- The November issue of Scientific American carries an article by Sheri Fink entitled “The Science of Doing Good” [purchase required, unfortunately]. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the article. Initially I wasn’t convinced that this was going to be much good (sorry, Sheri!) but I was wrong. It moves between different areas – refugee registration, GIS, human rights, and so on – quite smoothly, while communicating the main obstacles that we face without making excuses. As an overview, it hits most of the initiatives in the sector that are accessible to general readers, so it should engage a wide audience and give them a pointer towards the area that might interest them the most. This is A Good Thing.
- “Mapping for Better Accountability in Service Delivery” [pdf] by Katharina Welle is the latest ODI Briefing Paper. The paper uses WaterAid‘s work as a case study to demonstrate how the use of mapping can be turned into a policy tool. Although the paper was actually funded by WaterAid, it’s an interesting approach to emphasise that gets away from the “cool” factor of mapping.
- The latest Peace IT newsletter [pdf] is just out from Crisis Management Initiative, with articles on a range of recent developments including Humanitarian FOSS and the Global +5 Symposium. Again, this is a very nice overview of some interesting projects, although not much in the way of analysis, so be prepared to follow up on specific projects.
- NPR carries an interesting audio segment on the Reverse 911 service. From their blurb: “The Reverse 911 communication system was given the lion’s share of credit for successful and fatality free evacuations from San Diego County’s wildfires a month ago. But the program may not have been as effective as previously thought.” The clip is still pretty positive about the concept, but once again it seems that the cheerleaders for technology may have underestimated the reality on the ground.
Category Archives: Emergency Telecommunications
Quickbits December 2007
Posted in Emergency Telecommunications, GIS, Humanitarian, Media
Mobile Response 2008: Call for Papers
Last year, the first Mobile Response symposium on Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response was held – they’ve published the proceedings in a proper book and everything (somebody remind me why aren’t we doing that at ISCRAM?). Mobile Response is much more along the “emergency management” axis than the “humanitarian response” axis (you know, critical infrastructure, rescue operations and so on), but obviously there’s a lot of crossover (although at some point I’m going to have to write about the distinction and what it means for ICT issues in particular).
So the Call for Papers for Mobile Response 2008 has just been issued. To give you an idea of the topics that they’re interested in, take a look at this list:
- Mobile and wearable computing
- Context-aware applications
- Geographic information systems and location-based services
- Rescue operation management and decision support systems
- Multimedia and multimodal communication systems
- Requirements, design and empirical foundations
- System support for cross-organizational cooperation
- Critical infrastructure protection
- Strategies for involving the general public
- Information systems for environmental monitoring
And then get writing, I guess.
Posted in Academic, Cellphone, Emergency Telecommunications
Tagged academi, Cellphone, Emergency Telecommunications
Social media in disaster response: Dennis McDonald’s take
Dennis McDonald recently joined the humanitarian-ict mailing list that I manage (with Chamindra de Silva), and has raised some interesting points about social media in disaster response, drawing on his experience as a consultant and project manager. He’s also been blogging about disaster management from this perspective, and his most recent blog post sums up what he’s learning about applying social media to disaster response.
- What I agreed with.
Official adoption is slow… public adoption is fast.
We see this time and again, as new opportunities created by technology spread more quickly through the general public (largely via the web) than through the cumbersome bureaucracies that serve the public.
Every time a natural disaster occurs we see and hear reports of telephone and wireless networks going down… Obviously cellphone and Internet based services are vulnerable. In an increasingly network-dependent world, though, we need to learn how to deal with situations where portions of that public network go down.
The answer is communication systems with multiple channels and plenty of redundancy built in. However there’ll always be a need for a single reliable and secure means of communication, at least in order to ensure that responders can communicate. Does this mean the general public will get cut off? Unfortunately, absolutely; I don’t think civil systems are ever going to be that resilient (unless we get to a point where all communication is routed through satellite via wide area networks sporting multiple nodes…).
- What I disagreed with.
Not much, actually. My main concerns were about the level of detail that it’s possible to manage in a disaster:
it seems a practical response by the authorities in disaster communications planning should be, at minimum, to be able to (1) monitor such channels in the event of a disaster and (2) use them where appropriate to communicate with affected populations.
(1) doesn’t seem to be a practical option, given existing resources – monitoring sms channels in a disaster is frankly the last thing we should be worrying about. (2) is a much more obvious route to go down, but bear in mind that it will continue the broadcast (one-to-many) paradigm. We will always need the broadcast paradigm, but the question is how to effectively plug the official channels into the network (many-to-many).
