At some point when I'm back in Chicago and I sit down to write up a complete account of what I've learned from my time with the hurricane relief effort, the primary thing that I'll focus on is the centrality of IT to disaster relief in the post-Internet age. The Red Cross is well equipped to provide a few basic things: shelter, food, clothing, medical care, and mental health care. There are professionals on staff at the shelters who are trained and able to handle each of these items, and the organization as a whole does a great job with this stuff. But once disaster victims have their basic needs attended to, the problem then becomes, how do we get them out of the shelter and on the path toward something resembling a normal, healthy life?
This latter problem boils down to two basic social networking problems: a) rebuilding shattered social networks, and b) weaving permanently displaced families and inviduals into existing social networks in new locales. Both of these problems are uniquely suited to two modern connectivity technologies, one new and one old: the Internet, and long-distance phone service. Unfortunately, Internet connectivity and long-distance phone service are two types of service that the Red Cross is woefully ill-prepared to provide. The Red Cross may have doctors, nurses, and social workers ready at hand, but as far as I've been able to tell there are no Red Cross IT teams available for deployment in disaster zones.
The IT situation on the ground at each shelter site is unique: there's different hardware being set up and maintained by different people in each place. As far as phone service goes, in one place Sprint shows up periodically and passes out cell phones for people to use to make calls, and in another there's a single land-line that may or may not have long distance service. It's all completely ad-hoc, bottom-up, and volunteer, with what's available at each site being completely dependent on what hardware has been donated and who's around to maintain it. In a few fortunate cases, there's an expert nearby who can help out, while in most other cases it's the blind leading the blind. All told, the apparently brand new discipline of "disaster IT" is, to use a technical term, completely seat-of-the-pants.
In the future, not only will the goverment want to establish and maintain a single, centralized, scalable, publicly accessible survivor database for use in times of crisis, but disaster relief organizations like the Red Cross will need the capability to move into a shelter and rapidly deploy a low-maintenance, secure, locked-down "computer lab" environment with basic Web access for shelter residents and intake workers. These terminals will also ideally have VoIP capabilities.
I'm currently working with McNeese State University's Academic Computing Center and the Lake Charles Linux Users Group to prepare a standard lab environment that we can roll out quickly and cheaply on donated hardware for deployment at one of the shelters. This environment will consist of a kiosk build on a bootable CD-ROM, a router/proxy/NAT/whitelist box, and possibly a staff build that runs an Office Suite and VoIP software. If this deployment is successful, we plan to offer the software to the other Red Cross shelters, starting with those in the Lake Charles area.
Tomorrow morning, we're going to start with the kiosk build, which will have a need to have a few characteristics:
- Boots from a CD-ROM and/or floppy.
- Runs on the widest possible range of donated hardware.
- Runs in kiosk mode, so that it starts up by launching a default web page in Firefox.
- Connects to a router/server box that handles NAT, firewalling, and whitelisting. This last one is especially important, since we've already had problems with inappropriate surfing at one of the shelters.
- Is free.
Right now, we're looking at either Knoppix or the K-12 LTSP project. We'd like to hear the Linux community's input on either of these two ideas, along with suggestions for other possibilities.
As far as the hardware side of things goes, we're now ready to accept any and all computer systems you can send our way. Right now, we're only looking for complete systems that are fully functional and that preferably have displays. I can already forsee a shortage of displays, so if you just have a spare display or two (or forty or fifty!) that you can send along then please do so.
Please send all hardware donations to the following address:
Dennis Stutes
Academic Computing Center
450 Beauregard St.
Kirkman 117A
Lake Charles, LA 70605
When we get the hardware, we'll have a team of student interns on hand to process it and prepare it for deployment to the shelters. I've already had quite a few people write me with offers of hardware, so if you've written me then by all means send the hardware along to the above address.
On a final note, if you're working on these same types of IT problems in any of the other shelters and you read this, please get in touch with me via email. Be sure to include your mobile phone number, if you can, since I'm working away from my desk quite a bit right now and I prefer to get back to people via phone. I'd love to hear what the shelter IT situation is like in other cities, and I'd also like to have places to send any excess hardware that we get.
Update: There's a great project in California, called Public Web Station, that's already doing exactly what I've described above. You can find some general coverage of what they're doing at DesktopLinux. There's also a hardware component to their project, and they're taking hardware donations of all kinds through a component clearinghouse that will be assembling machines for use in the field. (Note that we're still taking donations of complete systems and monitors here in Lake Charles, so keep sending those if you have them.)
I've been in contact with the Public Web Station project head, Steve Hargadon, and he has a whole team of people who're working on this 'round-the-clock. We who're out here in the field are going to be coordinating our efforts with his project through the project's discussion forums, filling the developers in on our specific needs as they arise at the shelters.
Our back-end folks out here are also going to be coordinating with the developers and contributing to the project. If you're interested in helping out, you can get involved through the Public Web Stations homepage. Check out the page, read up on it, and contribute via the forums.
If you're an IT person who's out volunteering on the ground, by all means please get involved in this project. These guys are ready and eager to support what you're doing by providing you with ISOs that you can burn and deploy, and by rolling your suggestions into the constantly updated releases. We need your feedback, which you can submit through the forums. To start with, here are a few specific things you can tell us:
Links that are being used at the sites
The Red Cross, as of yesterday, did not appear to have a really good centralized homepage of links and bookmarks for all the shelters to use. Even if they did have one master links page, there are also locality-specific links and email addresses that the Red Cross is distributing to its individual shelters in certain geographic areas. All of these links are being written on large sheets of paper with magic marker, on Post-Its, on notepads, etc., all of which are then being posted in and around the lab areas in the shelters.
The ultimate solution here is to create and host pages of links and information for shelters in specific areas that the kiosks in that area's shelters can point to by default. We'll then roll the links to those homepages into the client ISOs that IT volunteers can download and burn. We're working on some interim solutions involving redirects that will get us most of the way there, but the sooner we have the links collections the sooner we can reach or ultimate goal.
Please collect these links and submit them to the project forum, along with the geographical area where you found the links posted.
Information on what applications and software are being used and in what contexts
My initial idea was that only a web browser was needed for the shelter residents to use. However, it turns out that the residents need to be able to prepare resumes for local job listings and do other work that requires and Office Suite.
I'm sure there are plenty of other requirements that I and the PWS folks haven't thought of, so the PWS team needs to know exactly what the needs are in the shelters, so they can modify the releases accordingly.
Please submit any feedback of this type that you have to the project forum.
Filtering, proxy, etc. needs
The PWS team has been focused on client distributions, but some of us in the field are asking for router/NAT/firewall/filtering capabilities. Often, all you get from a shelter is an Ethernet port, with service that can come from almost anywhere. This being the case, shelters will have to provide their own filtering and routing.
If you're using this kind of router/filter setup, the PWS guys need to get in touch with you and find exactly what you're doing and with what hardware/software combination. Please submit as much information on this as possible.
Any other information...
...that you think is relevant for folks working on the software side of this project to know, please submit it ASAP.
reader comments