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Disaster Recovery For Haiti's Cell Phone Networks
spun writes "A disaster recovery team from Trilogy International Partners, LLC was among the first responders to arrive after the quake in Haiti. After seeing to the safety of their staff, they worked quickly to bring up emergency generators and restore service to the devastated country. Winners of a State Department medal for their previous work in Haiti, the company appears to be a model not only for proper disaster recovery response, but also for ethical corporate behavior. Their quick action has no doubt saved thousands of lives, but Haiti still needs our help." Keith Calder, who used to work on Slashdot ad stuff before we had big corporate owners, is now a film producer of last summer's Battle for Terra. They are giving away signed copies of the DVD to the first 100 people who make $25+ red cross donations. It would be cool to see generous Slashdot Sci-Fi fans make a difference. If you are curious or voyeuristic about the devastation, Google Maps has satellite photos.
I always think about this during disasters too. Yes, complaining about the permitting process is a favorite sport. When 50,000 die someplace else and fewer than 100 die here in a similar event, then you understand what it's all about. OTOH, how many deaths are caused because people are homeless and/or don't have health care because permitted structures are more expensive? Death due to disaster is easily measured so the permitting process looks like a winner. Deaths due to opportunity cost are more difficult to measure, so we just don't know.
Unfortunately, this is Haiti. The point is moot. They've had a hard enough time keeping a stable government and figuring out how to deal with their limited resources. They should be so lucky someday, to get to the point where they are complaining about the permitting process.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm sure that they'd be more than happy to talk to somebody with the right supplies.
The trouble is, if you ask for in-kind donations, you are liable to get everybody's expired canned fruitcake and the contents of their secondary sock drawer. At best, that requires a lot of sorting. At worst, you have to pay to dispose of somebody else's trash, while they pat themselves on the back. I'm sure that if somebody who actually knows something about what sorts of supplies are useful called up and offered a pallet of them, the answer would be yes.
It's like computers. If you are operating on any scale, ad-hoc donations of everybody's random emachines would be worse than useless. Unless you have massive amounts of free labor, and a lot of time, you'd be stuck in driver hell until the sun burns out. So, you are much better off with cash, which can easily be converted into pallets of identical machines in known shape. This doesn't mean, of course, that you would say no to somebody offering a pallet of identical hardware; but you'd be an idiot to tell the public that they could dump anything old and computer shaped on you and then feel warm and fuzzy about it.