ReliefSource

I’m digging into disaster telecommunications, behind which there’s a huge body of knowledge which I won’t bore you with. I will scream if I hear the words ‘Tampere Convention‘ again this year. Instead, here’s a short list of what all the kids are using in Pakistan:

• Voice. Well, duh. The main finding so far of this assessment is startling - aid workers prefer talking to each other.
• Landlines. In some places, service was uninterrupted; in most places, service was resumed within 1-2 days. Many NGOs are using dial-up internet service from various towns, although there is plenty of residual distortion due to earthquake damage.
• Cellphones. As above, the network was disrupted for a couple of days. Most people report satisfactory and consistent service, although I hear it’s very patchy around Bisham, and when travelling on the road. Yet this remains the primary means of communication for a lot of people, which ties in with the findings of the GSM Association, who have just released a report on mobile communications in emergency response. (Interesting aside: Oxfam have started equipping laptops with GPRS, giving individual staff access while mobile.)
• Thuraya. I wish I had shares in Thuraya. As the lightest and easiest satellite phone on the market (and the easiest to get past customs), it seems to be indispensable - which is why it was worrying to find that there still weren’t enough of them to go around, even in the biggest NGOs. Having said that, there still seem to be some problems with registration, and besides, who wants to stand outside in a snowstorm just to make a call?
• RBGAN. This fella comes into its own in the early stages of response; it’s frequently the only means of deep field communication. It’s still far too expensive, although hopefully the prices will come down as Inmarsat rolls out the new BGAN units.
• VSAT. Licensing and customs regulations in Pakistan - holy heck. The UN was able to get them in fairly quickly, while NGOs have been stuck for weeks. However VSATs started to clear about two weeks ago, so they’ve now started springing up left, right and centre. More co-ordination needed, please. VSAT is still the best technology for more stable environments, particularly as you can determine your own level of bandwidth, and the market is open enough that you can choose from a range of providers.
• Two tins with a piece of string tied between them. Face it, nobody can beat it for a “communications solution.”

Every single person I spoke to in Pakistan said the same thing: that the Pakistani military had done an amazing job on the earthquake relief. So it’s good to see some acknowledgement of their capacity, and also an interesting analysis of the problems they face, in a BBC article. The earthquake zone is the most sensitive area in South Asia, on the disputed border with India, placing the army in a difficult situation:

The problem, it seems, rests with the character and training of the Pakistan army - an institution which the global relief regime now recognises as the best informed outfit on local conditions in all the quake-hit areas. The army’s issue with disseminating accurate information on the ground situation arises primarily from its dual role - being a governmental army and being directly responsible for providing relief to the victims.

Meanwhile… field commanders kept themselves quite accessible to aid workers as well as the media - though only for what they called background briefings. Relief workers, in particular those from international agencies, were astounded at the frankness of the field commanders at such meetings…. it was primarily on the basis of information provided by the field commanders that the food crisis in the more remote areas was brought under control.

This supports the findings of my assessment, which is that information sharing with the military - in both directions - was excellent, and the military were genuinely engaged with humanitarian issues. This alone turns the usual civil-military dynamic on its head, away from the usual antagonistic approach. But here’s where it gets really interesting:

The army’s maps of the quake-hit zone are the most detailed available anywhere. Field commanders say if these maps are digitised in relevant detail and put on the web, the entire world can follow the state of the relief efforts as they happen. “It will create a consolidated database of the affected areas, informing the entire world of what is needed and exactly where,” says one senior commander. “It would also avoid duplication of effort and ensure transparency in relief operations. But to do that, we will perhaps have to stop being the army that we are,” he laughs.

Particularly in light of the initial problems over remote sensing imagery for the earthquake response (more detail here), this is really interesting. It’s probably a little naive to expect that just by making the army maps available, co-ordination would improve - actually, from personal experience, it’s entirely unlikely that co-ordination would improve, but that’s another story. However it would be a tremendous resource, and Pakistan would be an example to the entire world if it was prepared to start tearing down the military monopoly on mapping that still holds in many developing countries.

The full story is here.

