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!

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