’m a technologist and like most
technologists and scientists I do my
best work in the corporate world for the
most part and I had been in London three
years ago and I was on the little
capitalist hamster wheel and I was
coming back through garlic Airport and I
saw a picture on the big screen it was
September 2015 and it was the picture of
the boy in the beach and that picture
floored me and I came back to Dublin and
I just decided I’m gonna do whatever it
is I can I’m not a natural fit to
humanitarianism I don’t background in
humanitarianism aside from being human
so I took a look at the space and I
thought I had some experience and she
cited marketplaces so that’s something
like Airbnb for Refugees that could work
so I registered the domain refugee B&B
comm technologists do ya or dinner we
have a demain I didn’t know then at
another two years before we actually
placed somebody into accommodation so
that we can be at a hackathon lots of
amazing volunteers Ireland’s America
Canada Singapore and we did what we
caught in a weekend and you know the
bones of a platform we did it in 34
languages the vision was a global
database of people who were willing to
give a spare room to refugees and people
started pledging spare rooms and then we
had to pause for a minute the saying in
technology move fast and break things
it’s not really okay when you’re dealing
with life and death you know and so we
took a step back and we started just
assessing the landscape so all of the
actors the NGOs grassroots charities and
the scale of the problem so it’s 28
million international refugees and
asylum-seekers seems like a really big
number
it’s about what goes through Grand
Central Station in New York in a month
it is a big number but you know we deal
with big numbers I think it’s like two
billion portions of coca-cola consumed
every day there’s a supply chain there’s
a distribution chain you know things
happen at scale I do think it’s a big
number but I don’t think it’s an
inconceivable number to address things
from a humanitarian perspective and
we’re seven point four billion people on
the planet so that little green man
there’s are 28 million refugees
international refugees and asylum
seekers that’s the amount of people
there are about two hundred and one and
two hundred and sixty in the world I
want to counter that right-wing rhetoric
that we get all the time thus we have to
protect what hours do we have to put up
walls we’re gonna be like over on Orson
like it’s just not true those Donald
Trump isms that say this this is the way
that they just breed on fear migration
has always happened migration will
continue to happen
people are gonna make move that way in
the world because climate migration is
coming I know where that picture of the
boy on the beach was taken and that
family were trying to cross from Turkey
to Greece at its closest that’s about
810 miles any of us can get on a ferry
runs multiple times every day pay by 25
euro and we won’t die whereas people who
don’t have a passport will pay maybe
$1,000 per person and they’ll get on an
overloaded boat and 14,000 died in the
Mediterranean since that picture was
taken since 2015 so that’s a piece of
paper that’s the difference between life
and death you know we have these seven
point four billion on the planet we’ve
drawn these imaginary lines we call them
borders and people die because of these
borders and the rich people tell the
poor people these poor people are going
to take your stuff maybe it’s not the
poor people taking the other poor
people’s stuff maybe it’s the rich
people
I think we just have to totally readjust
our perspective on this so after our
initial hackathon we started to do some
like proper requirements gathering and
came at it from a more grounded kind of
perspective I wanted to thank all the
humanitarians the grassroots
organizations the NGOs that bothered to
engage with us we’ve done a lot of
listening
lots listening over the last three years
and the concept we’ve started on is a
global humanitarian database NGO managed
so the Red Cross were working closely
with the Irish Red Cross we are
accumulating a database of accomodation
goods and services so anybody in Ireland
who has a spare room they would like to
pledge for a refugee Red Cross Shaheed
forward slash pledge we also moved into
God’s and services because we realized
we can’t just put people into
accommodation without the appropriate
wraparound supports so we’ve kind of a
couple of projects ongoing now we’ve got
this humanitarian database we realized
once we got into this that if you’re
gonna place people into homes then you
need to have some kind of a case
management element so we now have for
case managers and we have obviously
enabled them with the case management
system where we couldn’t keep
information by people and keep track of
who’s firing that kind of thing and then
the final piece of it was an open source
project so we’ve created this software
for free we’re working with the Red
Cross at the moment but we wanted to
make sure that it remained free and that
we could give it away to other people if
we wanted so we’re maintaining an open
source project at the same time that’s
the register apply just there now I
think we have 155 clients mostly Syrian
refugees we have 120 were given
accommodation support to half of them
are in fledged accommodation so applies
