What does NASA have to do with humanitarianism?

Strap in as host Lars Peter Nissen takes off with Rhiannan Price and Laura Guzman from NASA Lifelines to explore the groundbreaking intersection of satellite technology and humanitarian action. Can the very data that orbits our planet revolutionize how we respond to crises and save lives? This episode explores how Lifelines dismantles the barriers between scientists and humanitarians, creating a community dedicated to leveraging satellite data for real-world impact.

Learn about the innovative programs available to practitioners like you, from the Earth Science Review Board that offers free expert consulting to humanitarian organizations, to chatty supper clubs, to an immersive humanitarian simulation designed to showcase the power of satellite imagery in crisis scenarios. Unpack the challenges of building trust between these two worlds and why Lifelines believes it’s more than worth the effort.

Be a part of the collaboration today via these links:

Have your program reviewed for free by the Earth Science Review Board

Get in touch to host your own Supper Club

Check here for Humanitarian Simulation updates

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:47 - 2:12)

This week's guests on Trumanitarian are Rhiannan Price and Laura Guzman, who both work on a project called NASA Lifelines. Lifelines is a project that aims to build a vibrant community of scientists and humanitarians that collaborate on using earth sciences for humanitarian action. Now, if you expect this conversation to be about the latest, most amazing satellite that NASA put into space, and all the amazing capabilities it has, then you will be disappointed. What we talk about is how to build alliances across different professional communities and foster a greater uptake of data, and what some of the bad habits are in the way we deal with tech and data today. I really enjoyed the conversation with Rhiannan and Laura. I find their approach to building this community very thoughtful and strategic, and I look forward to seeing Lifelines develop in the coming years. As always, we appreciate your feedback and your help in disseminating the show, so if you like this conversation, why don't you share it with your colleagues, leave a comment on Spotify, send us an email on info at Trumanitarian.org. We love hearing from you. However, as always, and most importantly, enjoy the conversation. Rhiannan Price and Laura Guzman, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Rhiannan Price] (2:13 - 2:16)

Thank you so much for having us. It's a pleasure to be with you, Lars.

[Laura Guzman] (2:16 - 2:17)

Thanks, Lars.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (2:17 - 2:23)

Both of you work with NASA Lifelines, and I look forward to exploring with you exactly what that is.

[Rhiannan Price] (2:23 - 3:16)

Lifelines is really a partnership between NASA's Earth Action and DevGlobal Partners to build a community of the future, to foster a community of the future, that helps humanitarians accelerate their use of satellite data and tools to alleviate suffering and to save human lives. So what we're doing at NASA Lifelines is really about community building and breaking down barriers so that humanitarians can work more closely with scientists, researchers, technologists, folks who are intimately familiar with these data and tools, but need to understand how humanitarians want to deploy them and use them so that we can all collaborate together and start to make progress and really democratize use of the technology in a way that we haven't before.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:16 - 3:22)

When you say DevGlobal Partners, what does that mean? Is that just humanitarians, or is it a broader crowd of people in there?

[Rhiannan Price] (3:22 - 4:51)

Oh, that's a great question. So DevGlobal is the consulting firm that Laura and I are part of. And so while we're full-time DevGlobal folks, we're really dedicated on the NASA Lifelines effort in delivering this. So my role is the NASA Lifelines lead. Laura is our communications director, which, as you can imagine, for a community building effort is a pretty immense undertaking. There are a lot of moving parts there too. And really it's been, the way I would put it, is a great vote of confidence from NASA, from our champions and our partners over there, because this is unlike much of what they've done before in terms of being really targeted around community building, less around research and analysis or even capacity building and some of the other efforts that they've invested in previously. And so while I think NASA Lifelines, we're only, I think, almost a year in to a six-year endeavor, it's early days. We've seen a lot of really promising progress already. And just, I would say, a really incredible reception from the community that this was, one, well overdue, but they're very excited to see NASA at the table because so many folks who have been trying to use satellite data and technology for years and years in humanitarian contexts have been struggling and are looking for a community and are looking for ways that they can make the science more accessible.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:52 - 4:56)

What triggers this insight in NASA? Why take this initiative now?

[Rhiannan Price] (4:57 - 6:53)

Right now, NASA in particular, and I think lots of science institutes, science organizations are thinking similarly, are really asking, what is the impact of what we're doing? Where can our research make a meaningful difference here on Earth? A lot of NASA sensors are pointed elsewhere, but there are many that are pointed here on Earth that are really helping us understand what's changing about the planet. Where do folks live? How is the environment around us changing? What do we need to be aware of? What do we need to be thinking about? And so it really has been, I think, just a set of tools that have been under-explored by humanitarians on one hand, but meanwhile, you have this group of scientists who understand that there could be really powerful implications in terms of how their research could be adopted or where it could go. A lot of it is earlier stage and might not be ready to be deployed in a humanitarian context, of course. But for so many scientists at NASA and elsewhere, they simply don't have opportunities to collaborate directly with humanitarians or the opportunities that they do have are hindered because of lack of funding or lack of awareness on the really robust technical aspects of what they're trying to do together. Or the humanitarian team has other priorities because the next crisis is already there and they can't focus on the quote-unquote science project. And so what we're trying to do at Lifelines is be the kind of connective tissue across these groups so that they can engage meaningfully when it makes sense for them without having to take on a second job of learning something else or, you know, investing tons of their time in trying to foster their own partnerships type of thing.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (6:53 - 7:00)

And so when you meet a humanitarian, what's your elevator pitch in terms of what you have in your toolbox? What can you do for me? How do you explain that?