Nothing to do with information management or technology, but still quite amusing:

Many of the aid agencies have temporarily re-assigned their national staff from Afghanistan to the earthquake response (it’s all Pashtun, all the time up there). So these Afghan staff are going up into the mountains of NWFP to carry out assessments, and coming back down shaking their heads, saying “Boy, they’re really conservative up there!”

Note to self: don’t visit the mosque this weekend in shorts.

After enjoying the delights of Tunisia during the World Summit on the Information Society, it’s time to get back to field work. The Pakistan earthquake happened just as I arrived in the USA, where I was carrying out an assessment of ICT capacity to respond to emergencies for the Interagency Working Group (IWG). The IWG comprises CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, Mercy Corps and World Vision. Although they vary in size, this combined group ships at least 50% of the world’s non-governmental humanitarian assistance - so it’s a real challenge to work out ways that they can improve their game.

While I was in the US, the IWG Principals (ie the heads of emergency response) decided that it would be useful to include a field assessment of the response to the earthquake here. I was particularly happy about that, because I lived here for parts of 2001-2002, when we were setting up the Afghanistan Information Management Service. So here I am and, despite the terrible circumstances, it’s good to be back and to meet with some old friends.

So far I’ve been limited to Islamabad, visiting various NGO and UN offices to interview key staff. We’re not just looking at technology, which is only a means to an end - we’re also trying to identify the ends to which that technology is in service. That means talking not just to the ICT staff (although they’re key), but to the logistics officers, security focal points, programme managers… a range of roles within each organisation. Next week I’ll travel to Mansehra in the earthquake zone, to carry out interviews with field workers and do on-site assessment of communications set-ups.

Some things have changed immensely since I started doing this kind of work. Increased connectivity means that VOIP to the field has started to arrive. Applications like those provided by Global Development Group, Sahana, Groove and Voxiva become more plausible. We see more initiatives like Rise-Pak, springing out of nowhere and trying their own solutions on the fly. There’s more awareness of the need for better information in the field, particularly spatial data, which means more attempts to build standard models. We see more private sector involvement, through groups like Ericsson Response or IBM’s Crisis Response Team. All these things together mean that we are getting somewhere - hopefully this assessment I’m carrying out will be able to tie some of them together.

However, much as I like to champion new technologies, accessible services, open source software, and so forth, I’ve also spent 5 years working in the field. While improved communications technology (such as VSAT, which is pretty much standard for the larger aid agencies now) has definitely made a difference, it’s hard to get excited about many of the other developments. SMS early warning notification means nothing in valleys where there is no mobile signal, and where nobody can afford a cell phone. Google Earth is handy in the head office, but in the field nobody’s going to fork out the dollars to stream fairly rough satellite imagery without good reason. Skype is way cool (especially now they’ve got video), but have you seen how much bandwidth it swallows?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be trying out new approaches with these technologies; we absolutely should. And we need to engage the technology advocates and professionals who are making a big noise about the power of the web, and to build bridges with people working on digital divide issues; put them together in a room, point out the realities of working in Bana Allai, off a generator, with one landline between fifty staff and a VSAT that was supposed to arrive 3 weeks ago, with the temperatures dropping and the roads starting to be blocked by landslides, as the male population of entire villages come down from the hills looking for any kind of shelter.

Once we have that, we can start talking about what the real solutions are. I guess that we’ll never have everybody in that one room, except… except that the Web is that one room, and we’re all sitting in it. Let’s keep these discussions going, and not let them fade out as soon as we start thinking it’s business as usual. For the relief industry (and it is an industry) this is business as usual, and it will stay that way for a long, long time.

The notes from my presentation at the recent NTEN conference are now available. I concentrated on the practicalities - where the gaps are in our responses, and what approaches are going to fill those gaps effectively. Talking to people at the conference afterwards, I realised that I was right to emphasise joint approaches, rather than efforts by individual organisations. The organisations involved in humanitarian responses are so varied in backgrounds, mandates and approaches that there can be no single “right” way to implement ICT projects that applies to all. Instead, we need to focus on building liks between organisations and sectors in a way that improves the flow of information so that they can get on with their work.

Oh, and to remember that, in the end, all of these activities are only useful if they help the beneficiaries. Notes are here.