Who: International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
Workshop Leader: Mitchell Paquette, Open Source Information and Analysis Manager

Description: Rapid digital development has transformed today's information landscape, enabling access to unprecedented amounts of publicly available data that can support humanitarian actors in understanding and responding to conflict. This publicly available information, also known as open source information (OSI), can include content posted on social media, satellite imagery, or public databases and can be used to document and analyse a range of humanitarian concerns including potential violations of international law, environmental catastrophes, displacement and more.

In this workshop, we will look at the various open source information that humanitarian actors use today, and the tools and techniques that they employ to collect, verify and integrate this data as part of their humanitarian response. We will then discuss the implications of such technologies and their use by humanitarian actors, the increasing digitalization of conflict, and how open source information can be used to facilitate greater involvement by local populations in humanitarian operations.