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:

1. Disaster
2. Ad Hoc Adaptation
3. Championship
4. 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…

Another ridiculously late notice on an article in TechNet magazine from October: Communication & Collaboration: Building an Emergency Operations Center on Groove and SharePoint. As always, mine eye is drawn to the lessons that can be drawn from these experiences, which the article sums up as:

First, network connectivity and bandwidth are not guaranteed… Second, the Internet isn’t always there. This may seem like a given in light of the previous constraint, but it’s important to highlight the potential frailty of an Internet uplink…Third, the definition of “users” expands greatly… How many organizations are ready to bring potentially hundreds of volunteers, contractors, and various civilian and military governmental staff into their information systems in a rapid and secure way? Finally, people need to access data using a variety of machines and connectivity scenarios. New users will often bring their own computers, configured in their own ways with their own sets of applications on them.

Now that’s like a primer for technology professionals on what to expect in a disaster. An EOC is a very specialised set-up - you’ll rarely find one during a disaster in a developing country - but the lessons run across the board. Wise words from John Morello.

First Monday publishes an article entitled Open Source Disaster Recovery: Case Studies of Networked Collaboration, a review of some of the initiatives that I referenced in my paper An Ill Wind? The Role of Accessible ICT following Hurricane Katrina. That paper has already discussed how these “non-traditional” voluntary efforts might fit into the broader picture of disaster response, but the First Monday article is the first time I’ve seen any discussion of how effective they might have been. More on Open Source Disaster Recovery

Five years ago, I wrote an article for Humanitarian Exchange, published by the ODI Humanitarian Practice Network, entitled “Learning from Kosovo: the HCIC Year One.” It was the first thing I’d written about information management, and it was right at the start of my learning curve in this field.

I thought it would be interesting to update that article, and revisit some of the issues that it raised. So in the latest issue of Humanitarian Exchange, you’ll find another article, this time entitled “A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing: five years of information management for humanitarian operations.”

I packed in more points than I probably should have, so it’s quite a dense piece, but it’s probably summed up by these two sentences:

Five years ago, I believed that better information management would enable better management overall. Yet it is hard to determine whether all this activity has actually improved the provision of humanitarian assistance, since there are no clear criteria for measuring their impact.

The good news includes more partnerships, sometimes between agencies, but also with the private sector; the bad news includes a lack of leadership in this area, particularly given the recent implementation of the cluster approach by the UN. The most important point I wanted to make, however, is one that I’ve mentioned before. I’m going to repeat it now, because it seems to me to be important enough:

We are public organisations, funded by public money, working for the public good. In the interests of accountability, all information that we gather in the course of our work should also be public. The only qualification that should be made to this is if that information might in any way endanger the safety or security of beneficiaries or staff. Without the free flow of information, the process of coordination is crippled, and we all must take responsibility for this.

So I guess that’s my new mantra.

Also interesting this month is an article by Jeremy Shoham of the Emergency Nutrition Network and NutritionWorks. The article, “Information is a prerequisite, not a luxury“ expands on the importance of information management in the context of Food Security. Although he makes the case for what I would say is an overly ambitious system, the article is an excellent overview of some current thoughts in food security (along with a jab at the bias towards food aid, which thankfully is starting to diminish).

More map madness in Nature magazine, whose 16 February issue has a commentary piece on Mapping Disaster Zones, covering work done by the Global Connection Project in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Pakistan earthquake. The entire article is worth reading, but I’d like to focus on some of the lessons they learned:

More on Mapping Disaster Zones (Nature magazine)

On Tuesday I participated in one of N-Ten’s online seminars, this one co-hosted by HumaniNet, Aspiration, and the Innovation Funders Network. The participants included some of the people who worked on the issues I wrote about in my Katrina paper, including Will Reed of Tech4All and some of the guys who worked on the KatrinaPeopleFinder data initiative.

It was fascinating to hear first-hand about the things I’d been reading about during the Hurricane. It was obvious that these guys were dynamic, but what struck me was that they were also very frustrated with the chaos following Katrina. Of course, that’s the nature of working in disaster response - if existing systems could cope, it wouldn’t be a disaster.

It was also clear that they had quickly learnt many of the lessons it took me years to pick up - particularly the basic truth that the best way to lessen the impact of a disaster and ensure quick recovery is to help communities to help themselves - and that’s where the technology comes in. We need to develop tools that help the “first responders”, sure - but perhaps we should also focus more on developing tools to help the communities that we’re supposed to be helping.

Beyond that initial interest, the webinar was slightly frustrating. It was a good way to get a lot of people around the table, but not so good when it came to talking about the issues. It was also difficult to establish where the common interests lay between the different initiatives - I was presenting Sahana, the Open Source development initiative that came out of the tsunami response in Sri Lanka - and it was hard during the seminar to really pinpoint how we can all work together.

N-Ten are an interesting outfit, and thanks to them for organising the webinar (although I’m still not convinced that webinar is a word that should be allowed to survive). I’m looking forward to meeting them when I’m in the States in October / November - they’ve invited me to be on the Panel Discussion at their upcoming conference, “Answering the call: Katrina, the Tsunami, Darfur, Afghanistan - lessons learned from the Global ICT responses” on October 17th. If anybody out there is coming along, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t throw popcorn when I’m trying to speak.

Despite the terrible impact of Hurricane Katrina, it has been very positive to see the technology community using a wide range of tools to support the response. Particularly in areas such as family tracing and volunteer matching, many initiatives have been started privately, and resources such as Google Maps have really come into their own as a way of distributing information. I’m keeping a watch list of websites and articles on the use of technology in the Katrina response. You can find the (regularly updated) list on my del.icio.us roll, at del.icio.us/paulcurrion/katrina.

These initiatives are fantastic, and I’m loving the fact that so many of them are fairly spontaneous. The group that I’m involved with on the Sahana project are trying to field the prototype version, working with some volunteers in the US. I hope that we’re able to prove some concepts in this response.

However, two things occur to me:

1. Fantastic as these initiatives are, they are fragmented and unco-ordinated - much like any humanitarian response in the world, to be honest. However this is massively inefficient, and we don’t meet the needs of people and communities as quickly and appropriately as we should. Are there ways of rapidly developing network organisations to co-ordinate these initiatives, without destroying the volunteer spirit, spontaneity and inventiveness of the decentralised approach?

2. Despite the similarities in the response, this isn’t a humanitarian crisis like the ones I normally deal with. Aside from Kobe ten years ago, this is one of the few serious humanitarian emergencies that has taken place in an urbanised area in a highly-developed country. Many similar needs to an event like the Asia tsunami - housing, family tracing, victim identification, etc - but the operational environment is radically different - excellent infrastructure, functioning government, abundance of resources. At this point, it’s hard to see where to draw lessons - and easy for this event to skew funding availability and the development of useful tools for humanitarian responses in other parts of the world.