Raising some points of concern

Hi all,

I'll try to keep this reasonably brief. I have some concerns to raise  
from discussions that have appeared on this list to date.

1. Focus on US & Katrina - there seems to be a strong focus on  
Hurricane Katrina and US response to disasters in general. I hope  
that we are not creating an ontology that is driven by recent US  
experiences. As someone that did an internship in emergency  
management in the US, and has colleagues around the world in EM, the  
US is something of a special case due to its size, jurisdictions,  
governance, infrastructure, terrorism, financing, and even personal  
attitudes towards litigation and the like.

2. There seem to be a lot of people with an IT background and  
relatively few with an operational knowledge of how emergency  
management works. What plans are there to get more people with hands- 
on knowledge of emergency management involved to balance discussions?  
There are hundreds of disasters that are generally managed well every  
year, yet these appear to be overlooked and the topic seems to be to  
try and reinvent the wheel because of 1 or 2 bad experiences in the  
last few years. I would hate to see an ontology developed with a lot  
of IT people and relatively little input from the emergency  
management profession.

3. I'm getting a vibe that quite a few on this list want to go  
entirely with a distributed, individualistic approach to designing  
this ontology - letting two individuals connect to match needs etc,  
without actually considering any interaction with either emergency  
services, government agencies or non-governmental organisations. I  
get the feeling that this is miles-off-the-mark - the key target we  
should be focusing on is the 'impacted community' - which includes  
people, organisations, businesses, government, infrastructure and  
others. Any ontology needs to support say individuals providing  
damage assessment information to their relevant agencies - such as  
the water company, electricity company, local council that manages  
streets etc. I haven't seen any mention of the ontology supporting  
this form of community engagement, rather it seems to be focusing on  
an individual-to-individual approach. My concern here is that if a  
community adopts this individual-to-individual approach currently  
being promoted - what happens when someone dies because no individual  
came forward to provide someone with water? Also, who is responsible  
when hard decisions have to be made such as the allocation of scarce  
resources? Do you really want an individual making decisions  
regarding scarce resources without having the information,  
understanding, training, and experience that the emergency managers  
have?

It feels like we're trying to build something entirely new for the  
sake of a big experiment, when we should be creating something that  
improves and builds on the existing system.

Cheers Gav

PS I just skimmed Newt's principles - and there is nothing  
startlingly new there. Most of those things are indeed already  
happening in emergency management in America and have been happening  
for a long time (even when I was in the US in 2002). That paper  
smells like little more than a politician trying to make political  
hay out of Katrina without having a real understanding of how things  
are working at a local level.

Received on Friday, 22 June 2007 10:13:57 UTC