In the paper that I recently wrote on accessible ICT in the response to Hurricane Katrina, I talked about - amongst other things - some of the map hacking that was going on, notably of Google Maps. I pointed out that future GIS for humanitarian response could perhaps learn something here - notably about what non-specialist users find useful in terms of geographic information.
Most of the comments I received on the paper were were positive, but two people expressed frustration at the confusion between Geographic Information Systems - which can be distinguished by their strong analytical component - and map viewers, such as Google Maps.
Google Maps can be customised for a wide range of uses - but this dynamic element doesn’t make it a GIS. That’s not really the point, though. Google Maps (and MSN Virtual Earth, and a growing number of other sites) represent something new in the public relationship with geographic data. The leveling influence of the internet is putting more information in front of people in more accessible forms than was ever possible before. This - combined with the widespread availability of GPS - is going to change the way we deal with geographic information forever.
This presents more of an opportunity than a threat, although GIS providers should be worried. One (not entirely precise) parallel is the shift from mainframe to desktop computing, a shift that not many saw coming, except the desktop pioneers themselves. The industry simply couldn’t believe that anybody would want a personal computer and they couldn’t believe that these computers would be able to perform any significant functions since they lacked the computing power.
We know how that story went - personal computing is now ubiquitous, the real centre of gravity in the computing world, although mainframes still carry some serious processing weight. I’m prepared to bet that GIS will go the same way. Lightweight, personal GIS applications - which may be little more than highly-functional data viewers - will take the market from existing GIS applications. Current GIS tools are unwieldy, require training to use, and are not suited to the day-to-day needs of most users.
Smaller and more flexible GIS won’t be able to carry out high-level analytical tasks - but most people neither need or want that level of functionality. I think it’s almost inevitable that users are going to drive these developments - the challenge for the GIS industry is to adapt to this brave new world.
On Tuesday I participated in one of N-Ten’s online seminars, this one co-hosted by HumaniNet, Aspiration, and the Innovation Funders Network. The participants included some of the people who worked on the issues I wrote about in my Katrina paper, including Will Reed of Tech4All and some of the guys who worked on the KatrinaPeopleFinder data initiative.
It was fascinating to hear first-hand about the things I’d been reading about during the Hurricane. It was obvious that these guys were dynamic, but what struck me was that they were also very frustrated with the chaos following Katrina. Of course, that’s the nature of working in disaster response - if existing systems could cope, it wouldn’t be a disaster.
It was also clear that they had quickly learnt many of the lessons it took me years to pick up - particularly the basic truth that the best way to lessen the impact of a disaster and ensure quick recovery is to help communities to help themselves - and that’s where the technology comes in. We need to develop tools that help the “first responders”, sure - but perhaps we should also focus more on developing tools to help the communities that we’re supposed to be helping.
Beyond that initial interest, the webinar was slightly frustrating. It was a good way to get a lot of people around the table, but not so good when it came to talking about the issues. It was also difficult to establish where the common interests lay between the different initiatives - I was presenting Sahana, the Open Source development initiative that came out of the tsunami response in Sri Lanka - and it was hard during the seminar to really pinpoint how we can all work together.
N-Ten are an interesting outfit, and thanks to them for organising the webinar (although I’m still not convinced that webinar is a word that should be allowed to survive). I’m looking forward to meeting them when I’m in the States in October / November - they’ve invited me to be on the Panel Discussion at their upcoming conference, “Answering the call: Katrina, the Tsunami, Darfur, Afghanistan - lessons learned from the Global ICT responses” on October 17th. If anybody out there is coming along, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t throw popcorn when I’m trying to speak.
Despite the terrible impact of Hurricane Katrina, it has been very positive to see the technology community using a wide range of tools to support the response. Particularly in areas such as family tracing and volunteer matching, many initiatives have been started privately, and resources such as Google Maps have really come into their own as a way of distributing information. I’m keeping a watch list of websites and articles on the use of technology in the Katrina response. You can find the (regularly updated) list on my del.icio.us roll, at del.icio.us/paulcurrion/katrina.
These initiatives are fantastic, and I’m loving the fact that so many of them are fairly spontaneous. The group that I’m involved with on the Sahana project are trying to field the prototype version, working with some volunteers in the US. I hope that we’re able to prove some concepts in this response.
However, two things occur to me:
1. Fantastic as these initiatives are, they are fragmented and unco-ordinated - much like any humanitarian response in the world, to be honest. However this is massively inefficient, and we don’t meet the needs of people and communities as quickly and appropriately as we should. Are there ways of rapidly developing network organisations to co-ordinate these initiatives, without destroying the volunteer spirit, spontaneity and inventiveness of the decentralised approach?
2. Despite the similarities in the response, this isn’t a humanitarian crisis like the ones I normally deal with. Aside from Kobe ten years ago, this is one of the few serious humanitarian emergencies that has taken place in an urbanised area in a highly-developed country. Many similar needs to an event like the Asia tsunami - housing, family tracing, victim identification, etc - but the operational environment is radically different - excellent infrastructure, functioning government, abundance of resources. At this point, it’s hard to see where to draw lessons - and easy for this event to skew funding availability and the development of useful tools for humanitarian responses in other parts of the world.