"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Ushahidi and true resilience
Many remember the earthquake that hit central Mexico in 1985. Not least of all, the people of Mexico city, and the lessons learned from that catastrophe will not soon be forgotten. You see, Mexico city is particularly vulnerable to telluric movements for two main reasons:
1. Central Mexico is located in the middle of several tectonic plates
2. The ground in the Valley of Mexico is composed primarily of soft soil.
Being in the middle of many tectonic plates raises the risks, of course, but the true problem is the soil. While one may think soft soil could soften and even absorb the shockwaves generated by earthquakes, in reality the opposite is true. Not only does soft soil fail to cushion the waves, it actually causes seismic amplification, making tremors have a much higher strength they would have otherwise.
While I was not at Mexico City at the time, my family was and I followed closely everything that followed, from the moment of the event to the weeks, months and years of recovery. And based on that information, I can safely assert one thing: Ushahindi would have been completely and utterly useless.
The same thing can be said for the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Bangladesh cyclones in 2007, the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 or the El Salvador floods and mudslides of 2009. And it is useless in all cases for one simple reason: energy.
When you cannot access your crowd sourcing contacts, the system is essentially dead. Sure, Ushahindi has plenty of applications in local conflicts, humanitarian situations and minor disasters, but when looking at true urban resiliency, it basically falls short.
Most importantly of all reasons, it has a centralized database system without enough redundant backups. The moment a database goes down, for whatever reason, the system if completely off the grid and useless. Another reason is it's enormous dependency on wireless connectivity, which is nowhere near as reliable as one may think during a crisis situation.
Don't get me wrong, the system is a great start, but it needs resiliency of it's own far beyond what cities themselves would need. And the first step is redundant systems.
It not only needs worldwide database backups, but also satellite-based databases to ensure the system can continue operating in the case of a complete lack of service providers.
A system like this would also require every city in the world to have some way of generating power, both via fossil fuels and renewable sources. Depending on the crisis situation, not even sunshine can be guaranteed, so it is vital that communities have at least 1 building capable of generating no less than 3 different forms of energy for every million inhabitants.
Additionally, in the worst of scenarios, even satellite connectivity could be impossible, and Ushahindi could be unreachable even by the most entrepreneurial of individuals. For this reason, communities should have their own resiliency networks, and they should keep them as low tech as possible.
Finally, the main improvement Ushahindi needs and can implement now, is a hierarchal database structure. The main problem with crowd-sourcing is keeping track of all the information flowing in, and users of the network itself will have an exceedingly hard time accessing the data they need.
Some of the main categories this structure should have are:
Database corrections (user submitted complaints about wrong data)
Main developments (overall news)
Humanitarian help (news)
Humanitarian help (requests)
Local developments (news, sorted geographically)
Security information (looting, rioting, military presence, arrests, news)
Emergency centers and working medical camps (location data, news)
Survivor data (name, age, location data)
Missing people data (name, age, last known location data)
Confirmed deaths (name, age, location, identifiable marks and/or gender only submittable by authorities in the area)
To make sure people do indeed submit information to the correct section, the very first thing the application should ask for is the type of data they wish to share with no preset option, forcing users to look at the choices and select the appropriate one. A large part of crowd-sourcing involves people who may or may not even be familiar with the technology involved and the importance of proper categorization, let alone how to properly report any events or important information.
This is why Ushahindi should also have teams of 100's of people working on each category to verify and double check the data submitted. Inevitably, garbage data (such as mean spirited pranks or politically inspired misinformation) will be submitted into the system, and leaving all the data unsorted or simply parsed through an AI script is not nearly enough.
Criticism aside, I do think I will keep following their progress. As I said before, while they do have several problems and h***s in the operation that need to be corrected, they are off to a very good start.
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