Strong Angel III – Real time broadcast video translation

This is simply amazing.

Translations are not 100% accurate, but you get the gist, which is better than not understanding the broadcast at all. More details will be uploaded to this post after I speak with the creators of this technology before the end of SA III.

Strong Angel III – Interview with Ambassador Daniel Stauffacher

I recorded this conversation after dinner with Ambassador Daniel Stauffacher, Chairperson of the ICT4Peace Foundation today, who is a fellow participant at SA III. I first met Daniel in Geneva last week, when I visited him to explore possibilities for collaboration and exploration in the theory and practice of ICT4Peace between my own work in Sri Lanka and that of the ICT4Peace Foundation in Switzerland.

Daniel, during the course of the conversation, critiqued SA III and said that greater emphasis should have been placed on locating the pandemic scenario in a context sans the infrastructure and levels of stability and calm that governed the scenario in San Diego (or any first world city for that matter). However, he recognised the deep impression SA III had made in exposing technologies that could be used in humanitarian aid and more importantly, people who could champion ICT4Peace.

He also spoke of the need for practice to inform policy, but also on the need to concentrate on how policy could inform better practice in the field. This symbiosis he said was central to the strengthening of humanitarian aid and peacebuilding through the use of technology.

Listen to the full conversation, from one of the most senior and experienced international diplomats present at SA III, here. Always the diplomat, Daniel’s constructive criticism and analysis of SA III are useful not just for the participants who were part of the exercise, but for anyone interested in humanitarian systems design.

It is a silent testimony to German engineering that this recording took place on a busy highway driving back to our hotel after dinner in a Mercedes S500 the good Ambassador had been loaned by a friend of his. If only all technology was as sublime as driving or being driven in one.

Strong Angel III – Interview with Dan Gilmor

Dan Gilmor, Director for the Centre for Citizen Media, and I had a brief conversation today on the role of new media & citizen journalism in disaster relief operations. The recording only worked properly on the third attempt, an important reminder that reliance on technology in the middle of a chaotic ambience is rife with fallibility.

In conversations prior to this brief recording, Dan emphasised the point that new media does not in any way take away from an emphasis of traditional media in disaster relief. Both old and new media he felt had equally important roles to play. He cautioned against the cacophony of citizen journalism – the tragedy of the commons as he called it, where information anarchy led to the distrust of citizen journalism driven information generation and dissemination and generally fed to the chaos in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Instead, he said, citizens journalism and new media needed to strengthen the relief process by providing decisions makers with information from the grassroots.

Dan also underscored the importance of social networks over the technology itself. He also said that SA III was very useful to help him better understand the way in which the edge in information networks (usually the first responders) could help gather information from the farthest reaches of a region and feed it back into data centres that where then able to generate a better picture of the needs and resources on the ground. Dan also said that the connectivity issues that SA III has been plagued with (I had extremely poor connectivity today, 72+ hours after the operations centre began from a cold start) was useful for most of the technology solutions providers present at SA III, since it was usually typical of conditions that could be expected in a disaster response.

The full podcast of the interview can be found here.

Strong Angel III – Interview with Mark Frohardt from Internews

Mark Frohardt, Regional Director, Africa and Director of Conflict Programmes for Internews shared his thoughts on media, SA III and media in post-disaster scenarios in general. Many of those amongst us who have significant experience in traditional and new media participating in SA III have been dissapointed that the interactions and information with the local media – community, mainstream, new, ethnic etc – has been almost non-existant.

As Mark points out however, this is typical of a post-disaster response, where the first responders and the first response mechanisms are rarely plugged into the valubale information networks that local media offer.

Speaking about new and traditional media, Mark emphasised the importance of disconnected traditional media such as FM radio and newspapers, esp. given the abysmal connectivity at the SA III site that shows no signs of improvement over 72 hours into the operations. That said, he also said that we need to look at new and innovative ways to get messages out and in particular mentioned Microsoft FM radio enabled wrist watches (that at presently are first generation, somewhat unreliable for essential communications and not designed for humanitarian aid) that in the future could evolve into devices that could really help first response mechanisms work cohesively and collaboratively.

Mark is no slouch when it comes to media and disasters – he has overseen actual operations personally and through Internews in Indonesia and Africa, and brings with him insights that may help an eventual SA IV work better with the media, and more importantly, work into the SA scenario the myriad of ways through which the media helps and impedes a relief effort.

The full interview is available here.