[Hexayurt]

This is a Hard Problem.

I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in.

The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I finally arrive there.

It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey, Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.

The big orgs need to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for 15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on. It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were in a prison camp.

So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.

In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.

I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing where to put their support later.

Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!

[stealthf0under]

Thanks for the reply sir! Yeah it's definitely a Hard Problem. The futurist in me does agree with you that eventually a form of crowd-sourcing will likely come along which helps dramatically reduce bottlenecks and waste in the overall aid pipeline while increasing transparency for individual donors. I think that this is likely to come about due to the onrushing incline in global smartphone penetration rate paired with donation systems may which leverage emerging technology around micro-transactions. The first wave of low-cost android smart-phones will hit the developing markets in the not too distant future, so suddenly everyone will have a camera, and I think once that happens it'll be a whole new ball game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3fgqhat60&t=16m <-- Dave McClure does a great job of explaining that phenomena and what it could mean to the IT startup ecosystem in the US and abroad.