Homa Reto

A growing number of scientific literature in the international development field points out that sustainable progress is most likely to be achieved through active ownership and bottom-up involvement of local actors, as well as underrepresented actors in the governance of pressing and prioritized problems. While “localisation” carries a risk of growing into another buzzword under various frameworks e.g. the Sendai Framework and Grand Bargain Agreement, still many community actors that provide vital resources, know-how and grassroots projects to this end, remain invisible to the governments and humanitarian organizations. To bridge this disconnectivity between local and global actors, it is relevant to create open, accessible, transparent and secure data, information and knowledge platforms on local needs, capacities, capabilities, and networks for participatory global risk governance among local citizens and local and int’l experts. To increase the effectiveness of GRID3 (Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development) in mapping out relevant community organizations in disaster risk management context, Homa Reto (The Human Network) offers a geospatial referencing app that aims at encouraging data-critical and evidence-based development aid and humanitarian decision-making and monitoring & evaluation processes. Then, the main starting research question is: How could open source data collection, sharing, and mapping contribute to data-critical indexing and glocalisation of disaster risk governance?