Community Wireless Emergency Response -- Updates on Our Work & the Lessons Learned.

It's now been a month since Community Wireless experts from across North America first started doing disaster recovery post-Katrina (and now post-Rita). In that time, what began with a phone call and a handful of folks has grown into a major coalition of organizations and individuals spanning three states and four staging areas. While CUWiN continues to focus on managing behind-the-scenes logistical support for the good folks doing the hard work on the ground, the growing awareness of policy-makers, regulators, and key industry personnel continues to add pressure for a major realignment in our telecommunications infrastructure.

Having been in daily contact with some (and occasionally dozens) of folks on the ground, conducted countless interviews (and even a special conference session) -- having been regularly debriefed, and read through hundreds of e-mails daily, here's some thoughts on hard lessons the Katrina/Rita disaster has taught us:

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• 5-9s infrastructure (i.e., networks that are fully operational 99.999% of the time) is a myth.
• Volunteers working on shoe-string budgets and donated equipment can, under the right circumstances (especially in chaotic situations), be far more effective than "official responders."
• Top-down organizing is often far less efficient than distributed (flat) hierarchies for some facets of disaster response.
• FEMA disaster response coordinators often engage in systematic and capricious discrimination against so-called "unofficial" responders -- often leading to a degradation in disaster response and harm (both emotional and physical) to disaster survivors.
• The rigidity of the "official" disaster response continues to hamper core mission objectives -- even today. For example, the only supported browser disaster survivors can use to apply for FEMA assistance is IE 6.0 (in violation of the government's own Section 508 accessibility rules)-- you can check out this out for yourself at: https://www.disasteraid.fema.gov/famsVuWeb/integration). FEMA was aware of this problem by September 8th, but has still not fixed the problem -- meaning that Mac users as well as Linux and other OS users will have trouble even gaining access to disaster aid.
• Ad-hoc (wireless) networks were often the first telecommunications infrastructure made available to evacuees, beating out the major providers by days (and often weeks).
• Had a diverse array of telecommunications infrastructures been in place, the cataclysmic failure may have been avoided. In addition, networks that are set up to "phone home" to central locations/servers are prone to failure when most needed.
• The telecom incumbents are spending a ton of time & energy to obfuscate these issues and are conducting extensive lobbying efforts to spin this tragedy to their own advantage. Especially important to them are preventing the growth of unlicensed spectrum, ad-hoc networking technologies, and bandwidth-sharing infrastructures.
• More as they come in...