[Rhiannan Price] (7:01 - 9:03)

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, Laura, I'd be curious to get your take on this too, of course, but a lot for me is really around the potential for how satellite data and tools can not only make their lives easier on a day-to-day in terms of solving information gaps that have been persistent that can and should have been solved already because we have coverage of satellite data across the world on a pretty regular cadence. So there's that. There's the opportunity to make humanitarian lives easier because you don't have to go hunt for a ton of data, you know, when you need it, it's there. You know the right technical colleagues to talk to because, you know, it's really painting, I think, Lars, this picture of what could be and then let's figure out how to get there, right? And I think so much of it is really about understanding what are our shared requirements, which we just don't have, right? So it's great to think about satellite data and tools and the incredible potential across the humanitarian spectrum when you think about food security and displacement and health emergencies and conflict and disasters, right? But at the end of the day, to really make meaningful progress, we have to get into the weeds a lot more with scientists, with technologists, and understand, well, how could we actually apply satellite data with a systems thinking lens to understand the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of what's happening? That's a really complex question and that's why I think we have to be willing to wade in complexity a lot more than we have already, be uncomfortable with what we don't know, where our own expertise is, and to rely on expertise of others where it makes sense. And that's why I think having a partner like NASA, who have been such a, I think, important voice for folks of what is true and where the science is, is really important to help guide us and steward us on some of this as well.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (9:03 - 9:48)

I'd love to come back to the use case and dig in a little bit into more concretely what is it actually we're talking about. But first, Laura, I'd like to ask you, I mean, as I hear you, you are the interface, Lifeline is sort of the interface between the big scary brains in NASA and the cowboys in the humanitarian sector. I'm exaggerating a bit, of course. So, you are an interface between a very technical scientific community on one side and a very operational, fast-moving, always overstretched community on the other. Just talk me through what has been the experience of building community on both sides. How is it inside NASA? And how is it engaging with the humanitarians?

Yeah, I think that even the way you framed it points to a lot of the, let's say, differences in communication style and communication bandwidth that we can see across this broad playing field. Because the way I look at it is there's actually a lot of nuance between the two. There are a lot of scientists, whether they be at academic institutions, NASA itself, private companies, who have some kind of background that may not be specifically a humanitarian deployment. They have experience taking their science that they know so much about and putting it into different contexts and vice versa. There are a lot of humanitarians who are map whizzes, who know more about data collection in low bandwidth environments than anyone else. So, there's actually already a lot of this community. There are a lot of folks talking across what we see as silos as it is because they needed to, because they needed to answer a question, they needed to solve a problem, particularly in the case of a humanitarian. Let's say you're driven by the need to serve a population and you will get the answers that you need, right? And yet, we want to see more of this collaboration. We want to see more of this exchange. And we know that, as you just pointed to, there are certain aspects of being a humanitarian, fast-paced, low bandwidth, high need that maybe don't align with the pace of, let's say, academic work or work in a large government institution. And that is challenging. And that is something that, for example, we take into consideration in the design of our different programs. Because within NASA Lifelines, we actually have a number of different programs that are all differently paced, that all require different amounts of time and bandwidth and dedication from folks who are participating. So, with my comms hat on, I would say that the way we're going about doing this is really thinking about our audience, thinking about what their needs are, thinking about what their desires are, acknowledging that they're going to be different from person to person, but there are going to be trends. Acknowledging that they may be sometimes at odds, like with that pace of work question, but there will be a lot of overlaps. And I hate to use the word, but synergies. There will be things that are done better together and that have a greater impact when we overcome some of these tensions.

So, in my experience, trust plays a key role in building a community like the one you're talking about. So, how do you do that? How do you actually concretely link up these two communities where there is a certain overlap? As you say, we have our geeks and I'm sure they have their practical people on the other side as well. So, I mean, how do you make sure people find each other?

I'd love to hear some of what Rhiannan may have to say about this, but from my perspective, it's important for me personally and I think Lifelines as an initiative to acknowledge that we're doing a lot of things differently and also folks have been working on this for a long time. We know a lot of people within, if we want to put it as two poles or two sides, within both communities who are already leading the charge and who are really passionate about this kind of exchange and this kind of community building and it's working with the energy that already exists. It's knowing that we know some folks, but knowing that there are more people who are already getting together, having this conversation. There are people already doing a lot of very impactful work and it's lifting up those stories and it's giving them the floor where we can. So, a lot of it is, for me, important to build on what's existing because that's what's working.

And actually, that's where we first met. We met at the Humanitarian Network and Partnership Week here in Geneva.

Exactly.

And so, is that what you do? You go to humanitarian events and sort of try to identify the people to work with?

