Professional Blog

The earthquake in Haiti (cache) illustrates the desperate need friends and family trying to find out if their loved ones are alive and survivors trying get information out to them. Survivors are frantically searching for the missing. We are all familiar with the desperate search of physical bulletin boards with pictures posted of the lost. The internet and social media have a great potential to help this. Grass roots bulletin boards like Koneksyon.com (cache) and commercial websites like CNN (cache) and Facebook have sprung up. These are being of real value, but are very primitive attempts to help communication.
There are huge communications problems in a Natural disaster. Normal means of communications in the disaster area are out of service or very limited. Information from survivors can come via phone, the internet, radio, Media coverage, data collected by rescue organizations, and any other method the survivors can find. This information needs to be gathered from as many sources as possible, collated, fused, and made accessible. Survivors, friends and family are frantic to find out if their their loved ones in the disaster area are safe and to communicate with them.

The social media are starting to play a major role, multiple web fora sprang up, the media and different relief agencies have unsearchable databases. Unfortunately, these are all working independently and not sharing information. There is no central clearinghouse for the information and searchers must stumble from site to site, much like the Tsunami survivors wandered from bulletin board to bulletin board. There needs to be a non-profit open source effort to really bring IT's potential to help communications into play.

At first thought it will need to be able to get information into and out of all possible communication modes including voice,video, text, email and social media. It needs to be able to consolidate victim It should help identify and locate survivors and the dead. Facial recognition software could help match photos from searchers and victims. I think a site that mashes up the date from all these sources, coupled with facial recognition software, would be a valuable resource for dealing with future disasters. I would be willing to start an open source based .org web site to work on developing such a capability if I get any positive feedback. I'd also like inputs on how social media, the Web2 and IT in general could help and thoughts on requirements for a disaster communications website.

Please let me know what you think