Thanks a lot for the invitation.
It's definitely not my time of the day so excuse me if I'm a little bit…
Right, next the track.
I'm always really happy to speak in front of people
who are dealing with IT and stuff because I'm so much not an IT person.
You saw that I wasn't even able to start my presentation alone.
I'm from CADUS.
CADUS is a humanitarian NGO that was founded 3 years ago in Berlin.
It was founded out of a kind of subculture that is strongly related to the CCC, but
to the musical and festival subculture as well.
What I want to talk about today is our crisis response makerspace in Berlin.
Holger (Levsen) invited me after we saw each other again at Datengarten in Berlin
and he asked if I can make the presentation in english as well.
My english is shit, so please excuse me if I have to search some words
from time to time.
Do you have an idea what this is?
It's a huge truck, it's a medical sign on it, so this is a kind of mobile hospital.
Mobile hospital which you can use if other hospitals are broken down
or if there are no hospitals.
Do you have an idea how much such an hospital would cost you
to buy?
3 millions, 2 millions, 3 millions, 4 millions, hum…
This is a picture of a destroyed hospital in Syria.
You all see a lot of pictures on the TV, stuff like that.
Can you relate these 3 to 4 millions mobile hospitals
to these destroyed hospitals.
Do you normally see in the media that if a hospital is destroyed
then this fancy stuff is deployed to there?
Do you have an idea why?
It's "fucking expensive"?
Something more?
"Who's gonna pay for it?"
"Is help wanted?"
More?
It is a question of safety from time to time.
But on top you have to imagine Syria, war country, dust, heat,
no supply chain, nothing like that, so bringing there
a 4 million mobile hospital might end in two weeks of working and after that
nothing is working anymore because you don't have the technicians
who can repair this kind of stuff for example.
Next example, I'm sure you know.
What it is is a pretty fancy fire truck.
You have them in Germany in all the bigger villages and
all the cities, stuff like that.
If you take a look inside this firetruck,
you see plenty of fancy stuff.
I love this stuff, there is stuff to put out fire, there's stuff to lift things
with hydrolics.
There is normal stuff like shovels and stuff like that.
But if you relate this to pictures in disaster areas,
this is from Haiti, then you see that you have plenty of people
but no equipment at all.
All's pretty clear because normally, after a disaster,
people from all over the world come as fast as possible to the disaster area
the so-called "urban search and rescue teams".
They're coming by plane, so all the fancy stuff that we have
in our societies stays here,
and a few people that typically ???
go to the disaster areas to help the poor people.
You understand this was cynical.
And there's a third example. Have you ever seen what this is?
This is a tourniquet.
A tourniquet is one meter of nylon strap and a little bit of plastic.
A tourniquet is the best way to stop severe bleeding immediately.
We know this since the second world war.
At least it's twenty years it's totally clear and
it's validated, this is the best way to stop severe bleeding.
Spoiler, you won't see this in the media if you see like people in Syria getting hurt
like losing legs after explosions and stuff like that.
Do you have an idea how expensive is such a thing?
One meter of nylon, a little piece of plastic?
Not so expensive, but it goes in that direction:
55 dollars for one of these.
55 dollars for fucking one meter of nylon strap.
And, I don't know, less than 10g of plastic.
The last example, I don't know if you have a pet.
I had a dog, if I would like to, I could add a GPS to my dog
and this GPS would say when my dog is sleeping, where my dog is,
where I can find my dog if it's gone, stuff like that.
But again if you went Haiti directly after the earthquake,
people search for other people in collapsed building
with their bare hands.
So, obviously, we have a lot of technical solutions for everything.
I can look for my fucking dog in Hamburg where it is via my app on my iPhone
but on the other hand, in a disaster area it's not even possible to search for
people who are buried in collapsed buildings.
There are several reasons for that.
One reason: humanitarian work, humanitarian aid is a market.
This is a little bit perverted but it is a market.
It's always a question.
It's not like "Who wants to aid?" but "Who pays for the help?".
"Who gets his share out of the ??? ?"
And you can imagine we have, I don't know, every two or three years a major earthquake
so the market, if you compare it to another business market, is pretty small.
Who cares for the 1000, 2000, 3000 people who die in the earthquake every 3 years?
The next thing: access to the market.
Is it possible to bring things to Syria?
Why should I develop, as a businessman in capitalism,
why should I develop something if I can't reach my market easily?
And the third thing: who are the players on the market.
In humanitarian aid, most players are NGOs.
NGOs are not really interested in developing new things because
if I have an NGO, a classical NGO, then I like the things how they are.
