# The future of humanitarian innovation

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [267]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2017-05-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Ties shelter, the six needs and communications together as humanitarian basics for relocation.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Akvo (2008): Water work at Akvo, the Dutch open-source water and sanitation foundation.
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and... (suggested by machine)
  - The Private Humanitarian Company (2010): One-page sketch of a company modeled on private military companies, using operations and logistics talent... (suggested by machine)
  - Enabling humanitarian innovation (TEDxEWB) (2010): Talk for Engineers Without Borders: poverty is a permanent disaster that kills about 20 million a year,... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts.
  - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (33%); Rural poverty & development infrastructure (22%); disaster / refugee / food (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: UNHCR (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); refugees (5 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); critical infrastructure (3 here; 54 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 7 undated); refugee camp (2 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Settlements Charrette (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Pakistan (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); venture capital (1 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Department of Defense (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Frontier (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Red Cross (1 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002)
- Importance: core-text score 0.46 (1.00 is the top), number 126 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [332] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris... (2012): same career work: Akvo
  - [78] [Living Video and the Akvo Video Strategy | The... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/78.md): same career work: Akvo
- On the same works, just before: [208] [Taming Black Elephants (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/208.md); [705] [Vinay Gupta - Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/705.md); [270] [Hope For The World (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md)
- On the same works, just after: [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md); [690] [FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/690.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The future of humanitarian innovation, video, 2017-05-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [267], https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=0s) or something you guys amongst for weeks [Music] but so and we'll be very briefly so again so this building leaders thing called acts here it's a plywood shared it's incredibly materials efficient I invented in 2002 when somebody asks me whether I can figure out how to make refugee camp buildings that could be relocated so when the refugees were ready to go home you could fall out the shelters throw them on the truck transport them with refuse men they have places to go they were back talking about a design workshop for the sustainable settlements Charrette very much like this one and we bought one

[0:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=55s) model in Haiti and nobody would come to you we everybody involved in sheltering 160 people 102 different organizations not a single person commandeer taxi to come to a safe place in port-au-prince and take it with our transitional shelter entitled burning around on the other hand pick the things up with the house on fire Burning Man is a sixty thousand person arts festival in America and they build about two and a half thousand three thousand shelters a year there we know that because we have excellent drone satellite imagery from Burning Man so you can do aerial survey very easily and they just literally download the plans from the internet for free build the things themselves at materials in the supply chain and any humanitarian agency of the world could take those designs of scale right there very easy well done Eric ten percent of the price per unit per year that we would expect for a tent and quite few agencies have built one or two units just the cake is really testing stuff in Sri Lanka apparently stuff in Africa we have some very delightful video that we found on Facebook somebody built one of the things where we endorse people to identify the ones there's something it's just a bunch of video on the word hacks here we've not your wrist

[2:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=127s) here in johan carlson who's the designer that kia shelter which is really mean in the papers so in several years go ahead and workshops in sweden with Johan we built a number of these things together so what I'm going to talk about the difficulty of this kind of hard innovation why I think the time has come for innovations and could potentially work much faster in the environment that we're in because this stuff frankly just doesn't work the actual hard humanitarian stopped hugging you changed since then the world war two the tents are identified with the same models over being used then practices of not really changed either we still basically approach the hard end it's not as Aryan spectrum by building a world war two Europe military calm with materials which are being specifically commissioned the industrial supply change meet the World War two hero specifications it's a template that was set European refugees and the attends military surplus uh lots and lots and lots of former soldiers arranged at all but that's where your refugee camp template that comes from allows change in 70 years and in all probability it's just not going to and what's up what you

[3:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=194s) want to human centered design I also work in a human Center design paradigm if a human being here or inside the heart risks too hot to cold hunger thirst illness in you what will kill the person that you are trying to help both levels organization going to be this individual has a village ten region nation world what level of response is responsible for protecting people from not specific calls a hard accountability model based on epidemiology so this is the kind of approach that I took to reforming threat management of refugees with the impression that it would be possible to get humanitarian agencies different ways and come along for the right and it's not the work the dead ones red cross for years or work with UNHCR or American fans are dead you name it I've been there with des storing these technologies and there is zero adoption and that's not because this stuff is expensive I was giving it away right the problem is there is fundamentally normal readiness or willingness to adopt at the hard physical level this does not mean no fix as possible but it just means that you're talking about fixing this level the situation don't hold your breath

[4:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=276s) what does work common operational picture so this is country that I've worked with called a player there are charity run out of the Netherlands and what they have is software from managing and spending on water and sanitation so the software is free it's open source anybody can download it adopt a customized use it they've got a three billion of assets under management and this is a map of water and sanitation role levels will you to save in Malaysian government agency and this has been wildly successful because it's different problems everybody agrees ought to be solved it second method for everybody is agreed of the methods for solving those problems digging holes in the ground building water points all this kind of stuff and it's simply allowing better cooperation between all the answers who are working on those problems so a bartender there's something that looks like an e-commerce site and you could basically search for the kind of project you want to fund you find something you want to fund you put in twenty five thousand euros it's still going to be another sixty but somebody else can go in and then out the next twenty five and pretty soon focusing fund it and this thing thing really really works the channel enormous went to standing over that with very little institutional resistance so it doesn't change the hard practices are being done on the ground it does change the interaction between the actors who are working towards these goals and it is extremely effective with very little institutional observers so this second is a tropical problem second thing bureaucratic maps versus suitable Maps so that is a physical map that structure or an infrastructural map that's a bureaucratic map so one of the problems that we have in this field is it's roughly three spaces we operate in simultaneously there is a physical space there is a bureaucratic space and there's an infrastructural space on political economy and economic geography of infrastructural space are still very very poorly understood that Benjamin Browns seem like the same against that again to that example cope with stock they even said about anemia the understanding the critical infrastructure is its own terms of geography is still very very new almost everything that humanitarian agencies do involves creating and maintaining critical infrastructure so part of the reason it's hard as we just don't have a really good academic science of mapping and maintaining critical infrastructure systems it's basically terror in cohesion right