That's part of it, for sure. We've been in a couple of different spaces that bring together humanitarians or humanitarians with perhaps a tech bent or who may already be in this space. We do also hold some of our own events and our own, we sometimes call them experiments or initiatives. For example, we run supper clubs often alongside of events where we bring together an invited group of folks who are ideally a diverse group who are going to discuss a central challenging question. What does it take to build community, for example?

So, you physically sit down and have a meal together in the supper club?

Right. It's not always supper. We've had a breakfast supper club, I think, and a lunch supper club. But yeah, we do what we can to also create those spaces ourselves. We do have a very strong online presence and are working on, I will tease this, working on building a gallery of resources and documentation that will bring together work that's already being done that I've kind of pointed to already, resources from other organizations and also resources from Lifeline itself.

Laura, just to go back, a couple of things I wanted to kind of maybe connect some dots on for us too around that question of trust, Lars, because I think that really is key. One of the things that Laura has been leading for us is the development of what we call these user personas, which if folks aren't familiar with it, it's kind of a borrowed idea from software development where as you're developing software, you want to be really keen to design for your user base, of course, and be really thoughtful to what exactly are their requirements and the features they need and et cetera, et cetera. Now, we've adapted that concept for our purposes. And some of the questions we're asking of our kind of persona profiles around kind of our, as we like to call it, our tech savvy or tech curious humanitarians are, who do they trust? Where do they get their news? Who do they trust? Who are they working with? What tools and data do they already trust, which is the big question for us. And so, so much of what Laura and our team are working on are honestly listening and researching and being able to kind of foster this profile in a way that is our source of truth, so to speak, to say if we really want to reach tech savvy humanitarians, these are the ways that we do it. These are their trusted routes. And then the other piece for us that's been really critical, as I mentioned, is really the trust of the data itself. And so we at Lifelines are really thoughtful, both from the standpoint of we're working with technology that have immense amounts of data, and it is very easy to become overwhelmed by that. And so you have to be really careful around what sorts of interpretations and analyses you will apply.

And so there's all sorts of reasons why you need to have really thoughtful scientists involved in some of these projects. But then there's also just the having humanitarians embrace and trust these data, right? There's a whole chain of custody that we have to also be really thoughtful of from when that data gets collected from the satellite, who owns and operates that satellite, where does that data go to which ground station, how does it get from said ground station to your machine or to your printed map or what have you. There's a lot of questions in that and a lot of ways in which we need to support our community, to Laura's point, and really lift up the voices of what's working, what's not, where do we have trust and where do we need to evaluate more.

Talk me through your personas. What are they? You must have several, right? What are the geeks, tech curious, tech challenged, what would you call them?

Yeah, Laura, we've got two primary ones right now. I got to kick this to Laura because this is very much an effort that she is driving and helping steward us towards. But Laura, do you want to talk about the two primary and then I'm happy to riff on some of our secondary ones if helpful.

Yeah, we started with the tech savvy humanitarian or tech curious humanitarian workshop in the final title and the social impact scientist. So when we are thinking about both of these, we started here because they are the folks that I was talking about earlier. They're the ones who are already one step out of the quote unquote silo that perhaps we might have in our heads.

It's really the center of the Venn diagram, isn't it?

Exactly. Nailed it. So you can imagine a GIS specialist working at a country office who is the go to resource for folks who need a map of distribution routes, let's say, to take a very zoom in example. It could be someone sitting at HQ who's overseeing, let's say, a kind of technical innovation program within an organization. It can also be people in the field who are enumerating, who are taking surveys, who are collecting the kind of data that we then put on a map. They can be people who have, for whatever reason in their career, a really strong understanding of the field of satellite data providers and imagery providers and know how to navigate that labyrinth to get the images that they need for a natural disaster, for whatever it may have been. It's a lot of folks who maybe went into humanitarian work knowing they wanted to take a tech angle, but also a lot of people who perhaps picked it up along the way out of necessity, out of interest, out of curiosity. On the scientist side, kind of imagine a little bit of the inverse. Perhaps it's a scientist who knows the absolute most about a specific way to classify images, but what they care most about is the application within agriculture, within disasters, within conflict. And they got there, again, perhaps intentionally, maybe they started their studies knowing they cared about a humanitarian application, or perhaps it was something that they bumped into tangentially when they were looking at other applications and came to find that they actually were really passionate about it and pursued that deeper and deeper in their studies or in their kind of professional career. So those are where we're starting. We know that they're, as you put it, that is exactly it. That's kind of the Venn Diagram Center. We know that we care about the folks more broadly. So we're thinking about students, we're thinking about people who maybe have a sneaky curiosity but aren't sure where to jump in. Rhi, who else do you have on your list?

No, you mentioned a lot of them. And I'll just add more context behind some of the other personas that Laura is mentioning. Like, for example, you know, students and early career professionals are priorities for us, especially Lars, in part because if we can reach them and convert them, so to speak, to be believers in these technology, they have a long tail of a career ahead of them, hopefully. So it's a good investment from that standpoint. But the reality is, is in engaging with these different demographics, it's early career folks and students who get it. Like, they are the ones who have such really cool interdisciplinary backgrounds too, where they'll be playing around with earth science, but they're trained in social sciences. And meanwhile, they've been volunteering for a humanitarian organization. And so just these really unique individuals that I think just unto themselves kind of represent what we would love the community writ large to be moving forward. And so that's also why we're also focused on engaging those sorts of folks even more so these days too.