If there is a disaster, I send my people, I make some nice pictures for the media
and I get a little of donations.
I'm not interested in changing things.
If I would like building capacity and local communities
so much that they don't need me anymore after disasters,
then there's no need for my nice wide NGO anymore.
So, these three things together make the situation where you have
a lot of solutions in our communities and in our societies
but you have no possibility to bring this to disaster aid.
We started in 2014 in northern Syria more or less by accident.
We were asked if we could come with a political delegation and make
an overview of the medical infrastructure.
And ever since we were stuck in this region
because we saw no NGOs working there,
because the states were not really willing to pay money for that,
because the northern, north-east Syria is ruled by some Kurdish militias
and these Kurdish militias are too lefty to get money from states,
let's say it this way.
So we saw the situation there and we still had 4-wheel driven truck
here in Germany and we said
"This would be great if we just built out of this truck a mobile hospital."
We had no idea how to do this,
we were really a little bit naive in these times.
We said just like
"It's a nice truck, there's a lot of space in that truck, so let's build it."
"We have an idea, we have a fantasy. We will go with this truck to northern Syria
then we will give it to a local NGO and then they have a mobile hospital
to follow the front lines in their fight against the so-called islamic state."
And one year and a half, two years later, we really were in nothern Iraq,
not northern Syria so far, but in northern Iraq with our mobile hospital.
And it was pretty hard to cross a border to Syria so we had to stay in northern Iraq
So we asked to WHO, the World Health Organisation,
"What can we do right now? We are here, we have a mobile hospital.
Do you see any need for us?"
And they said
"Yeah, guys, if you'd like to, then we would like to send you to Mossoul."
I don't know if you saw in the media, last year,
the battle of Mossoul was one of the most bloody and the most shitty battle
that we had in the past 20, 30 years, I think.
It was a lot civilian casualties and we said
"Ok, let's try. We built this mobile hospital, let's see if it's working."
We were able to work, like, 1.5km behind the frontline with the islamic state
and we were really wondering, we were really surprised, because we saw that
nobody else was working there, because they just didn't have the equipment for that
??? easier to buy a mobile hospital for 3-4 million dollars
nobody had that, and other things were not available on the market
so we were the only ones working there
Over the few months that we worked directly at the front line,
we treated several thousands people with this.
This was actually the moment when the crisis response makerspace was born.
So it was not planned that build up this makerspace, it was just like
we had two workshops in Berlin where we fixed the truck
where we renovated the truck and stuff like that.
After we went to Iraq, we just thought
"This was a pretty good idea and it worked out pretty well."
We were sure there were more problems that had to be solved in humanitarian crisis.
Actually, this first mobile hospital went over the border to Syria one week ago
so it is on ??? should have gone too.
What we're doing at the moment.
We have some lessons learned from this first mobile hospital and
we're developing a second mobile hospital
because the first one was based on old trucks that we could get really cheap
in Germany, but our idea was always
we would like to create opensource blueprints for local NGOs,
so that they can copy our solution that we developed.
With these german trucks, it's not really easy, we can't to an NGO in the Middle East
and say "Look, this is how we build it"
because they can't get the hand on these german trucks
So now we use UC containers because you can get them everywhere in the world,
they are unbelievably cheap, you can get them for 2,500€ and
at the moment in Berlin we are building something like this.
It's not to work inside the containers but to have an inflatable tent structure
coming out of the container and then you have your 20 treatment places and
we're working on different solutions that are not existing at the moment
like this patient treatment places are based on flight cases
and stuff like this
We try to bring together our experiences from the musical subculture
from organizing festivals, from building up structures pretty fast
and empty rooms and stuff like that together with this humanitarian problems.
Another problem that I had at the beginning was the firetruck,
when I said "no firetruck in disaster areas" and we thought
"We can get our hands on these firetrucks"
This firetruck is basically just a truck with a good solution about
how to store your equipment
so that you can use your equipment when it's still on the truck
and you have your engine running and you have electricity and stuff like that.
We were thinking "Ok, you don't need this firetruck, you just need
a box system that you can bring with normal appliances to disaster areas
and then put them on normal pick-ups,
pick-ups you find all over the world.
For this we would need a kind of box system that you can connect and
three angles.
We took a look at the market, and again,
it's not necessary normally, to have something like this.
Nobody developed this, meaning that you can load these boxes with up to 200kg.
We developed a new kind of box. It won't have the name CAbox in the future,
but we couldn't find another.
This box is a modular system.
We try to work together with universities, this was together with the HTW in Berlin.
This is how things are done with us, we have first an idea, like
"How can we cut a firetruck in pieces, bring it to a disaster area and
put it together again?"
and out of this process are coming more and more ideas.
