More (hopefully) interesting thoughts…
One detail of interest given this is an EC grant, is that between Greece and Hungary, the countries in the migration path (Macedonia and Serbia) are not in the EU. So presumably they would not be so interested in funding anything involving those countries. That’s too bad because I imagine that a great many migrants are there trying to get north.
Any site or service we might set up immdiately runs into the problem of updating. I have seen a lot of efforts, many well funded, that catalog situations and orgs and other entities and there was no provision or funding to update it so it wasn’t useful pretty fast.
Another problem with evaluations online is that you can’t even out all the respective biases of whomever enters a report or a comment until you have a high resonse rate. Otherwise it’s too easy to skew things.
One idea I have is to make a tool that describes efforts at relief and care that is easy and simple to enter and update data (in a wiki-like sort f way) and then seed it with the insights and comments of people we know or can trust, to get things off on a credible footing.
Another idea also is to create somethign that matches someone’s skills, abilities, resources and location to needs and orgs who are doing the work. That’s easy enough to make, but it wouldn’t mean much unless it had a tangible path to making that help actually happen.
I’m still just musing about this so far (many pretty serious personal distractions, my apologies for not being very quick with this) and seeing if I can come up with something workable.
But in accord with what Alex said, I too pictured this in the call as a companion piece to Open Care to evaluate who is doing what and how well they are succeeding at it and what the obstacles are and how one can help, etc.
And I have been searching around the web looking at what is available now. For example if you search “how to help refugees in the European Union” or “refugee care Europe” you get a big variety of links to orgs large and small and articles but nothing that evaluates any of it other than recommendations by whoever the writer is. There is UNCR, Save the Children, Rescue.org, etc. but smaller more local orgs are harding to locate.
That said, any motivated person who wants to help shouldn’t have to spend too much time looking before finding a meaningful way to contribute. What I feel I have not come up with yet is an idea for something that offers a clear advantage over what is already going on.