It's very interesting, and I think it's a very smart way you have been thinking through the personas. We've also done the same exercise in ACAPs, actually. And we sort of have, we have a two by two table where we say on one side, probably what decides your information requirements is whether you deal with one or multiple crises. So are you at the country level or at the regional or global level? And on the other hand, are you an information user, so a decision maker, or an information producer, so an analyst, right? Are you doing decision making support or making decisions? And my question to you would be about the decision maker, because one of the issues that I have with all of the fancy new stuff we are doing around information and tech and so on is that I'm happy that we have a geek fest every now and then, and we sit down and do the, I sometimes call it the happy clapping tech fetishism, right? I mean, it's amazing how excited people can get about different gizmos. But when I look at the operational implications of these solutions, some of them do nothing, and probably the collective volume of garbage does harm. So my question, that was a long question, but so the question is, are you thinking at all about how, not just adaptation of the tech and development of things, but also what is the impact on the humanitarian action? Where does that fit?

Yes. Well, Laura, feel free to weigh in on this one too, but I'll kind of position it with what we've been speaking about, Lars, where I would say decision makers are certainly an important set of folks that we are very much thinking about and designing our programs around in the sense that we know that those decision makers have folks that they tend to trust, right? And so who are the folks that decision makers trust? In my experience, there are a couple that come to mind. One are their funders because they have to, to some degree, and because that is just the way the world works. And so funders have also been one of our, I'll call it kind of secondary or tertiary personas that we've involved in our programs because they need to also be aware of how this technology can help in humanitarian context. So there's a learning curve and an education component there that we've been taking on through a few of our programs. And then in addition to the funders, of course, it's their technical go-tos. So when you're a decision maker and you're flooded by these inbound new ideas around technology, who do you go to? Who do you trust to help discern what's meaningful and what's noise? A lot of times it's their in-house technical advisors, their in-house technical teams. Not every organization has them, so sometimes they're partners that they work with, and those are the technical go-tos for those decision makers.

And or it's third-party groups. So what does NASA do it? I should be paying attention to what NASA is doing. Or what is the UN doing around this? What are some of those large agencies doing? And so part of what we're trying to do is, especially with decision makers, is support the technical gurus within organizations, within humanitarian groups, within science groups, so that they can better champion these ideas themselves. If only because at the end of the day, they know how to best position it to their decision makers. They know when it will be best received, when that information is needed, because so much of this is right time, right place in terms of positioning things. And as long as we can support those folks so that they're ready to act in those moments, then I think we've succeeded. Laura, what would you add to that though? Because I know this is something that we're still very much grappling with too, Lars, and this is an area where we're actually looking to our community for even more feedback too.

So Rhiannan, I think the way you described it is smart. I just think, so I think the way you describe it is a smart way to go about it. Because if you don't get the right tech guys to carry the message inside the organization, it won't land. I think the trick is to, on one side of course, equip them to deliver the message in the most impactful way. And then also to pick the ones that actually are plugged into the actual decision making, and it's not just sitting in a sandbox somewhere innovating.

Yeah, true. That's very true. There's a spectrum, right, of who are the influencers within this picture.

NASA obviously is part of USG, the government in the US. And so what's sort of the boundaries in terms of use case here? Obviously, Gaza comes to mind. That can very quickly go very political. If you have a satellite imagery being interpreted in a certain way, and how many craters and how many people, and I don't have to go much into detail to start thinking of a few scenarios where that could go poorly. So are you sticking to natural disasters? Do you also deal with conflicts? What are sort of the rules of engagement there?

Yeah, those are great questions, Lars. So I would say, in terms of from a humanitarian crisis standpoint, we're able to cover the gamut. So there's no guidance or no limitations, necessarily. If there's human suffering, if there's significant loss of lives, that counts to us in terms of the humanitarian definition. That said, I would say where we have tried to find our own guardrails are where are the data, the existing data, most beneficial, most impactful? And it's not necessarily an obvious question. And to your point, you can run into these sensitivities, I'll say. And there's all sorts of different sensitivities. It's not always the obvious political ones, right? Like where the US interests are maybe at odds with other countries and things like that. What I'm talking about are more so where you have multiple methodologies, and you're not exactly sure which to pick to do your risk analysis, right? And I think these are more of the sensitivities that we're interested in, if only because they're, well, not perhaps the ones that get picked up in the news cycle as the most contentious, they are the most meaningful in terms of what we think and what we've heard or what humanitarians are grappling with. So do I use this climate risk model, which tells me that folks in this neighborhood are at risk? Or do I use this one that came from a different university that tells me that these folks over here are at risk? And I don't actually know how to evaluate these two models, because I need this long line of expertise to be able to do that. And so that's, I think, where we're trying with all the immense expertise in our community to help steer humanitarians in terms of these ones you should feel more confident about. Like these are the models that are more adopted. And where we're putting data points around that confidence too large is important. So it's, where are these more adopted by folks, by your peers, by those who have the same considerations and same mandates as you do? And so that's important as well. Where are there opportunities to evaluate is the other important thing. So just because we're asking the question doesn't mean we should stop and paralyze ourselves. I think what it means is we need to dig into that. And it's something for us to collaborate on, because we will need a lot of expertise to understand which models should we use in this crisis, for example.

