Willow Brugh on Distributed and Digital Disaster Response
March 10th, 2015
The citizen response to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy was in many important ways more effective than the response from established disaster response institutions like FEMA. New York-based response efforts like Occupy Sandy leveraged existing community networks and digital tools to find missing people; provide food, shelter, and medical assistance; and offer a hub for volunteers and donors.
In this talk Willow Brugh — Berkman fellow and Professor of Practice at Brown University — demonstrates examples ranging from Oklahoma to Tanzania where such distributed and digital disaster response have proved successful, and empowered citizens to respond in ways traditional institutions cannot.
Also in ogg for download
More info on this event here.
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1. Maureen Coffey | April 12th, 2015 at 10:52 am
The official disaster response is so totally ineffective because no one really trains for it. A SWAT team or the Green Berets have whole villages to “shoot it out with the bad guys”. Then, when they meet them for real, no matter in what terrain and under what weather conditions, they “know what to do”. To prepare for any (!) catastrophe in New Orleans or New York, you would at regular intervals have to bring normal city life almost to a standstill to really, really, train under conditions at least remotely (!) close to what a natural disaster might eventually look like. That is never going to happen. Like the European governments headed for World War One like sleepwalkers, so do all city dwellers who believe, any amount of “trained” FEMA personnel would know what to do under real (!) circumstances. No, they don’t. AND: they probably get so worried about their loved ones at home when things get really bad, that they all go AWOL. Prepare for it. You!