In Case of Emergency, Pull Cord
From Kable we learn that “The City of London Police has added mapping information and voice activated messages to its emergency communication system. It has added to the email, SMS and pager facilities already available to people and businesses registered for Priority Alert.”
What is the very first thing that has happened in each and every large-scale public emergency over the past 5 years? Why, the mobile phone networks have sunk under the weight of traffic. This is what will happen in the next public emergency as well.
In order to maintain stable communications, one would almost have to design a robust network of computers with redundant linking and flexible switching networks to route around damage. You could start by putting a few of them in universities to see how they would work. You could call it… I don’t know… maybe the Intertubes, or something.
If diverse government bodies wanted to communicate with citizens in times of crisis, maybe they could publish regularly updated messages on a pre-established location on this Intertube thingie, and make it so communications could be two-way. You could call them… oh, I don’t know… globs.
Maybe they would look like this. (Total time to build this was two hours.)
October 30th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
For an example of using a city wi-fi network for this sort of thing, have people looked at http://w2i.com/resource_center/the_w2i_report__weekly_newsletter/news/p/newsletterId_120/id_122a report on the recent Minnieapolis bridge collapse?
The report is about the infrastructure rather than the community aspects of distaster response, but perhaps the two go together, when mobile phone networks become overloaded?
October 31st, 2007 at 8:42 am
Good point–just like smart meters, stress testing devices could either transmit batched data periodically or when pinged, with an alarm function. There would be a lot of false alarms at first, I’d imagie, but after that it would provide a useful service.