But as a point of departure, there's not a use case that is off limits because of the political nature of the crisis, is what you're saying?

No. And I would even point to, I mean, there are some examples, I think, where groups within, the NASA Lifelines community are working on any crisis that you could think of that's currently ongoing. We have folks who are doing damage assessments in Gaza. We have folks who are working in DRC right now in terms of conflict stabilization and prevention. Like you name it, it really runs the gamut, Lars. From the NASA perspective, what's the most important is that NASA data and analyses are well used, I think. Well used in the sense of used appropriately, but used where they'll be valuable is the most important.

I'd love to speak to your point about the high-fiving, fist-bumping tech rah-rah, because I think that also connects a bit to these sensitivities that Rhea's talking about that show up when you dig into the technology deeper and deeper and into the data itself. I think for those of us who want to do any kind of quote-unquote good in the world so badly, technology, be it whatever, is a very, very tempting siren. I think there is a lot of desire for it to change the game for the best, for us to adopt some cool tool. And nothing here is new. I think this is a discourse that has been had before, but I think it's important to highlight. In reality, we all know it's way more difficult. We know it's about existing power dynamics. We know it's about existing access to data. We know that in the case of, for example, satellite imagery, Earth observation data, it can be really difficult for a small-time player to figure out where to get stuff, or even a big-time player. There's a lot of inefficiencies that map on to already existing patterns of inequity, et cetera, et cetera. And I think something that we do care about at Lifelines is getting into those details. So just to give a kind of random example from our broader community at HNPW in May, Pax for Peace, they're one of our Wayfinder partners. They led a session with, let's say, a lot of the tech-savvy, tech-curious humanitarians who are using satellite imagery, geolocated data, in their work a ton already. And the question of, is there too much fanfare? Is there inefficiency? Is this actually having the impact we want? Yes, here, but no, there, came up throughout the entire session. I mean, folks weren't worried about getting into these sensitivities that I think Ri is pointing to, because that's where the rub is. That's where the actual impact is. We talked about the importance of doing assessments of the impact of specific, in this case, it was Earth observation interventions, and how hard that can be, because there are so many kind of cascading effects that are impossible to account for. We talked about making sure we were being clear that satellite imagery maybe is really effective in one use case, but not another. Even if it seems like the same, it may actually be a different tool that's more useful. We talked about designing our kind of analyses for the problem at hand, rather than some shiny solution. And a lot of this, I think, becomes a richer discussion and a richer kind of in-practice practicum, when we do have different voices in the room as well. So, we want this to be an open conversation that has some of this, like, high-five, let's build a better future with this tool, and also some of what Ri is pointing to, that is like, this is a really sticky question that has some very real implications on human lives, and some very technical underpinnings in order to understand where to go. And that, for us, I think, is the crux.

I think if I should list the things that annoy me most about the tech, happy clapping, it's one, just the absolute lack of thinking about the user. Right? I see people developing, and you ask me, okay, but who is going to use this? Right? And it's like the thought never crossed their mind. And then, the second one is this business of prototyping, but never integrating into the mainstream of what we do. Right? There's a number of experiments we have been doing, and often in the same space, more or less with the same, maybe we change from red to blue, but it's exactly the same thing. Right? It's, I find that maddening. And I think the third one is people who grab onto something that obviously is not working, and somehow almost built their career around that and continue for 10 years, and nobody seems to be able to stop these people from getting funding, or just take that project out behind the barn and shoot it. Right? That doesn't, that calling doesn't seem to happen. And we have a limited bandwidth for how much innovation we can have in this sector. So that's, that was my little rant about those things.

Yeah, I think it's fair, Lars. I think it's well said. It's, I mean, what you're pointing to there are really different sets of incentives, right? Where those tech companies that are doing that kind of happy clapping, and it's not all of them. I will say there are some who are trying to really operate a little bit differently. I would say they're doing it because for them, it's about either PR, public relations type of a thing, and having some good brand equity working with a humanitarian organization. Or can I pressure test this new project that is just a pet project at our company because we make money over here, but maybe the humanitarians will do something with our data exhaust or our pro bono sandbox that we let our scientists play around and to keep them happy. And so I think there's, there's a matter of, okay, if these are your incentives, tech companies, that's fine. Let's, let's own them. Let's bring those to the table. And then humanitarians can bring their goals and motivations to the table. And then we figure out if it works as opposed to what really irks me, Lars is, you know, those who are coming from the tech industry who know that those are their motivations, but just don't own them. Right. It's like, let's own them because then we can both get value out of this as opposed to it just being a futile effort where we're all frustrated. And then at the end of the day, everybody's like, well, is this tech even helpful? And it, and it does a disservice to, I think the original intent, which is just such a shame, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I was actually shooting at the humanitarians.

