A frequent shortcoming in any disaster is the failure to develop an understanding of the tendons and sinews of a community before that disaster happens. How can such an inventory of representative people and sites be done and what does it look like when successful?

Short-notice deployment is the norm for several members of the Strong Angel Team. What does an appropriate deployment kit bag look like in 2006?

Waveland Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina had no light, power, communication, or coordination. Yet we had to do effective work there immediately or risk civil unrest and lives lost.

Arriving in a disaster area with no power, lighting, comms, or adequate staff available can be challenging. Those were the circumstances faced by Strong Angel members in Sarajevo, Baghdad, Banda Aceh, Pakistan, New Orleans, Waveland, Yogyakarta, Darfur, and more. Having a clear process for establishing an effective site and integrating with local colleagues would be helpful.

In each crisis, response agencies and communities fail to link among each other effectively. In some cases, failure of effective incorporation at a key decision point has led to alienation, and valuable resource integration has been lost. Furthermore, civil-military coordination can be very challenging since military and civilian organizations usually operate on different networks.

In emergencies, despite knowing who to contact, we have all seen failures of communication because of lost power - including dead batteries - and wrong contact numbers.

We have only a general understanding of the effort it takes to work within a disaster. We know, however, that there can be consequences when effort-capabilities are exceeded and staff lose efficiency and heart. The loss in resources and morale can severely impede a response.

Communications in the field has been seen to devolve into people passing scraps of paper or digitally photographing maps to send elsewhere as jpegs. We do not plan well-enough to optimize complex communications far forward between civilian and military agencies responding to a common purpose.

An early priority in a crisis is to identify and connect key decision makers and establish the ability to communicate critical information to citizens. The three areas that fail most frequently are communications, transportation, and power (comms, lift, and power). This task is specifically to explore options in the provisioning of communications.

In each disaster in which Strong Angel team members have participated, communications have been difficult. Historically shortwave radio has been the lowest common denominator for long-haul communications, with VHF and UHF radios used for short range. Now IP traffic is becoming the standard and the deployment of an effective wireless cloud, with at least one link to the Internet, is becoming more common but is not yet well-understood.

In an emergency response or in the wake of a disaster, it is difficult to predict the number of people who will be on any given network. This requires close monitoring of the network traffic in order to ensure high performance of a network so that people can effectively communicate.

Search and Rescue workers in the field need to have a full sensory assessment of ground zero in order to evaluate and complete a successful rescue mission.

Rapid assessment in the field can be potentially dangerous, depending upon the type of threat (hazardous environment, polluted landscape, enemy warfare), and may require using a blend of different modes for perceiving information.

During the Indonesian earthquake, people discovered that they could not make phone calls at the most critical time because the system was overloaded. The most reliable form of communication between Banda Aceh and Jakarta was through the use of SMS messaging on GSM cell phones. And SMS messaging was very cheap.

The inability to readily communicate through emergency communications systems often leads to an impaired response.

Initiation of resource disruption predictably leads to a loss in social continuity and cohesiveness. It should be easy to understand how assessments are made and how to in corporate the results of those assessments into planning and policy decisions.

In another sense, how can we incorporate valuable lessons learned in our decision making and planning in order to be better prepared for the next crisis?

How do we rapidly build a defense against day-zero cyber attacks from unwanted viruses, worms, spyware, and unsanctioned software?

In an emergency situation, how do you organize and distribute daily briefings and urgent "need-to-know" information to core ops and across multiple organizations, agencies, and individuals who may be physically displaced/scattered?

In Hurricane Katrina, approximately 3 million people were without electricity. If grid power fails, how do you get power? In addition, naturally, with no power there are no electrons flowing and so no data stream either, so power is the most critical single resource requested at national conferences.

In a disaster situation, people often need to relocate for safety, shelter, and to receive basic provisions. Collection points, such as a stadium or convention center, are key locations for emergency response teams to provide basic medical care, power, and communications.

Core operations not only needs power, we need lighting too.

A very complex crisis situation requires a combination of management tools for use across multiple agencies and networks. Those systems rarely talk with each other yet information sharing is a critical component of response efficiency.

Civil and military don't always speak the same language. In particular, the military has a strict code of terminology that civilian operations may not understand. So how does everyone work together in an emergency response situation?

During the time period immediately following a destructive incident (natural disaster or terrorist), the cellular networks are oftentimes shut down. Voice communication is the primary method responders use to transfer information to designated personnel. Integrated WiFi technology on hand-held Smartphones and broad area WiFi cloud networks allow people to talk to each other during a crisis, and at very little cost.

There is a widespread need for information specific to the outbreak, disaster victim identification, and for generalized medical reporting. The challenge is how to collect, transport, and deliver this information?

Communication systems break down in disaster situations, however ham radios remain a relatively archaic, yet versatile and reliable, technology. They can operate virtually anywhere, anytime, and are often used in conjunction with other cross-communication technologies during emergencies and major relief operations.

