Category Archives: Comms

New Mission for Guantanamo – Aid to Haiti

Pallets of Bottled Water bound for Haiti

Pallets of Bottled Water bound for Haiti

As covered in The Guardian, UK, and by WAVY-10, Virginia Beach, the  disaster in Haiti as a result of the recent earthquake is giving the American base at Guantanamo Bay two new missions: supplying aid and potentially detaining thousands of Haitian migrants.

The U.S. has designated Guantanamoas the hub of the aid operation. Dozens of helicopters and planes take off daily to ferry supplies and personnel to the stricken country or to American ships off the coast.

This makes sense as Guantanamo is a US Base so we have control over it, and it is about 200 miles from Haiti, so proximate to the disaster.

In a related story, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the World Bank says it plans to extend an additional $US 100 million in emergency aid to Haiti to help recovery and reconstruction from the devastating earthquake.

Radio

As public radio goes through its intermittent hat-in-hand cycle, we thought it worth remembering that in some places possession of a radio device – even just a receiver – is criminal.

Please consider donating to your local public radio station. Ours is WNYC.

ICT4Peace: community radio project in Sri Lanka

From ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace) – posted by Sanjana Hattotuwa –

In May this year, a colleague and I went to Nissankamallapura, Pollonnaruwa to strengthen online journalism capacities of a group trained in community radio production and had a decent production studio conveniently adjacent to an ICTA Nenasala. This groups was very interested in using the computers and internet access literally next door to their studio to publish and promote their productions on the web.

They called their station Saru Praja Radio and told us they were the first community in Sri Lanka to ask for a FM radio frequency to air their productions across a footprint of 48 villages in the Pollonnaruwa district.

Engaging as an Ashoka News & Knowledge Entrepreneur, this was a great opportunity to work with a rural community of well trained radio journalists, who had pinned all their hopes on a license to broadcast over a terrestrial radio frequency, on how the web could complement their terrestrial broadcasts and importantly, serve even as the primary dissemination model in the event they did not receive clearance to go on air.

The significant and enduring problems of existing community radio initiatives in Sri Lanka are well known and documented. It was very unlikely that Saru Praja Radio would get a license to broadcast, and even if they did, would be allowed to continue if their productions critically interrogated issues such as service delivery by local government, corruption and the rule of law, which the production team were very interested to cover.

The first thing I did was to set up a website for Saru Praja Radio, that ran WordPress on the backend and register it for 3 years. I chose WordPress because it is scaleable, robust and easy to use. Further, the skill-set learned in maintaining the Saru Praja website could be easily transferred and leveraged to support other individual or collective citizen journalism blogs / initiatives in these 48 villages. There was for example significant interest in covering issues related to the psycho-social spill-over effects of the war by individuals in the production team.

Our first day was spent talking not about technology, but what the production team wanted to achieve through Saru Praja Radio. We asked them how many people had access to the web and internet, how many had mobiles, how many had radios with CD players, what level of participation they had from local government and the Police, what kind of information would be most useful to the peoples in these 48 villages, how their production team was constituted, what equipment they had and how they intended to sustain the radio productions. Our intent was to shape our engagement based on socio-political, economic and technological ground realities.

My colleague and I were pleasantly surprised at the speed with which concepts such as citizen journalism, blogging and the differences between the broadcast model and web based journalists were grasped by the production team. On the final day, several members were even setting up their own WordPress accounts to blog in Sinhala, and all were proficient in the use of WordPress as a platform to upload, manage, share and archive their radio productions.

From community radio to Internet radio, mobiles and narrow-casting: New models for enduring needs

International Frequency Coordination for Disaster Responders

I had no idea that the United Nations has already propagated six frequencies (and six repeater pairs), three in VHF, three in UHF, for disaster responders. These frequencies are not, in my experience, common knowledge among commercial radio vendors in the United States, and don’t appear to be referenced on the relevant pages on the FCC website, so it’s possible that we’re not a signatory to the agreement.

