Overlap of Silicon Valley, Quake Country Producing Web 2.0 Emergency Response

A renowned eastern university is working to use the Internet and Silicon Valley’s location in earthquake country to unite crowd-sourced and corporate emergency information and response with those of government agencies in new ways, said Steven Ray, a participant in the efforts. The Valley campus of Carnegie Mellon University played host to public officials, technologists, executives of high-tech startups and representatives of humanitarian nonprofits at the Disaster Management Initiative Workshop last week and then at an intensive Crisis Camp over the weekend. The university’s partners in the work include the NASA Ames Research Center, which shares Moffett Field with the university branch and others; Clearwire, whose WiMAX network includes access for developers in the area; and the Wireless Communications Alliance, including its emergency Communications Leadership & Innovation Center, known as eCLIC.

The push aimed to “create a research agenda, regionally based but expandable to nationally scalable,” said Ray, a distinguished research fellow at the campus. “I think we succeeded.” He pointed to four focuses that emerged from the workshop for “bootstrapping” work while financing is sought.

One is an “open-source common operating picture,” to give all those involved in emergency response the benefit of information woven from all available sources, Ray said. He said the development effort will seek to combine elements of an East Bay Municipal Utility District system called Marconi with the Golden Gate Safety Networks with the San Jose Water Co., on the online platform of TWiki, which he compared to a multimedia Wikipedia and he said has offered free hosting. There are “lots of issues,” Ray said, not least of which is who can get access to which information. Water utilities, for example, are sensitive about making public the locations of their pipes, he said.

Another avenue is developing “community Internet exchange" -- connectivity within and even between communities when the cellular network and the regular Internet are down, Ray said. The use of temporary towers and other makeshift antennas at public institutions to create “a skeletal alternative” Net is envisioned, he said. A set-up like this would make use of the communications technology already set up at schools, he said.

Carnegie Mellon wants to create or at least link to a repository for “one-stop shopping” for the relevant freeware and commercial software tools for download and use online, Ray said. “It’s getting hard to keep track of what’s out there,” he said. Regional emergency communications plans, instead of being published statically, should be in hyperlinked form, “which would lend itself to finding what you need to find more easily,” he said. Interoperability is a challenge that cuts across the work, Ray said. “How should Facebook interoperate with some of these common-operating-picture tools?"

The Crisis Camp was among the semi-structured brainstorming events around the world growing out of Crisis Commons, a volunteer Web 2.0 effort that took off with the response to the Haitian earthquake, said camp organizer Jeannie Stamberger. She’s a visiting scientist at the Carnegie Mellon campus. The events apply the “unconference,” or bar camp, format from the high-tech industry to developing techniques to improve disaster management, she said.

The camp came up with priorities for further work and teams to apply for grants, Stamberger said. One is developing information processing, in the form of mining databases and algorithms, to filter and distribute grassroots information about emergencies to the workers who need it, she said. Another is seeking to deal with a gap between people’s knowledge of disaster risks and their motivation to make preparations, she said. The ideas include developing games to drive the message home and just-in-time information for delivery when a disaster hits about where the resources from doctors to shovels are in a neighborhood, she said.

As valuable as the concrete ideas were the interactions of players from different spheres, Stamberger said. “A lot of the technologists trying to help” had never “talked with emergency responders” before, she said.