Tag Archives: HFN

On The Media: do reporters disrupt disaster response logistics?

In Danger In Numbers, On the Media Host Bob Garfield interviews Noam Schreiber of The New Republic (transcript here).

Are large numbers of journalists displacing rescue workers and supplies, in part by competing for scarce resources on the ground? This is an excellent discussion, and typical for OTM, an outstanding weekly effort to provide feedbacks to inform and correct journalism.

To answer this with regards to Earthquake Relief efforts in Haiti we need to know:

  1. How many journalists and support staff went to Haiti?
  2. How they got there? Did they displace transportation resources, or generate new ones?
  3. What did they bring in terms of supplies and money?
  4. What they consume, in terms of supplies and other resources?
  5. How much information are the able to get out of the country? Did they increase outbound bandwidth? This information isn’t used just by the “public” – it is, and should be, integrated into the intelligence stream. This is an extreme example of open-source intelligence – because it’s essentially a non-military, non-adversarial incident.
  6. Did the journalists facilitate or develop enhanced outbound transportation facilities? Did they make medevac space available, albeit inadvertently?

To answer this question, originally posted by OTM listeners, we need a census of journalists and their logistical operations.

It’s true that Haiti needs a lot right now – starting with an airlift of ham radio operators, historically volunteer can-do communications personnel in big emergencies. (We believe that Haiti likely has insufficient local ham operators, but we haven’t been able to fact-check that). The organizations whose members have been doing this for decades are

Finally, there’s Brian Steckler of the Naval Postgraduate School and its exemplary  Hastily Formed Networks Research Group.Professor Steckler, his students, and others were able to restore telephone service in Mississippi during Katrina within hours of arrival.

Their after-action reports, (critical documents here) indicate that they were substantially delayed by “celebrity” fly-overs – forcing them to drive

equipment from the West Coast to the East. They still got it done.

Having studied these issues for several years – if I find myself in a disaster with one outbound message, I’m calling Professor Steckler.

We hope to follow this post with additional coverage of communications and logistics issues relating to the current crisis in Haiti.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis on Social Networks

Excerpted from “Social Networks ,” by Nicholas Christakis on The Situationist Blog, which is a blog maintained by The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. The excerpt is long, but well worth reading. Let me first posit this question – why do some communities develop disaster-resilient networks and organizations – and others not?

In social networks, there is an interdigitation between the higher order structure and the lower order structure, which is remarkable, and which has been animating our research for the last five or ten years. I started by studying very simple dyadic networks. A pair of individuals is the simplest type of network one can imagine. And I became curious about networks and network effects in my capacity as a doctor who takes care of people who are terminally ill.

* * *

For example, one day I met with a pretty typical scenario: a woman who was dying and her daughter who was caring for her. The mother had been sick for quite a while and she had dementia. The daughter was exhausted from years of caring for her, and in the course of caring, she became so exhausted that her husband also became sick from his wife’s preoccupation with her mother. One day I got a call from the husband’s best friend, with his permission, to ask me about him. So here we have the following cascade: parent to daughter, daughter to husband, and husband to friend. That is four people — a cascade of effects through the network. And I became sort of obsessed with the notion that these little dyads of people could agglomerate to form larger structures.

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