to accommodation isn’t appropriate for
everyone but it’s particularly good for
young single people who need to improve
their language skills
living with it with the Irish family can
be really helpful in that regard we also
we got a massive amount pledges that we
actually didn’t use I think we had about
600 in the early days but we had it like
an extensive screening process and the
reason we had to reject a lot of them
was because they were too rural and it’s
just not appropriate to put somebody you
know alone into a rural area like that
it’s fine if you have a car but it can
be very very challenging if you don’t so
that’s where we’re at with the register
of pledges I feel like I’m obliged to
just bring up the data protection here
and when we got into this you know we’ve
a database of people who want to pledge
accommodation out it’s worse
that’s a database of sympathizers if you
were in different countries let’s say
even hungry or Greece now there’s some
humanitarians who are locked up in
Greece for helping refugees so we are
mindful of how sensitive this
information is and then once we got into
case management we started collecting
refugee data which is about as sensitive
as it gets because it’s sensitive data
on vulnerable people so one of the
reasons we’ve chosen the Red Cross as a
partner is because they own this data we
as volunteers don’t and I think we just
need to be mindful that this is it is a
powerful concept and I don’t think it
should be owned by private company at
any points and I actually don’t think it
should be owned by a government either
it may be the Red Cross that that’s
worked well for us in Ireland they have
some of their fundamental principles
include neutrality impartiality ideal
kind of principles for a – controller
and I just finished with a friend of
mine armet and he is in a Red Cross
house now in Dublin and he saw the
picture of five each as well and he was
in Turkey at the time and he was
imminently getting on one of these boats
and it’s it’s lovely to see that three
years later and thankfully he’s one of
the people who did get here and he’s
embracing Irish life and delighted to
call him my
friend and there’s been times this
project has been challenging you know
it’s the kind of volunteer work where
you’re not running to really seeing the
results very quickly you’re behind a
keyboard at 3 o’clock in the morning
drinking coffee and trying to stay awake
and of course I look around and I look
at my friends who also happened to be
refugees I look at how challenging
integration is for them
I look at their determination their
resilience and I just keep going with this project so yeah thank you very much
technologists and scientists I do my
best work in the corporate world for the
most part and I had been in London three
years ago and I was on the little
capitalist hamster wheel and I was
coming back through garlic Airport and I
saw a picture on the big screen it was
September 2015 and it was the picture of
the boy in the beach and that picture
floored me and I came back to Dublin and
I just decided I’m gonna do whatever it
is I can I’m not a natural fit to
humanitarianism I don’t background in
humanitarianism aside from being human
so I took a look at the space and I
thought I had some experience and she
cited marketplaces so that’s something
like Airbnb for Refugees that could work
so I registered the domain refugee B&B
comm technologists do ya or dinner we
have a demain I didn’t know then at
another two years before we actually
placed somebody into accommodation so
that we can be at a hackathon lots of
amazing volunteers Ireland’s America
Canada Singapore and we did what we
caught in a weekend and you know the
bones of a platform we did it in 34
languages the vision was a global
database of people who were willing to
give a spare room to refugees and people
started pledging spare rooms and then we
had to pause for a minute the saying in
technology move fast and break things
it’s not really okay when you’re dealing
with life and death you know and so we
took a step back and we started just
assessing the landscape so all of the
actors the NGOs grassroots charities and
the scale of the problem so it’s 28
million international refugees and
asylum-seekers seems like a really big
number
it’s about what goes through Grand
Central Station in New York in a month
it is a big number but you know we deal
with big numbers I think it’s like two
billion portions of coca-cola consumed
every day there’s a supply chain there’s
a distribution chain you know things
happen at scale I do think it’s a big
number but I don’t think it’s an
inconceivable number to address things
from a humanitarian perspective and
we’re seven point four billion people on
the planet so that little green man
there’s are 28 million refugees
international refugees and asylum
seekers that’s the amount of people
there are about two hundred and one and
two hundred and sixty in the world I
want to counter that right-wing rhetoric
that we get all the time thus we have to
protect what hours do we have to put up
walls we’re gonna be like over on Orson
like it’s just not true those Donald
Trump isms that say this this is the way
that they just breed on fear migration
has always happened migration will
continue to happen
people are gonna make move that way in
the world because climate migration is
