Samizdat Bloggers Network Using SMS Text Messaging Done By Andy Carvin: You Can Do It, Too.

Kudos to Andy Carvin, for the SMS concept to an off the shelf level. At least for the United States. And maybe the new name will help get the idea where it should be. The basic concept is the same as the Alert Retrieval Cache(ARC), and I applaud that Andy remixed the idea in this way. It was lieing dormant before the tsunami, and the original ARC team got it working. It is interesting that Andy went the way of SMS when he's been a big advocate of mobcasting, but it works - and when it works, you build on it.

Go check out what Andy wrote. I'm going to ad lib some of my experiences here, and it's absolutely no reflection on what Andy has done, and I certainly hope that his remix of the same ideas and his own flavor, with off the shelf components, works out.

Of course, nobody used the ARC - a fact that I attribute partly to the politics behind the scenes of the TsunamiHelp blog - which I was an original member of, but left out of frustration because people refused to post about the Alert Retrieval Cache - to the point where it had to be removed from the TsunamiHelp wiki to even get posted on the blog, after I skyped Dinah Mehta and we came to an agreement where the ARC would be treated as a non-TsunamiHelp related project. It made no sense to me then, it makes no sense to me now. When I met Dan Lane later on at the MobileActive convergence, we were both equally disgusted with what happened.

I really think that the ARC could have helped during that period when we were fighting the bureaucracy just to get the word out. Very, very disappointing to myself at the least. The idea was to help people, not get credit, but... maybe because of that, people didn't understand our intentions. It was very muddy water because one person wanted credit for something that they didn't deserve credit for; it was not a new idea. Doing it was new.

Of course, later on people got a lot of credit for that blog, so they did do good things. It just seems strange that they would hinder an emergency communication system that way. Perhaps remixing and renaming the thing is just what was needed. It's a good idea. It can work. It has been used to some limited degree in other scenarios since; the ARC itself is a concept especially for emergency communications. It's always been a concept. And for me, it was about victims communicating to the people who could help, though implementations since have not done so. In fact, the original ideas didn't really do that either.

Personally, I've been asked to write about the ARC ad nauseam. To get funding, to whatever... but not much funding is needed for such a thing. All that's needed is cooperation with mobile phone companies in a region. The technology is not difficult, especially with that cooperation. An emergency SMS number should be in place around the world, just like a voice '911' or '999'. Phones last longer in emergencies when only using text, and a flooded infrastructure does not drop SMS messages. They just wait in queue.

I've gotten wind of a DevNet project proposal to the International Development Research Centre which basically is getting funding to research something that will end up being very similar to previous ARC implementations. I don't understand that either. It would take a lot less money to simply implement the thing, and when I questioned it, I found out that they had already chosen to purchase some software and that the study is basically a support structure being built to get the funds to buy that system. The funny part? The people with that proposal know me.

People wonder why I feel jaded when it comes to NGOs in the Caribbean. There you go. The system could already be in place. It's not. Estimated timeline for the study? Another year. And then, buy the system, and then put it in place...

Hurricane season just started, by the way. Hold on to your hats, because if the last few years are an indicator, we should expect lots of love from large spinning masses of air.

The SMS/Email/Web/etc integration in emergencies is a rock solid idea. Anyone can take it further, and I wish that they would. I was lucky to be part of the original ARC team, fortunate to have met and worked with Dan Lane, and have regretted just about everything else. The picture at top is for the basic concept of the system. It's simple, but it's meant to be implemented before a disaster. A number that people know that they can send SMS messages to. At the least, it's a comfort.

In the end... I'm waiting for these ideas to get into the mainstream, and the only way I see this happening is through members of the community. People like Andy Carvin. People like you.

A closing quote:

But there's still another challenge. You have to get people to know that the system is there for them to use.

"It's amazing how difficult it is to find someone to pass it along to, and say, look this is what we're trying to do and everything like that," says Mr Rampersad. "So the big problem right now is the same problem we're trying to solve - human communication."

When the world has collapsed around you, you'll want to be able to communicate. So do what Andy did. Find a way to route around the bureaucracy and do it, because it seems apparent to me that there are people out there who don't want you to be able to do that.

And if you can't do it for your life or another human life, what's the value in doing it for anything else?

Go. Do.