Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

So I've put out a basic plea for volunteer help with the ReliefHub technology. You may be wondering to what objective all this technology is to be harnessed.

The basic principle behind ReliefHub is that people around the world can and must be connected, in common cause, whenever natural disaster (such as Hurricane Katrina and the Southeast Asian tsunami of December 2004) strikes. In 2005, the fact that information and other resources often can not be located and passed along at a time of shared crisis is unconscionable. The Internet, satellite and cellular communications, and land-based links all can contribute to ensuring that these vital resources get to the people who need them most: the victims, and those in a position to directly assist the victims.

The Internet and cash

Let's take the Internet first. One of the most obvious resources needed is cash -- cash with which to secure food and water, shelter, supplies, fuel, and other necessities for large numbers of people at once. As we here in the United States saw in the 2004 Presidential election cycle, including primaries, the Internet can be a powerful engine for fundraising among individuals -- especially when short-term and/or specific fundraising objectives are identified in advance. Applied to natural disasters, such objectives might take the following forms (as well as others, of course):

• Raise X amount within Y days. (This is a simple short-term objective.)
• Raise sufficient funds for Organization A to accomplish goal B -- for the Red Cross, say, to provide three meals a day, for ten thousand people, for two weeks. (This is a specific but mid- to long-term objective, with a dollar amount which can be computed, but which may not be able to be met immediately.)
• Provide sufficient funds for Institution X to meet need Y within Z days. For instance, a town outside the immediate disaster area, but within some reasonable distance, wants to open its doors to as many as one thousand evacuees -- but has no money at all in its municipal coffers for such a task. (Specific objective, short-term.)

As we've seen with both the December '04 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, dozens of relief agencies already have both the technological and the financial infrastructures in place for raising money. I can't imagine ReliefHub's trying to duplicate any of that infrastructure. (Indeed, doing so would probably put RH in the position of being regulated by national governments -- just about the last thing the project needs!)

On the other hand, ReliefHub might be able to help focus the donations more, by acting as a central repository of information about specific needs -- information which can be reported both to the Internet as a whole, in the form of targeted campaigns, and to specific charities.

The Internet and information

The Internet's whole raison d'etre (though it's sometimes easy to forget) is the sharing of information in a timely manner. Certainly there already exist official channels of information in a natural disaster, channels both in the public and private sector. Bulletin boards (virtual or actual) are set up for locating missing family members, for instance. Master lists of hotels and other facilities willing to provide lodging to evacuees are drawn up. Shipments of emergency supplies are ordered and their delivery arranged. And so on.

But these official channels don't easily share information of other than the predictable sort. Suppose you're an evacuee who has been officially cleared by the authorities to return to your home. What can you expect to find and have to deal with when you get there? Suppose your roof has been partially blown off -- is there a relatively easy, quick-and-dirty, safe but effective, temporary way to provide cover beneath that portion of the roof, without having immediately to fully re-roof the house with lumber and shingles? If you had to leave your computer behind, what (if anything) can you expect to use it for now? Suppose you've offered to host a family of evacuees for up to a month. What kinds of things do you need to know not just about hosting evacuees in general -- how to obtain prescription medicines, for instance, when your new guests have no known or verifiable health coverage -- but also about hosting evacuees from this specific disaster?

My thinking about this led me to what I believe is an obvious conclusion: that there is a wealth of information out there, potentially accessible over the Internet, stored in the minds and experiences of thousands of individuals with particular expertise, individuals who are willing to share this gift with people whom they (most likely) will never meet. This information is now not just stored in these experts' minds; it's effectively locked away there, completely out of reach to anyone -- especially strangers -- at a distance. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Suppose there were an Internet-based database of disaster-preparation, -relief, and -recovery information, stored redundantly (that is, mirrored) at dozens of sites around the world. Anyone at all could enter information into it. Anyone at all could correct or clarify misleading information entered by someone else. And importantly, of course, anyone at all could retrieve critical information from it. Wouldn't that be, yes, technically cool, but also humanly marvelous?

This wouldn't require developing the infrastructure for such a database from the ground up. The infrastructure already exists, in the form of Wikis. (If you don't already know, Wikis are well-structured information repositories, heavily cross-referenced, which can be edited by anyone at all. Incompetently offered or wrong or misguided information doesn’t last long, because it’s immediately correctable by the thousands of others contributing to the Wiki. The best-known Wiki is the online Wiki-based encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org. If you're interested in more details, a simple Google search will get you plenty!)

Finally, for getting information out of the database as quickly as possible, the Internet offers two excellent tools: email, of course, but also RSS feeds. For both, the content can be targeted rather than dump all the same information onto all subscribers.

The human element

Technology will take ReliefHub only so far. Setting up mailing lists, a Wiki, a project blog, and so on -- all that's relatively trivial. But when it's set up it will be just an empty shell. What it will really need is people, lots of them... volunteers all. Here are the specific areas where I see critical human-resource needs:

1. An initial, fairly small project core of techie types just to get the shell in place. I described this team in a general sort of way here.
2. Another small team to lay out the, well, I guess you could say the non-technological scope and structure of the project. For instance, regarding the Wiki: As I see it, there needs to be some kind of really efficient cross-referencing system in place; not everyone will think of looking for "lodging" using that term, but may look for "housing" instead.
   
3. Thousands and thousands of volunteers to populate the ReliefHub Wiki with the disaster-coping contents of their expert minds. (Note, by the way, that when I say "expert" I don't just mean gurus of one kind or another -- carpenters, computer and networking whizzes, telephone repairmen and such. A critical component of the Wiki, in my view, will be a cross-referenced set of survivors' stories -- tales by people who've been there, done that, even though they may not be "experts" as the term is usually understood.) Eventually, translators will have to be considered as well.
   
4. Volunteers to operate computers (and other Internet-ready devices) at the time they are needed. This need will have to be dealt with both when it comes to entering information into the Wiki (not everyone with critical information will have Internet access), and also of course at the time the information must be retrieved (when even the Internet-savvy may no longer have nothing remotely resembling an Internet connection).
5. Over the long term, something like a board of directors to keep an eye on project progress, track bugs and enlist support for fixing them, establish new goals, and so on. One very important aside, though: This project's success (or, naturally, its failure) will rest almost entirely on the decentralized efforts of the volunteers described in bullets #3 and 4.

Questions? I've set up a separate email address just for handling ReliefHub questions, comments, good and bad vibes, and so on: reliefhubATearthlinkDOTnet. (Don't forget to replace the capitalized portions of that address, as appropriate.)

P.S. Oh yeah, about that "logo" up there at the top right of this post. It's a wagon wheel, which I chose for a couple of reasons:

• It's not a gleaming-slick bicycle or automobile wheel or hubcap. Nothing about ReliefHub requires fancy cutting-edge technology; it can be (relatively) simply assembled with common everyday materials.
• More importantly, of course, it is a wheel. Note that the spokes are kind of rustic and beaten-up in appearance. In fact, one of them (at about the 4:00 position or so) is outright broken. But no matter which spoke you're on, no matter which part of the wheel you're located at, it's always possible to get to the hub -- and thence, out to the other spokes and nodes.
  

The colors, well, I just thought they looked all right. :)