ICTs in Mitigation presented at ITU COE in Hanoi

Three talks in one day at the  ITU Asia-Pacific Centre of Excellence Training on ICT Applications on Mitigating Natural Disaster. The event was hosted by Viettel and held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, in Hanoi, Vietnam from 28th to the 29th of November, 2014.

First talk :: The presentation emphasized on a national emergency communication plans.; "considerations for developing a resilient emergency communication system." To that end one needs to:  1. Understand the Natural & Industrial hazard risk profile (e.g. Mongolia) 2. Determine the emergency ICT system:     (a) State of the plans, policies, and procedures     (b) Clarity of EM stakeholder roles and responsibilities     (c) Implementation of multi-agency situational-awareness     (d) Gaps in communications and business continuity plans     (e) Readiness on all-hazards all-media communication

A lot of the lessons learned were taken from the LIRNEasia report to UNESCAP.    Second talk :: Sahana ecosystem for developing Disaster Mitigation applications - The Sahana ecosystem essentially comprise a community of practice; namely, the group of individuals sharing a common interest in investing their resources towards developing information systems for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery phases. The power of the community of practice approach is one of the main reasons for the Philippines community was able to get Sahana community’s assistance to fulfil their humanitarian operations information sharing and publishing needs. Sahana members could be identified as “technology stewards.” - terminology adopted from communities of practice theory.

Third talk :: A national emergency communication protocol should implement the CAP standard with defining the country profile, register of alerting authorities, and alerting procedures. The presented the Common Alerting Protocol-enabled future trends of disaster warning applications. The all-hazard all-media protocol is quickly expanding into ads and digital signage space.

Strix ideal for ITU's Smart Sustainable Development Model

Spot-On's STRIX application coupled with YAZMI satellite system is an ideal solution for ITU's Smart Sustainable Development Model. Strix is capable of receiving syncronous (live streams of audio & video) and asynchronous data (files) and then making them available through a local area network. STRIX & YAZMI combine to provide the internet experience to those undeserved digizens who do not have access to quality broadband communications.

The Odyssey Tablet PC is designed to connect directly to the Yazmi satellite with the Yazmi antenna or connect to a Strix receiver-server box though the WiFi. The school solution provides live streams of classroom lectures on to the Tablet PC. Students can visit the library to access text-books to read, watch videos, or listed to audio sound bytes. Health educators can utilize the same applications to provide health education programs and sophisticated medical procedures to rural practitioners

During a crisis the Strix and Yazmi solution can be used to provide early warnings and support emergency response operations with situational-awareness information.

Introducing the Sahana CAP-enabled Messaging Broker to ITU-D Asia Pacific Community

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The International Telecommunications Union - Disaster (ITU-D) conducted workshop in Thailand, introduced the utility of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard, to the delegates, through a the Sahana CAP-enabled software and a series of hands-on exercises. The CAP ease-of-use and utility were appreciated by those delegates. Participants experienced the efficiency gains of the single entry of a message being simultaneously disseminated through multiple technologies to multiple recipients, acknowledged the CAP message consistency removing ambiguity that may, otherwise, lead to false responses, and realized the capabilities of brokering multi-agency publishers and subscribers for improved situational-awareness^.
 

ITU-D hosted a session on the topic: “Introduction to Operationalizing the Common Alerting Protocol” at the workshop: “Use of Telecommunications/ICT for Disaster Management¹”. This hands-on CAP session was resourceful in producing positive outcomes. Delegates had the opportunity to assess the capabilities of the standard using the CAP-enabled Sahana broker software.

Click to view the workshop report available on the web and the slide deck .

Evidence points to the growing need for a CAP-enabled ITU-D Module (CAP-ITUM). The CAP-ITUM would foster the wider-scale adoption of the the CAP standard and the policies it offers. The ITU branded module would advance the member states, lagging in implementing CAP, with facilitating multi-agency all-hazards all-media warning, alerting, and situational-awareness capabilities, to effectively coordinate hazard events. Since the first release of CAP in 2005, only a handful of member states: North America, Australia, and Germany have adopted the standard. Sri Lanka, an early adopter, has carried out several research projects involving the standard but has not progressed beyond with institutionalizing it at a National level. Other member states have failed to realize the full potential of CAP beyond simply accepting as an interoperable XML schema.