Crowdmapping after the 2010 Haiti earthquake gave humanitarianism a digital branch
When volunteers plotted reports on online maps after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Patrick Meier called it digital humanitarianism. The idea of helping strangers in distant emergencies is far older, but scholars place its global form in the nineteenth century, with the Red Cross movement from 1863 as a turning point.
Humanitarianism centres on the value of human life and on easing suffering for moral and emotional reasons. Unlike charity and philanthropy, which work at home and abroad, it usually means aiding people hit by international crises such as wars and disasters. Its ideals are cosmopolitan, extending compassion across borders, and its scope has widened as people have broadened their sense of who counts as human and whose lives deserve saving.
Jean Pictet, commenting on the Red Cross principles, traced the idea to the golden rule, treating others as you would wish to be treated. He found it in nearly identical form in Brahminism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, Judaism and Taoism, and among secular positivists who rely on reason alone.
In Britain, reformers pressed Parliament to outlaw brutal hours and conditions for children and unskilled workers, and the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1844 were landmark results. Many feminists of the early 1900s also championed the cause. Florence Nightingale and Henry Dunant brought it into emergency response in the mid-nineteenth century, Dunant's work leading to the Red Cross, and Henry Salt founded the Humanitarian League, which ran from 1891 to 1919. Michael Barnett divides later history into imperial humanitarianism up to 1945, neo-humanitarianism until 1989 and liberal humanitarianism after 1990.
Nicholas de Torrente, once head of Médecins Sans Frontières USA, named humanity, neutrality, independence and impartiality as the core principles: aid goes by need alone, and agencies must never favour one side in a conflict. Technology is reshaping the field. Someone asked in 2005 whether Wikipedia itself might count as digital humanitarianism, Paul Conneally gave a TED talk on the subject in 2011, and a 2015 book, Digital Humanitarians, examined how big data is transforming crisis response.
Source: Humanitarianism
