Development Blogs.com

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...

A

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: We learned many other lessons from Pakistan, not least the need to develop tools that can adapt to local conditions on the ground. Internet connections in Pakistan were often slow and patchy, making downloads difficult. Post-disaster feedback highlighted difficulties with printing out maps and locating specific settlements among tens of thousands. That part just brings back too many bad memories, especially the time that all the ink cartridges in our map...

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...