DisasterTech at eTech 2008
The O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference is another one of these confabs that I watch from a distance, filled with a mixture of awe and dread. (Awe at the sheer brainpower that you can see in the many presentations, and dread at what might happen next.) This year, Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron gave a presentation on DisasterTech to the poor and huddled masses that attended, updating some of their earlier thoughts on areas such as SMS, open source and distributed approaches.
Now I like Jesse and Mikel, and I agree with the lines along which they’re thinking, but when I see slides that say “225,000 deaths preventable with existing technology”, I start to worry about whether the expectations of those poor and huddled masses from the technology world are being raised just a little too high… but I’d rather wait until I can hear the audio rather than just read the slides.
One point they did make that’s worth picking up (because as far as I know, this is the first time it’s been explicit) is that disaster technology tends to follow this pattern:
- Disaster
- Ad Hoc Adaptation
- Championship
- Iterative Improvement
That’s pretty accurate – most of the more interesting developments of the last few years have followed that model. However there are definitely problems with Championship – not as a concept, but in terms of where to target your “championing” efforts.
I believe that most technology dissemination in this sector isn’t through organisational adoption – there’s just too much autonomy at the local level – but through word-of-mouth. Somebody sees something working, tries it out and takes it forward (or not) – but only within their particular part of their organisation. What this might mean is that we need to take a viral approach to this, rather than seeking to get management (i.e. top-down) approval, particularly if we want to reach smaller groups on the ground.
With that in mind, we have to be anthropologists as well as technologists. Cultures are different, communities are different and people are different; what “works” in terms of viral dissemination in the US is simply not going to work in Bangladesh. It’s not just the technology that has to adapt to these different environments; it’s us as well. Hopefully the start-up jockeys at the conference realise that…
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Paul,
Yikes! Those slides are easy to misinterpret without the audio.
The point is that readily available technologies (such as GeoRSS feeds and advanced data processing) have the potential to save lives when they are:
a) approperiately distributed
b) incorporated into larger systems
We paused for questions on each of the “” slides, and this issue came up then too. My answer was that this kind of technology was a small step in establishing a tsunami evacuation system. (Previously this kind of modeling was a big step.)
Jesse Robbins
7 Mar 08 at 22:38
Yah, I guessed as much… but you wouldn’t believe how many people genuinely believe that kind of stuff. What sort of feedback did you get from the participants? Any interesting leads on projects?
Paul Currion
7 Mar 08 at 23:45
I’m going to remember to make sure slides stand on their own in the future! In the talk itself, we explored the subtleties of championing within several examples, and absolutely the strategy is different in every case. What’s the right term for this role? The goal of course is to get the technologists excited to take on t role..
The message is gathering steam. Humanitarian mapping will be a key theme of Where 2.0 this year. There will be a keynote on Ushahidi, and several other talks, including a redux by Jesse and myself.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/03/from-etech-to-where-20-disaste.html
Mikel Maron
12 Mar 08 at 16:30