[7:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=424s) so this is from the most important thing I'm going to say scale don't do Facebook's job and there are only really 10 or 15 genuinely first-class institutions to manage information technology in the world right Department of Defense Facebook Google Amazon and a handful of others you know you could point to Microsoft Apple and that's it this is because hard ite is the hardest thing human beings do it's more consuming with intellectual firepower than fundamental physics the medicine it's the hardest thing there is and the people the frontier of that field are often very very very weird and nobody cares because the problems are just insoluble if they can make even an inch of progress they're in charge end of story I spread probably most the last 16 years working for autistic people just building the bridge we can probably understand about the structure of mathematics and what's going into the actual real world and you know I'm not a dumb guy I'm just a translation you know most of the time so the idea that the humanitarian world is going to build its own IP platforms and the that's all in some ways fundamentally changeable Hoffmans are the scale with billions of people is completely unrealistic it's not going to happen don't waste your time try on the other hand right these guys can't get access to the global network and what somebody provides them with power and let some do provide them with Wi-Fi or free phone cards so being able to build bridge between where people are right now on this enormous integrated global network and I don't mean by not just software right by Cole Porter in a box says you know what people need is network access but us economic networks it's the social networks it's bad you know it's the entire bureaucratic network what people need is this first file access to get them hooked onto those networks that it's problem which is certainly in humanitarian space that's exactly the kind of thing which is currently solved you do watering and do sanitation you do light they're very new and not internet to it editor projects six or seven years ago different who 100,000 lights into it comes in Pakistan and it was very successful there was little solar hockey pucks today if you're doing on same thing again you would get something will also did white on national networks someone so the idea that the first step is just getting people into contact with the modern world I think is attractive intractable problem it wouldn't be that

[9:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=574s) hard to suggest the telecommunications are fundamental resource that needs to be provided the same where the water is on a human change in humanitarian and the approaches which just said okay telecoms is behind water and sanitation and food but it's the next thing on the list before I know whatever the next thing would be right that might be one simple concrete thing that could be generally really on atomically for just making telephones critical Allegan to the list of assets is networking from there is a manageable set getting companies to donate enormous numbers of phones or getting somebody to commission and cheap phone all that stuff it's manageable so that might be a thing that we can think of doing that it's simple enough tractable and probably affect every organization in the world lots of pretty achievable goal and self-organizing systems so

[10:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=620s) start fishing spiders is kind of sort of the state in our course ten years ago and very popular in the u.s. largely because of the implications for anti-terrorism and personally I think the state there is moves on their peers think which I was involved in actually edit Juncker and it's probably a much more interesting book from the perspective humanitarian organization because what it focuses on specifically is what you do the Center for the functions of the hub and what are the functions of the periphery and how to have in the periphery interact so the hub function is basically your heavy logistics and it's your pump material purchasing it's the heart and neglects parties and sane organizations at WH o the network response is all the periphery and the periphery is people using Facebook to organize you know bus loads of goons that go out to refugees counter wherever it happens to be its people self rescuing by contacting the relatives and asking them to send the plane ticket and of course you get bus so the notice of the what we're really talking about contained in this periodic table of course in Romans book the pier is assumed to be an individual smartphone and the ink is assumed to be a large company on the American template that you see from for example airmail but there is no reason that those functions you know couldn't be reassembled from the perspective of okay the incoming humanitarian actors and peers will be first responders local groups right away to rescue and self rescue mutual aid refugees on each way to extremely poor as they say in an American context citizen is the first responder once you have cell phones and the ability to consult on two cell phones the idea that you can do a walk of Management simply by putting the correct information of the soul at the correct time if you have seen the seed move out you should run uphill now that kind of stuff is very very possible okay so what did i do -

[12:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWw-KkJtU&t=739s) good the answer is the less humanitarian space after basically 15 years of banging my head in this problem right and I left humanitarian space because it doesn't innovate nothing's happened right so two years ago I decided I was going to quit I was going to go into the real world and it's going to come back once I losing a lot more like you want musk and I was going to pay from solution to these problems myself first thing I did was a new part of project called Ethereum as the project manager of the Ethereum Wang most of the large bands moves the large humanitarian research agencies have obtained projects most of those projects are a theory so the project management that bill departs with right this is the beginnings of weighing out fundamental rockhard infrastructure on which you could then hand laser humanitarian operations this gives us what's called the u.s. unity of that rope of a community's command it will take 10 years for those technologies to mature at a point where you could trust enemies like the one but if we don't start building those things now we're not gonna have them you need them so I want us to do that now I am basically running a venture capital firm with the objective of making enough money to be able privately financed the humanitarian R&D that I've been trying to get done through institutions for 15 years so I'm waiting list them as a direct Challenge do something otherwise the future will be run by individual actors like me who don't have any fundamental control that's of the society don't have any fundamental control by nation state and just solve problems anyway these he said if you want to save the legitimacy of the humanitarian world you have to start innovating fast enough to solve these problems or the future is simply going to be run by self-starting tech entrepreneurs that can outspend the UN in their chosen areas and then very rapidly the humanitarian removal wonder one last time and not be seen again you must benefit

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End of [267] The future of humanitarian innovation. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [691](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md) Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017); the most closely related, [332] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris... (2012) (no text here); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.