Has-Needs: Sovereignty for Disaster and beyond

2010, Haiti had just experienced the most devastating earthquake in decades, but luckily a cadre of students and aid workers were connected electronically to Boston’s elite level of international aid coordination and technological capacity.

One night, deep in hackathon conversations, it was discovered that people on the ground are never trusted - by the entire aid industry. In that moment, Has-Needs was born, to provide ‘trust ability’ for every human in distress. Knowing that the crypto and code techniques were coming, the next step was to obtain degrees in Psychology and Sociology to back up the design choices.

As each crypto and chain project hit the streets, it was evaluated for use in Has-Needs and nothing has come close. They all violate the tenets of absolute sovereignty, and most are not resilient to network dropouts. To make Has-Needs however, some crypto technologies have been utilized. Primarily, the mechanics of an Executable Smart Contract (eUTXO+NFT) written to a chain that is self-maintained, and verified recursively through the available graph.

If all that was confusing, it means that all the parts of Has-Needs have been tried and tested, they are just assembled in a new way. For instance, Has-Needs’ Jitterbug network protocol is made to operate with only information about the self-node and nearest connections. Without network connection, Has-Needs is designed to route messages around errors and dead links, while expanding the local network to accommodate temporary stresses. This is a completely unique protocol with applicability to other domains.

Having design Tenets rather than a set of compromises has led to very patient decisions and purpose built solutions. The design has maintained absolute privacy for the individual and thereby all communities they participate in. A local mesh-first networking approach suits the ‘first two survivors coordinate’ tenet. Using simple repeatable architecture, Communities are made with Sub-Communities to control message volume. Anyone can create a Community of any size, duration, or purpose.

Has-Needs claims to be the first trauma-mitigating humanitarian logistics platform. This is reinforced by all research discussing self-efficacy and agency. By placing the individual at the center of their world and not equating them to a monetary reference, a remarkable level of change is emergent. Similarly, many prosocial outcomes were designed by creating the precursor conditions deliberately.

Has-Needs is a record of skills and accomplishments as attested to by every interaction. This is particularly valuable to migrants and refugees who benefit from trustable bona-fides and can travel as a substantiated equal.

By providing sovereignty in a Smart Contract environment, the ownership of personal information is completely reversed from present paradigm. So, what begins as a disaster logistics idea suddenly has applicability to every type of interaction. When we look at the layers of life that identity touches, and how that identity has been ‘handled for you’ by the internet corporations, the implications mushroom quickly.

Interactions with governance, commerce, aid, and neighbors are affected, for the better.

Secure, private, and inviolable personal and group interactions easily translate to whole villages or organization charts.

When all personal data is protected by Smart Contract, then any granular item can be sold or rented for a verifiable amount of time and for a declared purpose. The game is merely to connect data to its destination and Has-Needs provides the means.

As self-owned, access to one’s data is revocable. Similarly, when self-owned, data can be freely layered, processed, and mixed at will. The personal context is easily viewed in a geographic user interface and the resulting situational awareness is revolutionary.

This same situational awareness is available to all users and the organizations they represent. This understanding led to the unique business model. Has-Needs is free to users always. Revenue is a one-time fee: 5% of realized savings at the County level.

The benefit to governance, commerce, and aid is access to data of a quality that is not available at any price. Validated, detailed, timely, and ongoing, the data that Has-Needs provides is of growing value to all endpoints and now that value is captured for the individual.

The set of features Has-Needs provides: data security/provenance/contracted use; are a minimal set of utilities making one’s identity usable and enforceable. Through five intensive years of crisis mapping, and another ten years of research and design, Has-Needs has been vetted in all manner of natural and political disasters. While it does replace municipal systems and some social media functions, the unified environment of Has-Needs does not conflict with any governmental or finance-based activity. In fact, many initiatives like banking the unbanked, or subsistence business loans, are only enhanced by a secure identity solution that includes Smart Contract for records/data use.

Has-Needs is designed to be literacy agnostic, low-tech friendly, and without preset categories, such that it is built through use in every locale by all types of people.

Has-Needs removes friction introduced by private-interest communications technologies, and supports all of the factors that disaster removes. It is as useful for the Emergency Manager as for the evacuee and effective in all phases of recovery and beyond.