Co-authored post from Ella and Willow

Yesterday, you read about Civil Air Patrol and the basis of RELIEF. We continue that conversation today into security and the complexities of mismatched cultural backgrounds.

On the security side, Rogue Genius’s George Chamales and Geeks Without Bounds’s Eleanor Saitta spoke with RELIEF attendees about their systems. While the military and agencies like the State Department have experience with security in other arenas, recognition of the importance of security in humanitarian assistance and disaster response situations is an ongoing process. Security often isn’t intuitive, even for development groups with mature products. Beyond that, the landscape is often changing rapidly, as evidenced by the current state of mobile security. Just like in all areas of security however, outcomes are what matter, more than any theoretical state of security.

One of the most concrete security outcomes of the event, from George, was the creation of a test install virtual machine image of many of the open source tools in the humanitarian space, which can now be distributed to security testers. This will allow testers to quickly jump in and find potential vulnerabilities without needing to learn how the tools are installed and configured, reducing the overhead associated with pro-bono testing. Efforts like this one will feed into the larger project of professionalizing the VTC community’s approach to security-centric peer review and testing.

In addition to the longer-term work on the community process, Eleanor and George both had a number of specific conversations with different teams present at the event about the security of their tools. Some of this was skill-sharing and some of it resulted in actionable guidance for both the product development teams and the operational field groups. Apart from the technical concerns, understanding the cultural difference between how government organizations think about security and how the more Internet-centric security community thinks about it was productive for all parties.

It’s no accident that the cultures of different communities keep coming up here. One of the most valuable parts of the RELIEF experience for GWOB was learning the culture and the language of the government attendees. This is a wildly different crowd than the sort of people Geeks Without Bounds usually associates with and supports. While it was great fun to try to persuade someone from DHS to let us take a picture of a #HOPE9 Hopeland Security patch next to the real patch on their shirt (“of course we won’t get your face in the photo”), that’s not an approach that a lot of folks will be comfortable with.

Learning how to speak each other’s languages doesn’t mean that the cultural mismatch will magically go away – GWOB’s decentralized, bottom-up approaches are still going unnerve someone coming from a culture that expects strict hierarchical oversight. However, it does mean that they’ll at least understand what’s going on. On our side, we’ll have more of a clue of what their alphabet soup means and where we can find room to act and cooperate. One of the big open questions for the humanitarian world is what happens when these two cultures work together. Does one eventually override the other, or do we both come to an accommodation where we can both be productive and our ethics and their orders can live with each other?

Figuring this out is vital to the future of humanitarian response. Whole systems approaches are critical in the face of more frequent and larger disasters with increasingly complex infrastructure, and this includes both the scope of the response and its form. We need tools and structures that break down the silos that response groups can fall into. More than that, we need to let people cooperate directly — to encourage true decentralized response, where all of the resources on the ground can be brought into play. We can’t afford to rely on solutions that don’t allow people to self-rescue when that’s possible, and we must bring in affected populations with deep local knowledge as peers in our efforts. On the other hand, at least for major disasters within the US, the DoD will be providing the majority of heavy lift and logistics response capability. We all have to live and play together.

RELIEF was a small but important step in this direction.

Co-authored post from Ella and Willow

This week, Willow Brugh and Eleanor Saitta represented Geeks Without Bounds at RELIEF at Camp Roberts in California, an event that’s a long way from our usual beat. A “Joint-Interagency Field Experimentation”, most of the people at RELIEF are from US military humanitarian response groups or agencies like FEMA or the State Department that do significant response work, or private sector groups experimenting with technology solutions for these groups. The event gives vendors a chance to see what their technology can do in the field and to experiment with how it works together informally, and it gives the responders a chance to try the tools out or see how it could meet their specific needs. It’s by no means all commercial, though — open source and VTC-centric groups also attend, but they’re generally groups that have mature, field-deployed solutions.

For a group like GWOB, the importance of an event like RELIEF lies in seeing potential routes in the lifecycles of our projects. At RELIEF, we got to spend time with a number of organizations that might be partners, customers, or peers when a project is deployed. On the vendor and VTC side, we got to see what successful projects in this space look like in an experimental setting. The sharing went both ways, too — for the commercial vendors and government agencies, GWOB was a chance to remember the roles that the ordinary folks have when they deploy and to start a more open dialog with the rest of the world.

A great example of this was the Civil Air Patrol ad-hoc session. CAP is the official civilian auxiliary organization of the Air Force. It operates as a volunteer organization similar to the Boy Scouts, and also has strong ties to FEMA. They operate a network of private light planes around the US. CAP gets the first aerial imagery after a disaster, allowing the incoming responders to know where their efforts would be best focused. Currently, it’s time consuming to figure out the spot on a map that corresponds to an image and to assess damage. The planes have GPS, but the GPS is for where the camera is, and unlike custom survey aircraft, they can’t take pictures straight down and don’t record camera angle.