We thought "Perhaps it's not only connecting these boxes,
perhaps it's an idea to make it in a modular way because then,
you can define, for every side of the box
a special use, like for example photovoltaic
and now we have a box developed that you can put in a normal airplane,
bring to a disaster area, just ??? these boxes, these sides of the boxes
and get electricity, for example inside a water pump or something like that.
We then thought about "Ok, but how can we get into the disaster areas
if there are lots of blocks"
We saw this in the ??? of the earthquake,
we saw this on Puerto Rico last year after the typhoon,
that the help couldn't reach the island
We thought that it's not so difficult to throw things out of airplanes.
So again, we took a look at the market and said
"Wow, no civilian solutions to throw huge payloads out of aircrafts."
The solutions on the market are military solutions.
So the UN can use it, but normally it's up to the national military
who can use it.
The only solution we could find was a box system coming
from an english company
and with this box, you can throw, I think, up to 70kg but only things that can't break
you can't throw out medical instruments with this.
So, what we did, we called again, we looked for
who could be the best person to talk with us about something like that.
And we thought, it's not the military, obviously, because
they're thinking bigger scales, they're thinking endless money,
they're thinking endless logistics
So we got together with paragliders from Switzerland.
We met with the refugee response in the Mediterranean
and told them "We would like to throw things out of airplanes.
What do you think about it?"
They said "Why not? We are jumping out of airplanes all the time!"
So why should it be so difficult?
What came out is that every paraglider which goes down a mountain
in Switzerland, frequently, daily, has an emergency parachute
in his powerglide.
And this emergency parachute has to be renewed every 3 years,
not because it's broken, but because we're living in a rich society and insurances say
"If you don't do this, I won't insure you."
So, you have plenty, hundreds, thousands of used parachutes that are totally ok
And you can hang, obviously, more than 100kg on them.
Then you have these tandem parachutes,
you can obviously hang more than 250kg on them.
So, what we did, totally illegal,
we tried it out and threw some things from really high bridges in Switzerland
with these parachutes.
And then we saw "yeah, it's functioning."
Next thing was that we developed
[laughter]
a kind of absorption with carton
and the funny thing when we went to Switzerland and said to the officials
"Yeah, you know, we're a bunch of punk rock idiots working in
humanitarian aid but we have this idea, we could throw things
out of normal parachuting machines,
because you can find them all over the world,
because all over the world, people do this sport.
And it's pretty cheap, and we could reach valleys that are not reachable yet".
They said
"Do you know what the problem is?
Every country has to have this air drop capacity."
This is like, I don't know, regularly from the international air travel something
and they said "We, in Switzerland, we solve this again with the military.
We have to pay like 24,000€ an hour to do this because we do this
with helicopters.
You offer us a solution that, if it's working out, is working with
2,000€ an hour."
So they said "If your system is working, you will be immediately assigned
as an official humanitarian air drop capacity in Switzerland."
We started 1.5 years ago and then
what's called ???
building in Berlin to renew old trucks to bring to Northern Syria
and then we thought "Let's use this space, let's look for solutions
for humanitarian problems."
And the idea was, in the beginning, just to bring together nerds, geeks, people
out of the field, refugees who know best what will help them in the crises,
specialists, universities, stuff like that.
What started like "Let's see if it could happen."
comes out as, this year in July, we will throw out some boxes with parachutes
out of airplanes and we'll perhaps have
the first worldwide airborne emergency response unit.
So, yes, we saw there is a big need for these things.
At the moment, we don't have a lot of IT projects, we have some ideas and
we would like to grow our network, because we have nerds from the CCC
sitting around there, but at the moment they ??? to do something with ???
but this makerspace is a makerspace like you know it.
You have an open space, everybody could come in.
We have only the regular ??? and we say
"Everything that is developed should be with a focus on humanitarian aid and
everything that we develop has to be open source
so that people can use it worldwide."
If you would like to get in contact with us,
www.cadus.org
We have all this fancy stuff like facebook, twitter and that you can find
on the homepage.
Thank you very much for your attention.
[Applause]
Are there questions?
[Q] Hi, thank you for the talk. I'm not sure if you know about an organization,
I think it's only french at the moment, which is called HAND, which is
Hackers Against Natural Disasters
It's basically a non-profit which tries to help local populations
in case of natural disasters, mostly they were in ??? for the typhoon
in french islands in the Carribean
and they tried to set up some kind of infrastructures, IT infrastructures.
There are ham radios and they tried to set up internet and stuff like that so
people can actually use communications
and they tried to set up like 3G networks.
