This article was written by Patrick Meier and originally published at iRevolution on 3 May, 2015. Republished with permission.
There are at the very least 9 humanitarian UAV teams operating in Nepal. We know this since these teams voluntarily chose to liaise with the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators). In this respect, the current humanitarian UAV response is far better coordinated than the one I witnessed in the Philippines right after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. In fact, there was little to no coordination at the time amongst the multiple civilian UAV teams; let alone between these teams and humanitarian organizations, or the Filipino government for that matter. This lack of coordination coupled with the fact that I could not find any existing "Code of Conduct" for the use of UAVs in humanitarian settings is actually what prompted me to launch UAViators just months after leaving the Philippines.