We talked about changing the way deployment happens – pulling from things like Geo Commons and other social media platforms to help the commander set routes for the pilots. We started scheming how to standardize the way the camera is mounted, held, or tracked to make geocoding the image easier. Our working group also laid the foundation for automating image uploading and sending those images to be crowd-sourced for damage detection. We’ll talk more about it as it moves along, but it’s a big deal that these organizations are opening up to interacting (and even requesting assistance) from digital humanitarians and volunteer technical communities. Part of why groups like GWOB are valuable to RELIEF is bringing ad-hoc and community development to experienced groups, highlighting the best of both worlds.

Tomorrow, an entry on security and cultural legibility will follow this entry as its second part.

Interoperability is a *huge* issue in emergency management, humanitarian response, ..actually, in an awful lot of things. My hometown in rural Indiana didn’t even have a way for the fire department to speak to the police department, it was all done via 911 operators switching lines. Add on the issues of county lines, security clearance, multiple device platforms, and a long history of mishmashing protocols to make whatever exists works, and you have the current state of affairs.

Today at RELIEF I spoke to two groups that give me great hope for these issues being addressed. The first is MutualLink, which addresses the “ability” to speak to each other, and the second is VirtualAgility, which addresses a shared view of a developing situation.

MutualLink is already live in places like California, New Jersey, and Afghanistan. Deploying its router and black boxes mean taking in communications in whatever format it comes to a central stream. The important thing is beyond the cross-platform usability, though – it’s also about crossing city, county, state, and even country lines. Your responders are no longer seeing a forest fire disappear at the border, but are continuing to be in direct contact with the entire response group.

VirtualAgility addresses those people who can now talk to each other being able to “work” together as well. At its core a planning and task management system, but ultra adaptable, trackable, and sharable. It seems so simple, but it’s a really difficult challenge to support shared decision-making – how does someone in one secured silo let someone they’re working with in another secured silo know what’s the current status of a joint project? This is an incredible dynamic dashboard, and already adopted by some very large org, meaning it’s not redundant across existing models, but replacing them.

This is the infrastructure that everything else can run on.

From George, about the RELIEF efforts Diggz and I speak about at times:

Event:  JIFX-RELIEF Field Exploration
Location:  Camp Roberts, CA
Dates:  August 22-23, 2012

In the last 18 months there have been a steady increase in attacks by
hostile groups against citizens and response organizations utilizing
communications and Internet technologies.  Those attacks include
custom malware targeting activists in Syria, harassment and
infiltration of civil rights monitoring groups in Egypt, and the
murder of citizen reporters in Mexico.

The JIFX-RELIEF Field Explorations are acknowledged to be the premier
venue for creating interoperable civil-military systems for
Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Response (HA/DR) operations.  This
year’s RELIEF experiments will bring together members of the security
community to evaluate the security strengths and weaknesses of several
technologies that are being deployed in hostile environments.

Participants from the security community will have the opportunity to:
* Support the development of lifesaving emergency and humanitarian technologies
* Meet a variety of groups working in the humanitarian and government
technology space
* Interact with other members of the public and private security community

The security evaluations will take part over two separate days and
security experts are invited to take part in one or both:

August 15th:  Tour of the different experiments taking place and
discussions with the owners and operators of those technologies to
provide the security expert’s view of the strengths and weaknesses of
the technology.

August 16th:  Penetration testing of a set of those technologies as
they are being deployed to simulate attacks they will face when
fielded in hostile environments.

The attached document contains more information on the experiments
that will be taking place and the organizations involved.  If you are
interested in taking part in the security assessment on one or both
days please RSVP to george@roguegenius.com by August 1st.

Thank you for your time and interest in supporting the development of
secure technologies for use in crisis and disaster response
operations.

george

We are geeks who care to use our skills to solve more than just #firstworldproblems. In doing this, we imbue the response tools we build with the values we hold. For instance, crisis mapping is built around the ideas of crowd sourcing and open source. Anyone can post, anyone can edit, and through the trends which emerge, outliers who might attempt to skew the results towards their own ends are swallowed up. Open Source communitites and participants building tools for disaster response means the people in need of assistance also gain some autonomy. The response itself is still a huge logistical and financial endeavor which must be supported by governments and other large organizations. However, the ability for us to connect to each other as *individuals* in OS lends dignity to those most in need. The people building the response tools do so because they care about both the process of tool creation and the purpose the tool will serve. The creators’ values are then hugely manifest in the tools themselves. This then affects the people using the tools.