Here’s what’s brilliant about this idea – within certain distances along radio bands, it’s critical to have agreed-upon frequencies. And the cost keeps decreasing, as crystal-less, programmable radios which often have 16, 32, 64 or many more “channels” (frequencies or “repeater pairs” – two frequencies combined for signal boosting without feedback). So an international standard for all disaster workers to have at least three channels in common is, in and of itself, excellent policy.

Continue reading →

Disaster Blogging Resources – Part I

In conjunction with two blogs I’ve just set up – NewYork.PopularLogistics.com and EmergencyInformation.us – links to excellent articles and resources about blogs as communications tools during disasters:

“Blogging: reaching a global audience easily and affordably – from anywhere

,” by Teresa Crawford on Humaninet. Humaninet seems to have been an early adapter in using blogs as information toools by NGOs during disasters with this blog – humaninet.blogspot.com. Via Beth Kanter.  Continue reading →

Stephenson spots glaring omission in GAO report

David Stephenson

, who has done outstanding work on the issues which concern Popular Logistics,

has noticed that in a report using 23 criterai to evaluate the Department of Homeland Security, GAO entirely omits the promotion and recruitment of citizen responders.

Here’s Stephenson’s post .  I’m now not sure if reading this particular GAO report is worth the candle.

I regret not earlier posting about Stephenson’s important piece, written with Eric Bonabeau, Expecting the Unexpected: : The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, published in the Homeland Security Affairs Journal.

Our position on citizen response is this – any plan that doesn’t regard citizen response as central might contain useful tactics – but we submit that no such plan conceivably constitutes a useful strategy. 

Must-read: Gary Wolf’s interview with Art Botterell

is short, incisive, and, alas, some of the most accurate explantions of dysfunctional government bureaucracis. Here are some excerpts:

Botterell suggested that we begin, rather than end, with the notion that the federal government can’t protect us.The federal failure should be the starting point, and, he suggested, it could be a liberating starting point. Once free of the illusion that Mommy and Daddy are going to make it all better, we can ask smarter questions about what it will take to protect ourselves. Botterell is not a naive libertarian, and he was not talking about buying assault weapons and hunkering down in the basement. Instead, he was talking about identifying the native strengths of our communities, and reinforcing these strengths with technology.

….

Botterell has made or helped to make [important inventions] including California’s Emergency Digital Information Service (EDIS), and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).

….

No matter how much research is done disproving their assumptions, people insist on believing in panic. Panic actually occurs only in specific circumstances – this is all pretty well understood. Some of the research goes back to the Second World War, when there was attention paid to the behavior of sailors trapped in submarines. The research shows that where there is a dreaded hazard shared equally, panic almost never occurs. Reasoned flight is not panic. When people were running away from the collapse of the World Trade Towers, they stopped to pick up other people who had fallen. That was not panic. Only perceived competition for the means to escape creates panic. If panic is a myth, why is it mentioned so often in discussions of warning?There’s a tendency to believe in the myth of panic because it reinforces a sense of bureaucratic elitism: we can’t trust the citizens with warning information, because they might panic.

Read the whole interview here. Botterell’s blog is here.

 You can read another Gary Wolf’ piece – Reinventing 911 – How a Swarm of Networked Citizens is builing a better emergency system, from the December 2005 issue of Wired, which discusses Botterell and others.

Rescue Streamer – exceptionally well-designed emergency signal device

We’ll have a longer post later, but for now, we’ll say that the Rescue Streamer is brilliant. This tiny (when stored) banner greatly increases the probability of being seen from overhead – one doesn’t need to apply Bayes’ theorem to figure that out – and also has the following attributes:

  • not subject to battery failure
  • no training required
  • no fuel required (as in triangles of signal fires)
  • no fire starting required – and no risk of, for instance, starting a forest fire – when what you really wanted was to be rescued
  • not prohibitively expensive (by any stretch of the imagination)
  • works on land and water

Safe, non-toxic, effective, inexpensive, easy to use. Apart from our interest in emergency preparedness, this is a fantastic example of excellent engineering.

We hope to be following up shortly with photographs and more information about the development of the Rescue Streamer.