Disaster relief technical volunteer opportunity

[Brent Chapman]

At 1:14 PM -0700 8/21/06, Phil Hunter wrote:
>I'm curious how this is different/better/needed vs. Amateur
>Radio?
>
>Training, Field/Sim Day, International, VoIP, what's different?
>Basically a duplication of effort as far as I can tell.

Not at all.  I am an Amateur Radio operator myself, and Amateur Radio 
serves very different needs in very different ways from what we 
envision.

In simplest terms, Amateur Radio is very good at setting up systems 
that _they_ can use to pass messages _for_ other parties.  Because of 
licensing restrictions and technical factors, though, an Amateur 
Radio operator has to be involved with every message at each station. 
There are also restrictions on what sort of messages can be passed; 
nothing for commercial gain or in support of a commercial business, 
for example.

What several different groups built in Mississippi and Louisiana, on 
the other hand, were community WiFi Internet access networks that 
anybody (sometimes victims, but more often other relief workers from 
other agencies) could tap into and use.  This enabled these other 
groups to far more effectively communicate with and mobilize 
resources from outside the disaster area, such as their own backing 
organizations, yielding a much more effective response; furthermore, 
they could do it on a "self-serve" basis with IT equipment that 
they're already more or less familiar with, and without needing a 
specially-licensed operator, enabling far more "customers" to be 
served.

I'm proud to be an Amateur Radio operator.  Amateur Radio is probably 
always going to be up and running first, within hours of a major 
disaster, providing vital communications links during the first hours 
and days after a disaster.  But it's foolish not to recognize its 
limitations (some regulatory, some technical, and some practical), 
and pretend that it can be everything for everybody and that there's 
no role for any other mechanism.


-Brent
-- 
Brent Chapman <brent at greatcircle.com> -- Great Circle Associates, Inc.
Specializing in network infrastructure for Silicon Valley since 1989
For info about us and our services, please see http://www.greatcircle.com/
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