Relief workers and rescue teams have difficulty communicating with one another, with victims, and with local emergency centers for rapid assessment and secure information sharing. Remote sites often cannot see what is currently happening in other areas of crisis. Messaging in written text format is a slower means of communicating than video-VOIP. Audio requires a spoken distraction or sound without sight - a significant reduction in understanding and one that takes dedicated time from a valuable site resource.

Remote sites and rural facilities without regular access to medical expertise need a secure means of transmitting information, especially when physical movement is limited.

"Cure Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan needs pathology interpretations. They have complex patients with unknown diseases, adequate surgeons doing biopsies, a good microscope, an adequate prep-technician, and an excellent digital microscopy camera. They don't have a pathologist on the other end, nor do they have a secure means of transmitting patient information."

Without an assessment of the economic impact of SA-III as a demonstration, we will not be able to determine analyses and recommendations for replication in the future.

During a period of restricted mobility (quarantine, terrorist attack, civil unrest), it is difficult to transmit localized information across physical zones and networks.

People, both those affected directly and indirectly by the disaster, often wish to volunteer and thus be part of the solution. Many of these folks are better able to heal when they are able to feel useful and distracted from their own problems.
In the past, many of these people were turned away by relief agencies for reasons including a) the volunteer's lack of training b) lack of trainers within the organization c) no process to record volunteers and their abilities.

How do you keep the network secure and accessible to the greatest number of people, and yet protect the information in it without encrypting or eliminating the information from view to people who are not yet known to you but who may need access to the information?

Effective communications in disaster relief operations and international development field work are often hindered by language barriers. The challenge is to quickly provide reliable information to a vulnerable population in order to help them understand the situation, and to gain and maintain trust of the affected population.

How do leaders and teams emerge and confront challenges in a crisis situation? How can we identify leaders within crisis situations and bridge the gap between leadership theory and practice?

Rapid establishment of post-contingency information flow typically faces a number of obstacles, including intermittent connectivity, information ownership concerns, and a heterogeneous assortment of applications, platforms, representational schemas and devices in use by various participating organizations.

How do we ensure a consistent focus for the SA-III demonstration? How do we contribute to social change?

When the power goes down in a disaster area, what else goes down? How do you act in way that preempts the cascade-down effect?

In a disaster, it is very important to know where people are located in order to deliver supplies and relief, and to plan and run rescue missions. We need to physically know where core team members are located as they move around.

Situational awareness is problematic in crisis situations, and there is a constant challenge found in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating accurate information frequently and rapidly.

How do we report medical information from a non-standard place where injured or sick people are accumulating during a disaster, like a ballpark field or nursing home?

How do you know when a population is at risk for civil unrest and societal breakdown?

Failed states/communities breed instability and insecurity and present a real-time challenge for developing strategic planning. Attempts to address multiple facets of the problem simultaneously and lack of understanding of the sequencing of critical tasks often leads to confusion as to appropriate priorities, and gridlocks in supply chains and tasking. Lack of clarity as to which organizations have which capabilities to address which tasks mean that roles and responsibilities are misaligned to tasks, and multiple actors compete to perform the same task in the same area, or no actors are assigned responsibility leaving vacuums. Lack of clarity as to goals for intervention and realistic timelines for delivery means that the expectation of the population is set unrealistically high, and so hopes are easily disappointed. Short term goals are often attempted to be satisfied, while short term solutions themselves hinder meeting the goals in the medium to longer term.

It is difficult to know when we are achieving results if we do not set standards and objectives beforehand. The key to success of a process often lies in identifying measurable objectives that are consistently evaluated.

Inclusion and openness are critical for community acceptance. Further, being able to have the project be viewable in a way that makes sense and resonates for each stakeholder is critical for comfort levels.

SA-III team would like to address the challenge of cultivating community resilience in response to a complex disaster; how to ensure public involvement and open communications (one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many).

How can we capture important topical conversations about SA-III objectives in real time so that the group can see the larger set of connections as a whole system rather than just a local perspective?

Mount Merapi is the most active volcano in Indonesia, it has erupted 68 times and several of its eruptions have caused fatalities. It is very close to the city of Yogyakarta, and thousands of people live on the flanks of the volcano. It began erupting again in 2006, and scientists believe a large eruption is imminent. On May 27th, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck roughly 30 miles southwest of Merapi, killing at least 5,000 and leaving at least 200,000 people homeless in the Yogyakarta region, heightening fears that Merapi will "blow". A further 11,000 villagers were evacuated on June 6th as lava and superheated clouds of gas poured repeatedly down its upper slopes.

In response to a contingency, members of diverse organizations must be able to discover one another, form virtual teams, and work effectively under austere network conditions.

Policies and procedures that normally provide the operational framework within which institutions function, are not usually adapted for a ground zero pandemic crisis situation.