What I Wish I Could Have Said During BBC Interviews.

Looking back upon the interviews I did - the initial one as well as the one today - I realized the problem with such interviews. They're short. Of course, they have to be short. There's a lot more news than what some fellow in Trinidad and Tobago is a part of.

So what would I say?

(1) Well, the first thing I would say is that despite systems such as the Alert Retrieval Cache being around, there's not much in the press about such systems. In fact, it's only because a tsunami killed a lot of people, and put a lot more at risk, that this all came into being. In the grand scheme of things, I believe that this is sad.

(2) There's been a question of government involvement (or lack of it) in such initiatives - and frankly, I don't know that a government should be responsible for such an implementation. With the rampant bureaucracy of governments, there's a tendency for really good ideas to take a really long time to become concrete. Further, when they do know about such things, they don't necessarily use them. Quite sad.

(3) The pre-existing systems didn't deal with the affected region of this last disaster.

In fact, if you look at the website of CEASE, you'll see that not one of the affected countries is listed. Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Holland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Denmark. Not one developing country. Now this isn't necessarily a reflection on CEASA, as it were. One has to wonder what's going on. Specifically, I'm wondering about the Caribbean and shall follow up on that. But there are a LOT of countries NOT on the list...

Granted, ARC may well end because there shouldn't be a competition in such systems - there should be a collaboration. But the ARC team is still researching this, and I understand that Dan Lane is chatting with CEASA along these lines. Expect something next week more tangible.

(4) Warning systems could have used this same technology - it's not just for distributing aid.

(5) Such systems are not bulletproof, and they need to be able to not only coexist with other systems (such as HAM radio), they should complement them.

(6) It's almost impossible to contact people at aid agencies so that they can USE a system. Really. I *still* haven't heard from people I've tried to contact. They'll tell you how to send money, but they won't tell you how to share ideas and technology. Kind of strange, really. Shouldn't there be a way to do that?

(7) Public awareness and training in first aid is probably more important than a network for disaster relief. People can save lives almost immediately in a disaster.

(8) The latest disaster hit low income regions hardest, where technology is largely unavailable due to cost. So even if we had such a system in place, there's no guarantee that a poor family would have been able to get the information. So that's a Digital Divide, and a mortal one.

There's space in the comments below for more.