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How an Android Phone and Facebook Helped Route Haiti Rescuers
One intrepid Android fan is extolling the virtues of the open smartphone platform that helped him to route SOS messages in the recent Haiti disaster. "Well, when you are in such a situation, you don't really think about going to Facebook, but it happens that I have a Facebook widget on my Android home screen that regularly displays status updates from my friends. All of a sudden, an SOS message appeared on my home screen as a status update of a friend on my network. Not all smartphones allow you to customize your home screen, let alone letting you put widgets on it. So, I texted Steven about it. As Steven had already been working with the US State Department on Internet development activities in Haiti, he quickly called a senior staff member at the State Department and asked how to get help to the people requesting it from Haiti. State Department personnel requested a short description and a physical street address or GPS coordinates. Via email and text messaging, I was able to relay this information from Port-au-Prince to Steven in Oregon, who relayed it to the State Department in Washington DC, and it was quickly forwarded to the US military at the Port-au-Prince airport and dispatched to the search-and-rescue (SAR) teams being assembled. So the data went from my Android phone to Oregon to Washington DC and then back to the US military command center at the Port-au-Prince airport. I was at first a little skeptical about their reaction: there was so much destruction; they probably already had their hands full. Unexpectedly, they replied back saying: 'We found them, and they are alive! Keep it coming.'"
First time,Facebook was proved useful...Hope more can get help like that.What a disaster really...
Technology is so fucking cool. I really love it when people do amazing things like this and prove how useful it all is.
This is the now obligatory web 2.0 platform saves the day story. The last one was twitter I believe.
maybe i'm being whoooshed, but doesn't "communication for everyone, everywhere" sound rather socialist ? Not that i'm against it... right wing would be "communication for whomever can pay for it, wherever it's profitable", wouldn't it ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This is an amazing story, and everyone involved deserves all honor and appreciation for their life-saving efforts.
Nonetheless, it raises the question: how can we leverage technology to achieve this kind of effect without requiring a friend-of-a-friend with a direct line to the US State Department?
There were no doubt many other people trapped by the quake who didn't have such fortuitous Facebook connections, and many of them probably weren't found in time. Is there a way to deploy some kind of SMS-based 911 infrastructure in situations like this, even on foreign cellular networks? Could we even deploy our own mobile cellular base stations for this purpose, if the local cell network is too badly damaged? Other ideas?
Internet. Project Title: Adopt an Haitian Internet technician or facility
Because if they used any other protocol that doesn't involve sending huge amounts of redudant text and shiny graphics over a commercial telephone network it would never make the news.
Personally I'd find it much more amazing if some radio hobbyists managed to repair a transmitter from bits of scrap salvaged from the rubble and sent out a packet using that but we'd never hear about it because FB and Twitter were not involved
--"Via email and text messaging, I was able to relay this information from Port-au-Prince to Steven in Oregon, who relayed it to the State Department in Washington DC, and it was quickly forwarded to the US military at the Port-au-Prince airport and dispatched to the search-and-rescue (SAR) teams being assembled. "
Great, but just about any smartphone can do this, even most of the closed smartphone platforms, nothing special. Is it just me that thinks Android fans are becoming as preachy as the apple fanboys?
FanBoids.
There's a lot of great disaster relief open-source stuff going on in Haiti. Check out Sahana for Haiti. Or the work done on the open street maps project for Port-au-Prince. The map was filled in with routing, street, building state, health facility etc. by some good developers who extracted satellite & other data in a few days; to the point where the marines could use it move trucks around the rubble. Like the 2008 Year of Edits for OSM but for one city in days.
Great, but just about any smartphone can do this, even most of the closed smartphone platforms, nothing special.
The part you quoted, yes, but not the part that kicked the whole thing off: he noticed someone's Facebook status update on his home screen widget. If he had to open an app to get Facebook updates, he wouldn't have seen it, because he had better things to do than browse Facebook.
I don't know about all the other smartphone platforms, but I'm pretty sure this is something the iPhone can't do. It doesn't have widgets; its home screen only shows app icons. You can get push notifications for certain events, but friends' status updates aren't among them, and you likely wouldn't want to get a message for every status update anyway.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
If the guy in Haiti had access to update his Fbook status, and was able to send and receive sms - why didn't he just contact the State Department directly?
This story isn't about technology, it's about personal access.
Guy in Haiti didn't have it - so he sends the equivalent of a smoke signal, and is lucky enough that someone notices it and does have access.
This all sounds really contrived, and I'm not impressed.
...and not just because of this story. But let's face it: Very little information (except early reports of the quake itself) was disseminated from Haiti via ham radio. 80% of the cellphone network of the second largest provider in Haiti was re-established within a week of the quake. Don't believe me? Google "ham radio haiti". As a long-time amateur radio operator who has been proclaiming the demise of ham radio for some years now, the proof is irrefutable: Ham radio has been relegated to the technology basement.
Yes, I know the hams will be coming out of the woodwork, defending their hobby. Or are they defending the large sums of money they've sunk into equipment that serves very little purpose in the way of emergency communications in today's world?
if they have access to facebook why not just call the police?
It's perfectly understandable that you would ask such a question. To find the answer you would have to do something incredibly difficult and unusual, such as RTFA.
