As those who have interacted with me at any time in the recent past are aware, I’m really fond of UAVs, which some of you might know better as “drones.”

I’m incredibly excited by the possibility of using flying robots with cameras on them in both journalism and in humanitarian aid. They will provide us with a cheap, easy to use, and incredibly versatile way of gathering data, from perspectives humans have rarely had much access to before.

Beyond that: they are extremely cool.

For the past couple of months, I have been working with Patrick Meier, the founder of the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) on a large-scale evaluation of UAVs for humanitarian applications. In this work, I was joined by Peter Mosur and Justine Mackinnon, and I think we did a pretty darn good job.

You can look at the open-to-editing Google spreadsheet we created here.

The public is welcome to make suggestions or add entries. I hope it is useful to those of you who are interested in working with drones for the benefit of humanity.