Collaborative humanitarianism: Information networks that reduce suffering

Modern humanitarianism combines the traditional focus of unconditionally alleviating human suffering with the need to operate in an arena of providers that is increasingly crowded, heterogeneous, and technologically enabled. In this chapter, we explore networks of organizations engaged in humanitarian information management and sharing. Our goal is to investigate the potential that humanitarian inter-organizational networks can offer to the international community in their ability to provide more effective alleviation of suffering. Through networks, humanitarian organizations can successfully take on issues that otherwise would be beyond the scope of any single organization. This chapter illustrates a few collaborative paths across humanitarian organizations that eventually lead to a reduction in human suffering. We analyze data collected through multiple members of the HumanaInfoNet, a community of organizations engaged in humanitarian information management and exchange. We present this data organized around three themes: Communication to Collaboration, Collaborative Projects and Collaborative Principles. We discuss these potential benefits to collaboration and provide some implications of our research for alleviating human suffering, as well as designing humanitarian inter-organizational networks.