An important part of the project involves my ability to do actual on-the-ground tests of the pproof of concept. This means working with partners in countries that border Syria — namely Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan (and Iraq, but that place is volatile enough as is).
The challenge then becomes figuring out a way of reaching agencies that would be interested in assisting. I haven’t tried this before, so we’ll need some sort of preliminary strategy. I read this Wikipedia entry on aid in Syria — it describes the organizations involved and the capacity of their involvement. That’ll be a good starting point.
Next, I’m considering the below:
The goal is to get the pilot flight done legally, and as quickly as possible. If I could just pop into Turkey, do the test flight and come back — that’d be ideal (for this initial stage of the project).
The basic strategy here is:
Since I’ll be starting off with the UN, I’d need to understand more about the problem, specifically:
I’d also need to be very clear about what it is I’m asking from them.
After some extensive searching, I came across this list of UNHCR implementing partners in Turkey. There’s another list here on Page 5.
To keep things sane, I fired up a Google sheet to track the status of the different interactions I’m following up on.