I think it's only french but they have a great,
I don't know a lot about them, but I think they have a quite hacker spirit.
??? cooperation with you.
[A] This is really perfect, thank you very much.
There are actually a lot of groups like this worldwide.
For example, we are now part of the GIG, the Global Innovation Gathering which are
50 maker spaces all over the world.
There are small organizations that are really interesting.
The problem is, it's hard to find your space in this humanitarian world
because big organizations really close down the access to this,
the access to big amounts of money,
so contacts are always welcome because I think we can only reach something
if we form better and bigger networks.
[Q] In areas of crisis, and especially in war, it's hard to understand
which interests are on which side or are there any goods in this.
How to you avoid to become a useful idiot?
[A] I think…
I don't avoid it and humanitarians are a kind of useful idiots.
In the humanitarian sector, there are two main pictures about
humanitarian aid.
It was Henri Dunant who founded the red cross, who said like
"Yes, there is a war. Yes, obviously these are assholes that shoot at each other
but in the end they're humans.
So once they're laying down on the floor, they deserve to be treated like humans.
I know that if I treat him and he's fit again,
perhaps he goes out again and shoots again."
And there was the other person, Florence Nightingale at the same time.
She said, like, "Humanitarian aid should mean 'only these people
get humanitarian aid who bond themselves to these humanitarian principles'.
So, a soldier that got shot down, I won't treat him if I'm not sure
that he won't go out again."
In the meanwhile, I think the humanitarian world stuck totally to the model of Dunant
and for us it's the same.
I treated people who fought ISIS in Mossoul definitely.
Because in my opinion, if I go there and say
"I am the medic and the judge at the same time", then it's really strange.
There have to be other people to judge over this.
As a humanitarian, you are little bit helpful idiot all the way.
The other discussion is definitely a question about
if humanitarian aid brings anything or if it's just like a machine
that tries to run itself again and again and again…
Like this help industry.
This, we try to avoid with not playing after the same rules.
We are not into, I don't know.
Every 2 or 3 years there is a new theme that you have to surf.
For example, now it's capacity building in war zones.
We think it's pretty easy, we don't have to follow these rules of
the humanitarian sector, the humanitarian market.
We stuck with the humanitarian ideals and we always try to work together
with the locals.
And, yes, for sure, you always have locals who try to have their share
out of these crises, but if you talk to the locals, talk to different locals
several organizations together, you will see who's really working on the ground
just to help the people and we try to support these.
Like I said, we don't produce or develop solutions that we can sell.
It's all open source, so I hope it helps to avoid a little bit
to support the wrong people.
Any further questions?
[Q] Hi, awesome work. Have you considered 3D printing to maybe come up with
spare parts or let…
[A] Sorry, again?
[Q] Have you considered 3D printing?
[A] Yes, there are actually organizations who are doing this.
There one really cool organization called Field Ready.
They're developing a database with a lot of things like
the small thing you need to stop the connection between a mother
and a baby, I don't know what the name is in english.
And they develop a database so that people can print these medical devices
in disaster areas, that's pretty cool.
At some moments, we tried, a few months ago
to get our hands on 3D printers but then it's so expensive at the moment and
we are just more experienced with metal and steel and stuff like that.
But we looked into this and at the moment we're always doing too much unfortunately.
I wanted to buy one and then our colleagues from CCC said
"Don't do that, you're not clever enough", so…
"You'll destroy it! Waste money!"
But actually, for the tourniquet for example
there is a solution as well for 3D printing.
I just read an article a few days ago.
I think 3D printing is a kind of… really close connected
to the future of humanitarian aid, definitely.
Any further questions?
[Q] It's less question, more comment.
Because you showed that we have these cool sexy solutions for technology
for finding dogs and in less developed countries we have problems, but
it's also, like, we have problems with disasters in all the world.
Look at what happened in New Orleans, look at what is still happening
in Puerto Rico, which is supposedly first world country, but has still
problems with electricity.
It's not that there are good countries and bad countries, but we have
problems with all those global solutions to recover.
I think that's a good approach to get local people to organize and
to try to solve because they know what is needed most.
[A] Totally. I think it's a fucked up thing about capitalism.
If I live in a nice decent city like Hamburg and I have a dog,
I will easily spend 10€ a month for an app to find my dog, but I don't relate
to the thing that I could be on a zone rubbish as well,
so I won't pay for a disaster app or something like that
because it's not part of my daily life.
So no company will be willing to develop something like this,
it's just like the rules of the market.
Silly but it is what it is.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Thanks a lot Sebastian again.
[Applause]