But I'll help you out. Here's the relevant part of TFA:
In a disaster, the phone system can be overwhelmed. The bandwidth and resources the phone system needs to make a voice call are huge compared with the bandwidth and resources needed for a simple SMS text message. A 160-character text message, plus its envelope, should be under 2 kilobits for the whole message. A GSM voice connection uses at least 6.5 kilobits per second, every second.
Also, there are a limited number of conversations possible at one time for each cell tower. In terms of how many people can use a tower at a time, SMS messages are a huge win: an SMS message doesn't tie up a chunk of the tower for seconds.
At my job, we had a Red Cross disaster training session, and the person from the Red Cross told us to expect that cell phone voice service is very likely to not be available in a disaster, but text messages are likely to still work. That was the first time I actually got interested in text messages.
I think, very seriously, that emergency services (police, fire department, etc.) should be set up to receive text messages, precisely to handle the mass-disaster scenario.
Also, in the USA, mobile phones are now required to send GPS location data when the user calls an emergency number (911). I'd like to see a similar feature for texts: when you text to 911, the phone attaches GPS location data to the text message.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
There are couple of things that make Port-Au-Prince (PAP) unique.
Haiti gets regularly hit by hurricanes. They have an abysmal electrical system.
During normal times you are lucky to get 10 hours of electricity a day.
There are 4 cell phone carriers, 30 percent of the population owns cell phones.
If you are cell phone carrier, you always want to have 24 hours of operations.
In order to do that in PAP you had to have a very robust generator - fuel supply system and distribution just to handle the "Haiti" normal daily power outages. So post catastrophe - guess what the cell phones came up pretty quick and many got to call the US to relatives to tell them "They are starving and had no water for days". I'm pretty sure no post-apocalyptic fiction writer saw that one possibly happening.
Additionally with only one undersea cable a lot of telecom-traffic is handled by satellite and is also why TV/ISPs were able to deliver video and messages immediately after the quake.
The water system in PAP was also lousy in normal times so water-trucks, walking 5 miles to a kiosk a large portion of the population was used to that. So when the quake hit and the city lost its mains. The water trucks still worked.
So ironically their horrible utilities and the system in place to cope with that saved many in a quake generated catastrophe.
Ham radio does not pretend to replace the phone company / 911 and never did. So you're a little misinformed there. And among the ham radio guys... all 650,000 in the US less than one half percent are trained and have an interest in
emergency communications Even then I am being generous.. probably closer to a quarter of percent.
Yes the ham radios and antennas can cost from 600-2500 dollars depending on your goals, but the equipment lasts 20 years. So exactly how much money have you spent on computer equipment in 20 years and how much is that biyearly cell phone contract? Ham radio plays a very very small but necessary role in helping route emergency information from point A to point B when all else fails it is the last line of communication.
Even in Katrina, the two groups I am credited with helping assist used cell phones to call out to a distant relative, I just completed their call for help to the closest authority. Even in the twitter example it took several hops to find someone who could help.
Ham radios role in Haiti this time can be counted on one hand. I knew one of the two Haitian Ham radio operators that got on air a couple days after the quake. Almost all in the Haitian Radio club had lost a relative to the quake.
How many Ham radio operators do think a very impoverished country as Haiti has? Exactly what is that Haitian radio operator going to say on day two after the quake that we didnt already know. We were sending the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink our neighbors sink in an effort to help take away some of the misery.
As a life long computer geek and later radio geek I applaud ANY means of communications method that saves lives and minimizes human misery.
Every disaster is different... if a category three hurricane hit PAP there would be no cell phone, nor satellite dishes...
But that undersea cable would still be there and radio always works.
AG4ZG
The problem with this mentality is that the optimal functioning of human communities on the planet must be in everyone's best interest. A significant amount of research indicates that with the advent of sufficiency (an end to human poverty and need), education, civil rights (particularly for women), and available contraception, the problematic future for human beings would change for the better overnight. Famine, war, plague, and overpopulation would vanish. With the first world sharing of breakthrough technology, even the problems surrounding climate and pollution could be fully addressed, and a brighter future for all people could be ensured.
Giving all people a powerful means by which to be in communication, relate, grow and thrive together in collaboration, is in all our best interest, and trying to place this in the context of a business plan or a financial justification is as myopic as letting millions a year die because a proper cure for malaria makes poor business sense.
The principle being that we don't have infinite resources, so you have to be able to justify their allocation. In capitalism, this is done on the free market. Socialism advocates political allocation.
It is up to the reader to do some research and decide which is generally more efficient.
I encourage the reader who takes up that challenge to also research which is specifically more efficient.
In a particular mathematical model, free markets solves an optimization problem. They also seem to work well in practice in many situations.
However, they work less well the more barriers to entry and exit there are in a given market. Having to build a large amount of infrastructure (factories, cell towers) in order to start producing is a barrier to entry. Having to fight a monopolist or cartel is a barrier to entry. Network effects (where present) means the free market will converge towards a monopoly or cartel situation.
Particularly for cell phone communication, there's the infrastructure problem, network effects, plus you need some radio frequency spectrum allocation mechanism. It looks like it's a good case for allocation through public policy.
Of course, feel free to compare the US against Canada and your favourite European countries if you feel empirical today; but you may also want to control for corru^Wlobbying influence (if able).