By Heather Rae Darval, MIcronews
September 1, 2006
People fell under a fearful pandemic last week, with countless dead and more infected daily. Cities worldwide enforced quarantines as governments and relief agencies struggled to manage the damage. In San Diego, cyber-terrorists then played havoc with global and local communications.
Sound too terrible to be true?
Government staffers, nonprofit humanitarian workers and employees from high-tech companies including Microsoft and Google spent last week in an abandoned fire department training facility in San Diego, trying to work through this hellish scenario in case anything like it ever becomes a reality.
The event, called Strong Angel III, ran as a giant disaster-response laboratory, where teams worked within the scenario’s constraints to improve communication and save lives. The event’s keyword was “team.”
“What we’re trying to do is get all the policymakers and … stakeholders and … engineers in the same room – because we have found again and again that, actually, the tech is already out there to solve the problems that don’t seem to get solved. At the same time other issues underlie the failure for people to come together across organizational boundaries and share information,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, lead architect for Microsoft Humanitarian Systems and Strong Angel III board member.
“I could say something cheesy like ‘Hope brought us all together,’ but I think all these people really do believe, all these organizations, that the need for better cooperation is clear and a social network is badly in need of creation because all these groups do have a small area where their interests overlap. … All of the cutting-edge solution prototyping is merely a framework within which organizations that historically don’t work well together can learn to cooperate.”
Strong Angel focused on the “small area” Kirkpatrick referred to. Bringing together such organizations as Cisco, Save the Children and the U.S. Joint Forces Command – to generate conversation and collaboration – had results greater than organizers had anticipated.
“You may find that five years from now the world will be a different place, and if you trace back those social networks, some small part of it will have come from Strong Angel III,” said Dr. Eric Rasmussen, U.S. Navy Medical Corps commander and Strong Angel III director.
“Corporations were changed, policies were changed, technologies were changed. Even the way we try to rebuild fallen nations on their knees changed as a result of conversations at Strong Angel III. It was very gratifying.”
While the 800 people in attendance couldn’t choose the evolving scenario or even their table partners, this was not a scripted event.
Everyone came in with ideas and tools they thought would help in a disaster and then things went south. Over the course of the week, a series of challenges were introduced, designed to put realistic pressures on solution teams. It was a situation many relief veterans like Rasmussen had seen. It was then that participants had to look around them for help from other organizations, often reaching across the civil-military divide, or to vendors with whom they usually compete.
“What we were doing was … like jazz improv, variations on a theme,” Kirkpatrick said.
Some teams were asked to establish a chain of command during a crisis, others tried to figure out ways to transmit video and data without the Internet, and others worked on ways to improve local agencies’ abilities during a disaster all without tools like the internet, electricity and cell phones available.
“It’s a bit like humanitarian IT, a bit like MacGyver and a bit like Cirque du Soleil,” Kirkpatrick offered.
For members of Microsoft Humanitarian Systems this was the chance to continue their mission of doing good while learning how to apply technologies collaboratively and finding ways to improve Microsoft products.
“In Strong Angel there is no crisis. What we have is a huge laboratory where we can go in and try to shake loose all the ideas that everyone has come up with about what may or may not be effective, and just experiment and learn,” Kirkpatrick said.
“If we can build solutions that have an impact in this challenging environment, then these designs, approaches and architectures will work anywhere.”
Just like in a real disaster, some of the ideas didn’t work and some of the technology failed, but for some teams, including Microsoft, the technologies were a success.
In particular the new open-source Microsoft protocol called Simple Sharing Extensions based on Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technologies proved to be especially compelling. While RSS allows users to subscribe to one-way data feeds, such as news stories or blogs, the new SSE technology allows for bidirectional subscription so data put up on any system will appear on any other system in the mesh. In San Diego, SSE was used to share information among various geographic information systems, including Google Earth with Microsoft Virtual Earth, two systems that normally can’t communicate.
For many of the relief workers and military agencies, Strong Angel was a chance to see what technology can provide. Members of the “failed-state reconstruction” team, for example, got new ideas on how to use software that will change the way they work with fallen nations such as Afghanistan.
Seeing companies that normally work to put one another out of business, like Microsoft and Google, instead working side-by-side, building relationships and finding ways for their products to do so, too, also was perceived as a success.
“What we tried to do was embrace what we know is a reality: that in a disaster everybody shows up with the best that they’ve got and it’s never going to be an all-anything, homogenous market. What we’re not going to do is hurl ourselves into the futile goal of saying ‘in order for everyone to share information, we all need to use the same system’ – because it’s not going to happen,” Kirkpatrick said.
“When a real disaster strikes, the truth of the matter is that you’re not going to care who you work for.”
That represented the event’s spirit: everyone stepping away from differences and sharing information and technology. Microsoft and Google now have tools and a common understanding of what’s required to integrate products to support disaster relief. The team members at Strong Angel III now know that they can call one another should a need arise.
No organization was paid to be at Strong Angel, nor was any there to sell products or points of view. The nine board members who thought up and ran the event did so on their own time, with no money until the last weeks before the event, no staff and no legitimacy.
With every person bringing their best products, ideas and technologies, Kirkpatrick called the event “the ultimate stone soup.”
“You don’t need multibillion-dollar custom solutions to solve these problems. A lot of commercial, off-the-shelf software can be snapped together like Legos to solve some really interesting problems if we can get everyone communicating,” Kirkpatrick said.