coming I know where that picture of the
boy on the beach was taken and that
family were trying to cross from Turkey
to Greece at its closest that’s about
810 miles any of us can get on a ferry
runs multiple times every day pay by 25
euro and we won’t die whereas people who
don’t have a passport will pay maybe
$1,000 per person and they’ll get on an
overloaded boat and 14,000 died in the
Mediterranean since that picture was
taken since 2015 so that’s a piece of
paper that’s the difference between life
and death you know we have these seven
point four billion on the planet we’ve
drawn these imaginary lines we call them
borders and people die because of these
borders and the rich people tell the
poor people these poor people are going
to take your stuff maybe it’s not the
poor people taking the other poor
people’s stuff maybe it’s the rich
people
I think we just have to totally readjust
our perspective on this so after our
initial hackathon we started to do some
like proper requirements gathering and
came at it from a more grounded kind of
perspective I wanted to thank all the
humanitarians the grassroots
organizations the NGOs that bothered to
engage with us we’ve done a lot of
listening
lots listening over the last three years
and the concept we’ve started on is a
global humanitarian database NGO managed
so the Red Cross were working closely
with the Irish Red Cross we are
accumulating a database of accomodation
goods and services so anybody in Ireland
who has a spare room they would like to
pledge for a refugee Red Cross Shaheed
forward slash pledge we also moved into
God’s and services because we realized
we can’t just put people into
accommodation without the appropriate
wraparound supports so we’ve kind of a
couple of projects ongoing now we’ve got
this humanitarian database we realized
once we got into this that if you’re
gonna place people into homes then you
need to have some kind of a case
management element so we now have for
case managers and we have obviously
enabled them with the case management
system where we couldn’t keep
information by people and keep track of
who’s firing that kind of thing and then
the final piece of it was an open source
project so we’ve created this software
for free we’re working with the Red
Cross at the moment but we wanted to
make sure that it remained free and that
we could give it away to other people if
we wanted so we’re maintaining an open
source project at the same time that’s
the register apply just there now I
think we have 155 clients mostly Syrian
refugees we have 120 were given
accommodation support to half of them
are in fledged accommodation so applies
to accommodation isn’t appropriate for
everyone but it’s particularly good for
young single people who need to improve
their language skills
living with it with the Irish family can
be really helpful in that regard we also
we got a massive amount pledges that we
actually didn’t use I think we had about
600 in the early days but we had it like
an extensive screening process and the
reason we had to reject a lot of them
was because they were too rural and it’s
just not appropriate to put somebody you
know alone into a rural area like that
it’s fine if you have a car but it can
be very very challenging if you don’t so
that’s where we’re at with the register
of pledges I feel like I’m obliged to
just bring up the data protection here
and when we got into this you know we’ve
a database of people who want to pledge
accommodation out it’s worse
that’s a database of sympathizers if you
were in different countries let’s say
even hungry or Greece now there’s some
humanitarians who are locked up in
Greece for helping refugees so we are
mindful of how sensitive this
information is and then once we got into
case management we started collecting
refugee data which is about as sensitive
as it gets because it’s sensitive data
on vulnerable people so one of the
reasons we’ve chosen the Red Cross as a
partner is because they own this data we
as volunteers don’t and I think we just
need to be mindful that this is it is a
powerful concept and I don’t think it
should be owned by private company at
any points and I actually don’t think it
should be owned by a government either
it may be the Red Cross that that’s
worked well for us in Ireland they have
some of their fundamental principles
include neutrality impartiality ideal
kind of principles for a – controller
and I just finished with a friend of
mine armet and he is in a Red Cross
house now in Dublin and he saw the
picture of five each as well and he was
in Turkey at the time and he was
imminently getting on one of these boats
and it’s it’s lovely to see that three
years later and thankfully he’s one of
the people who did get here and he’s
embracing Irish life and delighted to
call him my
friend and there’s been times this
project has been challenging you know
it’s the kind of volunteer work where
you’re not running to really seeing the
results very quickly you’re behind a
keyboard at 3 o’clock in the morning
drinking coffee and trying to stay awake
and of course I look around and I look
at my friends who also happened to be
refugees I look at how challenging
integration is for them
I look at their determination their
resilience and I just keep going with this project so yeah thank you very much
Please follow and like us: