N-TEN Webinar - Hurricane Katrina - Innovative Information and Communications Response
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.