Well, I'll shoot at the, I'll shoot at the technologists then since that's the world I come from. And I know that a little bit about it. I can, I can throw some shade on us, but I wanted to, in terms of what Laura was mentioning earlier, I wanted to maybe take us one step further and, and if it's okay, highlight one of the community building programs that we're running and get into a little bit more detail on this. Cause I think this hopefully is a really practical example of, of how we're trying to solve some of these challenges and bring folks together. One of the programs that we launched earlier this year is called our earth science review board. And it's basically the way that I will pitch it to humanitarians is it's free consulting. And, and I say that as a consultant, this is like premium high quality free consulting to where the bar is pretty low on both sides where we have, you know, humanitarians come in and bring their methods, their write-ups, their case studies of how are they using, trying to use, planning to use satellite imagery and tools for whichever use case doesn't matter. Bring that to a panel of three to five experts that we help curate that have specific expertise that's relevant for your case at hand. And they'll come in, review your documentation and provide unbiased feedback really directly to that humanitarian team. And so we've done this now in with a few different humanitarian organizations that have brought forth cases and, you know, big props to them for being our early adopters and, and, and going through this process and giving us feedback and things to make it really impactful. But we had, our first case was from Catholic relief services around estimating walk times. So walking and accessibility from one place to another using imagery and kudos to CRS teams done a fantastic job of documenting everything on GitHub and open sourcing their methodology.

And so we're really excited about that case and cautiously optimistic that we helped CRS in particular, improving their methodology and knowing what else is out there. We've also heard cases from Mercy Corps that were around some, those cases were more specific to agriculture and food security, another one around infrastructure planning. And then most recently we had a case with human rights watch that I can't talk about in too much detail because of the sensitivities around it, but you get the picture, right. In terms of if you are a humanitarian, I really welcome you to submit a case to our earth science review board. If only because you have this roster of wonderful experts who they're from around the world, they have different types of expertise and they're very eager to help and to put their expertise to good use. And we're excited to share some of the recommendations and kind of the really just the incredible insights that have come out of these case reviews so far, we'll be publicly sharing what we can. But again, this is just an invite to it. One, if you are an expert, you can also sign up to be one of our volunteer experts on the roster. And we've heard only good things from those experts who have been involved so far. So cautiously optimistic, we're getting you signed up for a really wonderful experience. But on the other hand, if you're a humanitarian and you're looking for a sanity check or you're looking for some really specific expertise on something that you're crunching on that you don't necessarily have already, come to us, submit your case, we'd love to help.

That's fantastic. That's such a wonderful idea. And as you were talking, you will get a mail from ACAPS very soon.

Good. I'm glad I shouldn't just said directly, Lars, we'd love to see as many as you can from ACAPS. Because I'm sure there's lots of great stuff we could do together.

How big is your community? How many people are you in touch with?

Oh, that's great. Great question. When last I checked, so we're we have folks from over 140 countries who have signed up for our programs or on our kind of distro list right now. Laura, do you know off the top of your head, we were over like 11,000, I think that were signing up and getting alerts and things like that.

Yeah, if you pull together our, if you pull together our socials and newsletter and program participants, we're approaching, I think around 10,000 folks who've been touched in some way or who've engaged in some way. But if you zoom in to look at our programs, which require obviously more time commitment, more, more bandwidth, more engagement, we're at several hundred of people who have been fellows or wayfinders or participated in our simulation. Yeah.

So that's, that's a hugely exciting program you have with the Earth. That's a hugely exciting program with the Earth Science Review Board. I know you also work with humanitarian simulations.

Yeah, this is a great question. We've got an exciting new program that we just opened up, our humanitarian simulation that we're going to run across three days in October. So October 15th, 16th and 17th, we're doing a three day virtual simulation. And I would, I would actually call it Lars. It's like a data hackathon meet simulation. It's kind of a melding of the two where it'll be role playing and team and folks who have signed up will be assigned to a different team. So there'll be a, you know, a humanitarian team or a government team or, you know, different, different actors that are involved in the pre, during and post crisis events. And so as part of what we're doing with the simulation, and it's really all about helping teams understand the potential of using satellite imagery and tools for various applications across the crisis lifecycle. And so what we're doing is within the simulation, we'll have different scenarios across those three days. So the first scenario is going to be all around early warning. The second day is going to be a disaster is going to happen in the very beginning of the session. And then everything thereafter will be around crisis response. And then day three, we'll do a jump forward in time and cover more on protracted recovery, more resilience type questions on that one and associated use cases. And what we're doing for the simulation is providing this data sandbox for folks of all of these different data and tools that we've helped curate. And these are all third party tools. So a lot of it are, you know, NASA's kind of immense trove of all of their data and assets, but also, you know, lots of other third party things that are already being used by humanitarians or should be being used more. And so we're putting all of that together to make it much more accessible for our teams. And then they'll come in. We're also going to have in person hubs where folks get to play. So there's actually one in Geneva to Lars. So be great to get you at that one.

