News — 14 April, 2025

Our Journey at Skoll World Forum 2025: a Time for Reflection and Collaboration in a New Era

The Skoll World Forum is over, but the reflections that came from it will definitely stay with us for a long time. Read more about what our Executive Director, Rebecca Firth, and Fabrizio Scrollini, Regional Director for the Open Mapping Hub –Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), learned during the week of April 1-4, 2025.

[Cover image: Rebecca Firth, HOT’s Executive Director, and James Nardella, from Last Mile Health, presented a powerful session on Big Bet Philanthropy for Long-Term Change. Source: Fabrizio Scrollini.]

Last week, we had the opportunity to participate in one of the largest and most relevant gatherings of social entrepreneurs, funders, and innovators in the world: The Skoll World Forum, hosted at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. The Forum is organized by the Skoll Foundation (also known as Skoll), which has contributed significantly to HOT’s goal of mapping an area home to 1 billion people affected by disasters or extreme poverty via the Audacious Project.

This was our third time at the Skoll Forum, and so we knew the generous setting and connections would bring serendipitous connections. Among thousands of other delegates, our journey through the Forum was marked by extensive networking, as well as participation in several events and side events. Although the environment was full of excitement, feelings of confusion, anxiety, and disbelief with some of the current events were very evident. This year, conversations were dominated by the dramatic changes in international cooperation and the significant impacts of US Government funding reductions, with several organizations announcing they were sunsetting as a result. In this blog post, we are offering an initial take on what we found out during the Forum.

What We Heard At the Skoll World Forum

Go Green or Go Home

One of the most striking notes of this forum was the focus on how important it is to address the effects of climate change, protect the environment, and advance toward a more resilient future. During the event, we heard inspiring stories from people like Dominique Bikaba, founder and Executive Director of Strong Roots, a grassroots conservation and sustainable development organization in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and Farwiza Farhan, an environmental activist and founder of Haka, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Leuser Ecosystem in the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Both of them shared how their journeys have been mostly about acknowledging the communities where they work and having the humility to engage with them, not through preaching but by actually building with them. Resource extraction was a key topic as well, with a new race for rare minerals on the horizon. Many people wondered if we are going to repeat some of the blunders energy industries committed in the past, with terrible effects on local populations.

In the realm of geospatial data and tech, we heard stories where a lack of resources or capacity was preventing access to some basic tools that could make a difference for many of the organizations attending. It is evident that OpenStreetMap can play a significant role as a core digital public infrastructure for a lot of this work. These conversations showed us that our work co-creating accessible geospatial data with communities, particularly to mitigate the effects of climate change, continues to be crucial.

P(AI)ring Tech Firms and Civil Society

Technology and in particular Artificial Intelligence (AI) was also another big part of the discussion. AI was in the air in every conversation, but with no clear or shared definition that told us what people really meant by AI. Was this about generative AI? Was this about jobs, automation, or a mix of anxiety about the use of technology? We are no strangers to these debates ourselves as our staff, community, and voting members explore, reflect, and use AI tools; and as we keep developing our own AI-assistive mapping tool, fAIr, along with other projects. Open source AI, and in particular open data for AI remains as relevant as yesterday. But as we discussed in our Tech to the Rescue Side Bar event, we really need a new set of partnerships between tech firms and the civil society sector to generate impact investment models that deliver innovative solutions so relevant data and adequate AI models deliver for the public good.

A New Funding Landscape

Ununderstandably, this was one of the most critical discussions in the forum. To state the obvious, most developed countries are now substantially reducing their budgets for international aid and humanitarian assistance. This has left a global majority of countries and actors in the social entrepreneurship sector puzzled about how to move forward. Skoll and other foundations are stepping in and pouring more resources from their endowments, but a more general debate looms about the role of the philanthropic sector in this new era of reduced international cooperation budgets. At a session led by Rebecca and James Nardella from Last Mile Health, it became evident that “Big Bet” philanthropy was already playing a significant role in changing the landscape of social entrepreneurship, but has also come with its own challenges, given that it’s not a one-size-fits-all model.

The Point of It All

In the end, we also had conversations from human to human, with several amazing people with ambitious visions. Some of them were from our field, some of them were serendipitous and we wouldn’t have crossed paths without the Forum. We exchanged notes on how to lead from a better place, explored meditative practices with Plum Village brothers, and also engaged in some of the important conversations about life balance, being a good parent, and the complexities we face according to our different genders and geographies. We also had some good laughs occasionally, because even in these dark times, we are reminded of the power communities and motivated humans have. We left feeling encouraged and inspired about the relevance of HOT’s work moving forward, and the role community-led, hyper-local data can have in providing solutions for climate and humanitarian action.