I have always taken the position, since I first encountered this subject
in college, that technology of almost any form is essentially benign,
but what people do not like about it is that technology has a weird way
of stripping away social constructs that we as people leave in place
because, for whatever reason or heuristic, we don’t want to see how
things are really structured or occurring. Law and economics scholars
sometime refer to this as the cost of costing.

Take the BlackBerry – the bane of lawyers and executives. Well, it is
actually really helpful. Many times it has allowed me to send an e-mail
to someone on a thought I just had, or answer something quickly while
out of the office. Yet, it also exposes the power relationships
between, say, my superiors at our law firms and us (the attorneys). People say they
hate their BlackBerry, but it is impossible to divorce this piece of
technology from the social construct that is the modern workplace.

This is a simple example. The ones noted by Mr. Everard are far more
complex, but I suspect, in agreement with Paul’s comments, a significant
aspect of the cell phone is the larger social construct.

Technology has its place, its how people use it that is important and
also whether they have the ability and capacity to use it. Did a little old lady sitting in a flooded house in Gloucester use a mobile phone to call her family who then came to collect her? Who knows? If she did, it served a purpose.

I think that the article is weakest in identifying these social and organisational contexts in which the technology is implemented. I believe that investing in our organisations’ capacity is essential – and I’m happy to have worked with NetHope on key issues such as training development – but I also think that we need to keep one eye out for how the same technology is going to change beneficiaries’ lives, and how we can adapt our response to to those changes.

The comments in the article about email overload is a way of working, blind
copies, email everyone everything because it might be important or of use
to someone. Too many co-ordination meetings, well coordination meetings do
need to be held and perhaps the underlying statement should read ‘too many
meetings that acheive nothing’ although this situation is not specific to
an emergency.

NGO’s also compete with each other, they compete for the same funding, to
be the best, for all sorts of reasons, which of course are barriers to
horizontal information flow. Just as a Corporate produces a new product to
expand its customer base, so NGO’s move into different areas to expand
their capability, widen fundraising opportunities, raise their profile etc,
creating even more competition.

Technology has its place, its how people use it that is important and also
whether they have the ability and capacity to use it.

Did a little old lady sitting in a flooded house in Gloucester use a mobile
phone to call her family who then came to collect her? Who knows? If she
did, it served a purpose.

We use the same system to alert our SAR volunteers, although they are a predefined set of people and the phone system basically sends the alert/message to the list of people (if I remember it does 25 SMS receipients at a time, since the teleco’s can process bulk messages of 25 people at a time). Alerting around 1000 people on a predefined list takes about 3 minutes.

Of course this kind of alerting mechanisms can only be built in close cooperation with the local teleco providers, making sure they provide access to bulk alerts, info on phones within a cell tower, etc.

“The benefits of easier surveillance are manifold. Take two cases: since the tsunami, Sri Lanka’s largest telephone company has started an early-warning system which would send SMS messages to every mobile phone in an area at risk of flooding.” This is an inaccurate statement by the author. Area based alerting via GSM can be achieved only through Cell Broadcasting (CB), which is yet to be activated in Sri Lanka.

This paragraph was directly extracted from the Dialog website: ” It can be used to issue customized alerts to selected recipients instantaneously, and is compliant with the internationally accepted alerting protocol – CAP.”.

There’s a big difference between “selected recipients” vs “every mobile phone”.

Sometime wonder if journals are simply for commercial hype and not for scientific facts?

The early warning system deployed by Dialog as part of their CSR program was truely for the Government of Sri Lanka; namely the Disaster Early Warning Network (DEWN). I have to agree that DEWN is capable of issuing SMS alerts to selected mobile phones to warn of Floods and other hazards. However, I have my doubts that Gov of Sri Lanka is actually using it.