We'll get you hooked up with the folks over there in Geneva. But if you're interested in also having an in-person playing hub, your folks are welcome to join us at one of those cities. That's Geneva. We've got one in Goma, which I'm really excited about. Fantastic partners in DRC and in Kenya as well. We'll have one in Nairobi. And then here in the US, we'll have hubs in DC, St. Louis where I am, and Boston as well. And so really, really thrilled. We'll have nearly 300 people who have already registered across the world who are going to be part of the simulation. And each day we'll be sharing kind of readouts in terms of these are the maps and types of things that are created as part of this. Again, simulation will be really clear that it's not an ongoing crisis, of course, but really excited to share what we learned from that and get people more involved. So definitely, if you haven't already heard about the humanitarian simulation that Lifelines is running, please sign up for it. We would welcome your interest. And if we can't get a spot for you and get you plugged in this time around, we'll also be running another simulation in the future. So more to come.

And so for people who are interested, they should go to your website, I guess, and they can find information about it there.

Yep, exactly. There's a whole page around the simulation, so they can see a lot more even details than I have shared so far. And then folks, once you sign up, you'll get an email to confirm your registration. We're also provisioning kind of a training kit for everyone who wants to participate. So you'll have access to a whole bunch of information around what you're getting into, but also just some really helpful resources, we think, in terms of how to use the data sandbox if you're not as familiar or, you know, why are we taking on kind of the simulation serious games kind of approach and why is that important. So excited to also share that training kit. And that's something we can definitely share with the community more broadly too.

Very cool. And we'll put the link to that page in the show notes so you can register if you want. So it's fantastic. You come in, you start building this community, you have all these great capabilities, you appeal to all the boys with the toys and all of these things. But we do have something we call a coordination infrastructure in the humanitarian sector. We have OCHA, we have clusters, we have information management working groups How do you link up to all of the infrastructure that's there in terms of coordinating?

I would say, Lars, that many of our early adopters, champions already in the network are those folks. They are part of the information management units for sure. They are the folks who are the data science teams in many cases where they have them, or they're the one GIS person if they have them. Not so many have remote sensing specialists, but some. And so a lot of times we are kind of, I would say, naturally getting plugged in just by virtue of the people that have already been involved in the community. That said, I would also say just from a kind of process and opportunity standpoint, we're also keen to hear from the community if there are areas where as lifelines with the kind of community that we have activated, should we be kind of fostering or stewarding some kind of effort, right? And I say that kind of vaguely because it could look, you know, it looks different depending on what it is. But one of the things that we've heard from community, for example, is that there's this need to really understand this question we've been grappling with, right? Which is what are the most impactful use cases right now of using earth observation, using satellite data and tools? You could ask that question to lots of different experts and get lots of different answers. And so that's part of the question we got from the community. And so we've pulled together a community working group really to be able to create a resource that answers that question. And so for instance, that's one example of where we're trying to take this community feedback and be really thoughtful around, this is clearly a need and a gap. And this is a gap that we as lifelines could actually help solve for because you need this kind of community to solve for it. And so if there's opportunities like that, we're all ears and would welcome those suggestions too. Is that fair, Laura? Feel free to stop me. I know I get excited about new ideas and taking new things on and sometimes I have to slow myself a little bit.

But I think my question also is, do you then go to the information management working group yourself and sit in and listen to the discussions there? Are you participating there?

Great question. And the short answer is no, Lars, but it's not to say that we don't want to. I would say it's just that we haven't done it yet.

So if that is something of interest to those information management folks or to M&E, I know a lot of the M&E folks are also really trying to use a lot of satellite data and tools. If there are groups like that within the subgroups in the humanitarian community that we should be reaching that we haven't yet, we take all those recommendations or invite us, we would be glad to come and share more about lifelines as well. Fair, Laura? I know I'm signing us up for more work, but I think it's the kind of work we want more of.

So you've been at this for a year and you have a mandate for six years, I think you said. Where are you getting traction and where are you stuck?

Yeah, I would say where we've got traction. I would say at the very kind of fundamental level, Lars, we have a ton of support and traction around the vision, which is important just to start. It seems like a not so important thing, but I will say just the fact that we have buy-in that we exist is, I think, a marker of success for me, at least in kind of the launch of this and the initial reception. Now, in terms of how we're going about doing things and where we've seen success in terms of our programs in particular, there have been a few things that have already, I think, been good experiments. One is definitely the simulation. So we saw, I think we had registration open for a few weeks and we already have 300 people who signed up.

And so that shows us that there's a lot of demand signal for these kinds of efforts in particular. So we're leaning in on that and hoping to do even more and doubling down there. Where we've struggled, I would say, is because we have all of these incredible programs, some of which we haven't talked about today and can get into those too, but we have all these different opportunities for folks to engage. It can be kind of overwhelming as someone who's just getting involved to say like, here's the universe of what I could sign myself up for, where should I start? And so that's a big part of, and Laura's laughing because this is, it's the communications challenge that we struggle with, but it's also the community engagement challenge that we have, right? Of, you know, we can reach you with our message and it can resonate, but then it's another thing to help people take that action that will be meaningful. And so that's where I think a lot of, you know, just evaluating what's worked and what hasn't, where folks have really embraced the messaging too has helped us, where it's been a little bit more, where we've needed more meetings and more high touch follow up with folks, I think has been clear to us that we need to improve in terms of how we're explaining what we're trying to do. There's a lot of that. So I think the name of the game for us kind of in the near term here is streamline those opportunities, make it really easy so that, to your point with our kind of user persona journeys, if you're a humanitarian and you land on our page or our website, it's really easy to see where you should go and what you should get signed up for just as much as if you were an earth scientist coming to the page for the first time type of thing. So that's, that's our challenge is it's, there's so much overwhelming opportunity and so, so many incredible things happening already, both directly and indirectly in the community that it's a good challenge for us to help people parse that out even, even more than we have.