It will also be interesting to see how effective the One Laptop Per Child effort will be in generating demand for low cost but sophisticated computer networking features
I don’t think it will be that interesting, because I don’t think OLPC will be very effective. Obviously if I’m proven wrong, the world will be a better place, but my concerns about OLPC have only grown as the project bumbles along. We need to get away from planning based on the resources that we’d like poor people to have, and plan on the basis of the resources that they actually have.
- What I need to think about:
But they’re not here yet and we need to take into account how people are using their cellphones and computers today to communicate when disaster strikes.
I agree with this, but I hope that doesn’t mean that we have to use Facebook to tell people that we’re trapped under a building with a broken leg…
Posted in Emergency Telecommunications, Web
I’m not liveblogging the Global Symposium +5 in Geneva
… for one very good reason, and that’s because I’m not at the Global Sympsium +5 in Geneva. However it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, since it’s a pretty big deal. I’m also not liveblogging the NetHope Bi-Annual Summit in Panama, and that’s because I’m not there either. I’m sure that there are good explanations for my otherwise inexplicable absences, but that’s not important right now.
The Symposium +5 is being held five years after the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange (hence the +5 title – do keep up). That first symposium was a very mixed bag – it was the first time that the various actors in the sector had come together, so it was a very big deal. Because it was the first time, however, it was a little unfocused – nobody was really sure where the sector was going, although we weren’t short of ideas.
The Final Statement [pdf] that came out of that meeting wasn’t a bad one, but I had a lot of concerns about whether any progress would be made on the key points. This was partly because the wording was quite vague, as always with consensus documents, but mainly because there was (and remains) a lack of leadership in the perenially fragmented humanitarian sector. So where are we, five years later?
Do mobile phones answer all our prayers?
I’ve written about the role that mobile telephony can play in humanitarian assistance quite a few times now, without really talking about it directly. The one line I have consistently taken is that cellphone coverage is not reliable or secure enough to be used as the primary means of communication in an insecure environment. Putting that to one side for a moment, however, it’s clear that mobile telephony really is the key communications technology for the poor – and that means it should be the key communications technology for the humanitarian community.
Now, via the NGO Security Blog, I read that UNHCR and WFP have been using SMS to notify Iraqi refugees in Syria about upcoming food distributions. A total of10,000 SMS have been sent out, which should be enough to reach the 50,000 planned beneficiaries (although it’s only a drop in the ocean if Syria’s numbers are accurate and 1 .4 million Iraqi refugees have arrived in Syria). This is fascinating stuff, and I’m interested to find out how SMS fits into their overall strategy, since it’s the first time that this has been tried.
At the same time, Jonas Landgren asks
What could it mean if future emergency response information systems would be based on the fact that mobile phones are the only information technology in common for emergency responders across all sectors in society?
and proceeds to draw on Swedish experiences to look at what the implications might be in terms of system design. Obviously Sweden is not Syria, but given the impact of mobile phones in the Arab World, the possibilities are certainly there for more creative use of SMS and other mobile formats.
Text messages are more likely to make it through a degraded or overloaded network than voice, especially if the system has been set up to prioritise emergency calls, and notifications for non-urgent events – such as upcoming food distributions, which will be announced in other places – are perfect for this kind of medium. However I hope that we’re going to start to develop more creative approaches to this – perhaps using mobile phones to enable people to register for distributions remotely – and perhaps even using their unique SIM number to identify who has received a particular distribution, instead of relying solely on ID cards or other paper documents.
p.s. Good luck defending your thesis this week, Jonas!
UPDATE: This post is cross-posted on Mobileactive, which is a very useful resource if you want to find out more about how mobile technology is being used by activists around the world..
Posted in Cellphone, Emergency Telecommunications, Iraq
Humanlink now!
One of the projects I’m involved with (as a Board member and general layabout) is HumanLink, the brainchild of Jonathan Thompson. Jonathan decided that not enough is being done to develop technology solutions for the field, and decided to use his expertise and connections to set up an organisation to do just that. That new HLink website is now up and running (and looks good – well done, guys!) and we recently had a link in from the smart fellows at Ogle Earth, with a few links on to some new imagery in Tagzania. Good news all round, and hopefully the momentum behind HumanLink will build from here to expand the service delivery.
(Jonathan and Jeff Allen have also been playing around with Clark Connect, a Linux server gateway which I didn’t know much about previously, but looks interesting as a way of providing connectivity over low bandwidth.)
