Strong Angel 3
Strong Angel 3 started without me this Sunday. Despite some last minute discussions, nothing could prise me away from the comforts of Berlin. Actually it’s my own damn fault – I was previously on the Executive Committee, but I dropped out because I couldn’t really justify my involvement. I didn’t feel that the technology being tested, and the way it was being tested, would really be relevant to the work that I’m doing right now. The down side of that decision is that I don’t get to play with some really cool toys in San Diego.
However there will probably be some interesting outcomes from the exercise, particularly in the realms of SSE (intangible) and the Pony Express (tangible). I do find SSE interesting (see Ray Ozzie’s initial thoughts here) but I just don’t get the Pony Express concept. Driving around a wifi-enabled truck in a hazardous environment to provide a few hours of patchy connectivity always struck me as a not-very-effective way of delivering internet access in the field.
Despite my misgivings, Strong Angel continues to be an interesting exercise with potential lessons for humanitarian organisations. I’m hoping that they release the results live, through blogs and wikis, so we can all get a view on events in San Diego this week.
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Paul,
I do wish you’d been with us. We’d have benefited from your perspective, and your company would have been most welcome. I hope, as we release more about what was done on the website, that you’ll be able to find something of value for the work you do.
The point of the Pony Express is not to provide Internet access. A Pony Express “node” has no Internet access at all. It’s intended to move data around between users who never will have any Internet access at all. Right now, this tends to happen by sending CDs out to the field, but that’s limited in so many ways. Nor do we imagine that implementation would require dedicated vehicles. My thought here was simply to piggyback structured data replication services on top of the transportation infrastructure. You could place laptops with wifi in a food convoy — similar to what has been done with buses in India. SSE is based on a bi-directional RSS mesh. Imagine delivering HIC content to users in the deep field, riding atop a flow of people and assets that are already moving through areas where assistance is being provided. Now imagine collecting data from those same users, passing it on to other groups of disconnected users, and then replicating it back to the HIC when the Pony Express comes in range of a network with a WAN uplink. I wholly concur it’s a poor substitute for Internet access. Users who can count on Internet access, however, aren’t the ones we’ve got in mind here.
And yes, we DO intend to release a huge quantity of content out to the site in the next few weeks. Thousands of photos. Final reports from participating organizations. Many hours of video. We’re working hard right now to get it digitized, consolidated, and taxonomized appropriately. Everything — the bits that worked and the bits that didn’t — will be there to see.
Regards,
Robert Kirkpatrick
Director, Strong Angel III Application Integration
Lead Solutions Architect
Microsoft Humanitarian Systems
Robert Kirkpatrick
1 Sep 06 at 20:19
Hi Robert – welcome to the blog, I was hoping that you were reading! It would have been great to be there, I’m sure I would have had a blast. I think my initial concerns were still there, however, so I’m hoping that SA3 can be the start of a conversation rather than a one-off event.
Apologies for misinterpreting the Pony Express – I should have been more precise, as I know from both you and Ted that the PE is specifically for data synchronisation. However in practice, isn’t that a substitute for data synchronisation that would otherwise be managed via the web?
I’m also interested to know exactly who you view as the primary users of the service. It struck me as I was reading the various Strong Angel blogs that there’s a danger that the PE might fall between users, but that might be because I haven’t seen it in action.
And I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing the outputs. I have no doubt that there will be some fascinating stuff in there!
Paul Currion
5 Sep 06 at 14:22