Yeah, I would say absorption capacity is probably how I would describe it. Exactly. And I think, I mean, it resonates with me that, that everybody's happy to see you show up because it is exciting and, and I think we can all see the potential.

At least to our faces Lars, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are polite people. You know, I, I can see people being really happy to see you come to the table and, I mean, let's face it, you are probably the one part of the humanitarian section with six years of funding, nobody else has that. So you'll be around for a while. That's also a unique opportunity to, to build some really long-term relationships. But I do think that absorption capacity is a, is a key issue. We don't invest a lot in innovation. It's, it's, it's a very difficult thing to do, especially when budgets are being cut, as we see now. So, so to, to really take a substantial part of your money aside and invest it in something that may not work, that's a very hard call. Let's, let's say we sit down again in five years' time and you're at the end of the six-year period. What's your best case scenario? What has, what, what does it look like? What does lifelines look like at the end of the period?

Well, I, the first thing that came to mind, and perhaps other things would supersede this, was actually that in some ways we're not really that necessary. I think what I would see as deeply valuable is having built a community or woven together existing communities in a way that doesn't need us, doesn't need us in a, in a stewardship capacity that is self-propelling. I'd love for there to be both broader understanding of the power of earth observation for humanitarian action, but also more space and more bandwidth and more absorption capacity for the nuanced discussion of what application actually looks like so that we're not just fired up by the possibility, but we actually understand realistically what the actual impacts can be and in what use cases and how and with whom in the room. So, yeah, I would just love for there to be more, even more, because there already is a lot of this, even more kind of self-propelling energy around this intersection that we care so much about.

Totally. I wholeheartedly agree, Laura. And I would say just to add to that, that that's kind of the end vision, right? In, I think the bet that we're making in terms of how we get there, and I would love if this is how we do, but if we don't get there this way and we still end up there, I'm still happy. But from a Lifeline's perspective, if we get to that vision and it's because folks have seen what we are doing by way of community building and adopted these approaches for themselves, like the simulation was so great, we needed to run it at ACAPS, you know, this, this Earth Science Review was so fantastic that we are going to stand one up that, you know, we offer that kind of quote-unquote free consulting because of our expertise at our organization or whatever that looks like, right? So I think that's a big one for us too of, is what we're doing actually moving the needle in terms of this community bringing people together? Does that make a difference in terms of, are they able to then create more innovative research, innovative being impactful, not just new and novel? That, that is a big part of our kind of theory of change is let's activate these experts, bring together a really diverse community because our working hypothesis is when you do that, you see better innovation, you see technology adopted for more use cases more often. And, and that's what ultimately we think will then make this impact that Laura is mentioning too. But there's a lot of A leads to B and B leads to C over these next five years that we'll be evaluating the, each component along the way. So excited to come back and talk about what is working and what isn't working in those pathways too, Lars.

Fantastic. We will do that in a couple of years time.

Excellent. Looking forward to it.

Thank you both of you so much for coming on Trumanitarian. It's really, it's a great conversation. It's, it's such an exciting project that you, you're working on. And I know that you have a very concrete activity that people can undertake. You, you have these supper clubs. And I understand they can also, for example, be Negroni clubs or brunch clubs, so you can, you can sort of stretch the concept a little bit. If we have people who are interested in that, just, just tell us a bit about how we can get involved.

Supper club, Negroni club, brunch club, be it what it is. We, there are multiple ways for people to get involved. One is by joining one that already exists. We do publish some of the invites on our social media or via our newsletter, so make sure to sign up to those. But this is actually a great opportunity for students, for people working within an organization where they want to have these conversations and maybe don't have a container for it to host your own. So if you visit our website and we'll make sure to share the precise link with you, Lars, there is actually a guide for people who want to host their own supper club. Again, it can be with friends, it can be with fellow students in your, you know, geosciences program. It can be with your fellow colleagues who all have, you know, a niche interest in something at this intersection. And we give some kind of structure for folks to optionally follow, host it, take some pictures, share it with us. And we're happy to share the outcomes of the conversation to, you know, highlight the people who are involved. And it's just a really lovely way for folks to get together and have an in-depth conversation again over supper or brunch or happy hour.

And I would say that I would be disappointed if the city were a good chunk of the humanitarian community, the World Methodological Organization and CERNA, if we can't pull together one or two events among us.

Oh yeah, let's talk.

Thanks again. It has been a wonderful conversation. I look forward to following Lifelines in the years to come and see what you guys come up with. And I hope to see you next year at HNPW here in Geneva.

Awesome. Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, we'll be there. Thanks so much, Lars. This was fantastic. Much appreciated.