Posted in Emergency Telecommunications, GIS, Humanitarian, Indonesia, NGO, Open Source, Web
Disaster Resource Network – Survey on Emergency ICT
The Disaster Resource Network at the World Economic Forum is an initiative that aims to network the private sector in support of disaster response activities. Generally speaking I’m strongly in favour of this kind of engagement, as long as everybody’s agenda is kept on the table, and it seems like there’s been a proliferation of private-public initiatives of this sort in the last few years. Only time will tell which ones really deliver – in the meantime, it can get distracting.
DRN has just released the report (.doc, 350k) from an interesting survey on the use of ICT in emergencies, based on a desk review, survey and interviews. (Disclosure: I was one of the interviewees.) There’s no revelations in the actual findings, so you might want to skip to the bottom for the recommendations on private sector engagement.
In particular, there are a couple of clear points about providing personnel which emphasise that any contributions need to be based on matching up private and public sector requirements, rather than each side assuming that it knows what the other needs to be effective. DRN will be following this up with more discussions with key actors, including the UN Foundation.
Simulating Disasters with ADRA
Interesting news from Gregg Swanson of Humaninet, who recently attended a simulation exercise held by ADRA in Indonesia. (Incidentally, the ADRA Indonesia home page is funny as hell for all the wrong reasons, mainly due to the font.) Gregg has written a series of blog posts about the experience on the Humaninet blog, as well as an accompanying article at their ICT Features page. It sounds as if the exercise went really well, so congratulations to all involved!
On another page Gregg has written 12 reasons why relief organisations should conduct simulations. There’s some useful ICT-related findings on that page, but I was more interested in those 12 reasons, because we’re discussing a similar project for the ECB agencies – to do an inter-agency simulation either at HQ or field levels. I’m going to quote all 12 reasons here, and not just to pad out this blog post either – they’re genuinely useful:
Posted in Capacity Building, Emergency Telecommunications, Indonesia, NGO
Microsoft To Open Computer Training Centers For Ex-Combatants In Colombia
Interesting news from the big beast that is Microsoft, particularly interesting in light of the ECB / NetHope plans to develop a global ICT training delivery mechanism for staff working in the field. This project was recently approved and we’re moving forward now with ECB funding for NetHope management.
One of the critical problems that we identified in the ECB4 Assessment was the general lack of good IT skills in the field. This was true across the board, from senior IT staff (who lacked specialised skills in areas such as VSAT installation) to junior project staff (who are often recruited in an emergency with few computer skills). The question is, how to introduce that training to them.
There are three possibilities:
- Remote learning. Increased connectivity in the field mean that staff can access e-learning in a way that wasn’t possible a few years ago. The disadvantage here is that this method relies on staff taking the initiative in identifying and participating in training – something which doesn’t always apply in developing countries, where the education norm is rote learning, rather than personal experiment.
- Leverage economies of scale to deliver training to groups of staff in the field. While it’s not cost-efficient to train a single staff member from a single agency in MS Word, it is possible to run 30 staff from different agencies through a course at a relatively low cost.
- Leverage training networks to improve access to existing training in the private sector. Cisco, for example, have an international network of training academies, which could be engaged to provide low- to no-cost courses to NGOs participating in the scheme. (You can also try to use these networks to develop local capacity, training up local providers to a level adequate for our needs.)
I’ve no idea which of these is likely to yield the best results – which is why we’re designing a training mechanism which combines all three. It’s ridiculously ambitious, but entirely feasible.
(Cross posted on the ECB Team Blog.)
NetHope Disaster Relief White Paper
Is it just me, or am I posting a LOT of reports recently? Seems like everybody’s got a report – as well as the ones that I’ve already listed, research is also underway by the Disaster Relief Network at the WEF, and the same with Fritz Institute with SAP. I will of course post their reports as well, once they’re out.
The NetHope White Paper on Disaster Relief is a little different. It’s the accumulated practical experience of the NetHope members, who are a good cross-section of international NGOs, although obviously there’s bias within the membership towards particular types of organisation. The research is nevertheless very useful, particularly for the way it breaks down the stages of response.
This was something I deliberately glossed over in the ECB Assessment that I did earlier this year, because I knew that NetHope would be publishing this paper. So they complement each other nicely, and hopefully give us a very firm basis for the projects that we’re now running. ECB will also fund NetHope to establish a Humanitarian Assistance Working Group, which will focus on dealing with these specific issues.
Enough reports. I’m going to do some actual work – ECB4 budgets ahoy!
Posted in Emergency Telecommunications, Humanitarian, NGO