Julian Bond (Voidstar) submitted on Smartmobs, this what he calls ‘a modest proposal for a bottom up, SMS tree/Smart Mob approach to disaster early warning systems’.
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.
Thanks Julian !
Comments
@ 04:05
Interestingly, I have also been in touch with one of the largest mobile operators suggesting that cell broadcast systems could be used to tell people in affected areas of an impending problem. In the event of an impending crisis, official early warning centres would send alerts to the mobile operators in the affected countries.
These alerts would indicate the nature of the problem and the areas that might be affected. The alert would trigger a standard ‘text alert’ within the affected areas only (ie people would only receive warnings if there device was currently in a radio cell within the affected zone). Secondary messages could be sent to regional disaster support specialists. Tertiary messages could be sent to adjacent cells letting people know that they are outside the main area but they could help people who are coming from the affected area.
Apparently, one european government has already decided that their new sirens are not loud enough and they have already asked their local mobile operators to leverage SMS Cell Broadcast for this reason.
@ 11:12
You wouldn’t believe how many academic papers have been sitting around for years describing very similar things. The truth is that the 2nd Superpower has caught up with them.
The question is - can we pass them? Or will they now keep up with us? I think the latter would be most beneficial, but may not be possible because of the inherent bureaucracy of the system.