| The recent horrific Tsunami disaster has highlighted the failure of centralised early warning systems. It seems that there were people in all the countries involved who knew what was coming but there ws no mechanism for getting the word out. So here's a small proposal. Combine Smart Mobbing based on SMS trees with one-to-many SMS services like TXTMob with a central disaster management system running 24/7. Concerned individuals with a cellphone would sign up to the service and agree that if they received an alert, they would forward it to their address book. And if they became aware of a disaster they would alert the central management system. So for example, the system would work like this. People like the Earthquake monitoring agencies would have a hot line through to central control. They would report a best guess of the impact and geographical spread. The central control would craft an SMS message and target the signed up individuals in that region. Each of them would then forward the SMS to their contact list. Within minutes and with very few hops, the local cellphone population in that area would all have been alerted. Each of them decides what to do next, whether it's run from the beach or if they're in the local government systems begin disaster control processes. Rather than make the system completely decentralised and automated, I think there has to be a central agency that verifies and decides whether to launch the system to avoid the dangers of crying wolf. The point here is that we wouldn't need a copy of the old style Pacific Tsunami warning system or for a huge buy in from governments round the world. We can use existing cheap technology and a minimal central bureaucracy and decentralise the rest out to ordinary people. |
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[ 03-Jan-05 10:46am ]
