Final Report

Annex 11

Annex 10

Annex 8

Annex 8

Annex 7

Annex 6

Annex 5

Annex 4

Annex 3

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Mission

Strong Angel demonstrations are neutral laboratories for the development and evaluation of tools designed to assist in global responses to populations in crisis. Each demonstration incorporates principles of inclusion, cooperation, reliability, accessibility, simplicity, and creative synthesis while maintaining a dedicated focus on the population served.

Vision

Strong Angel will become an incubator for ideas that help improve our global responses to man-made and natural disasters. We will nurture ideas and solutions that are flexible, inclusive, impartial, reliable, resilient, and which build trust. We value open standards and the development of tools and technology that can simply and effectively share information and knowledge in difficult circumstances. We are sensitive to the complex needs of populations affected by violence and disaster and seek to develop capabilities that transform antipathy, antagonism, and desperation to cooperation toward goals held in common. We are guided by a Do No Harm ethos and strive to develop solutions that strengthen humanitarian response cooperation, bringing assistance to communities in need through the supporting of resilience, self-reliance and self-determination wherever such independence can be encouraged.

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“Moving SA-III towards a Strong Angel community”

1. StrongAngel.org: In our view, Affiliation is the oft-forgotten tier in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but that step on the ladder may actually be the most crucial for restoring a sense of community after a disaster. It is also, arguably, the most valuable attribute for the responding community to share as they arrive to help from diverse areas and agencies. Any solutions proposed for response and reconstruction that disrupt a sense of affiliation, in those affected or in those responding, will impede the restoration of a community. From our perspective, the best ideas from Strong Angel III were those that allowed a damaged community to embrace self-reliance and reconstruction on their own terms rather than those terms imposed by an external agency. A willingness to engage in a conversation with the local population, then, ensured a sense of integration and trust with those charged with helping.

SA-III provided a setting for the Strong Angel team to assemble a diverse group of people with complementary capabilities whose cooperation is essential to solving some of our world’s most challenging problems. Many participants who came to SA-III with the aim of fulfilling a certain task or objective failed to do so, sometimes after repeated attempts. The demonstration was structured in such a way that failures were often as instructive as the successes.

Based on opinions within more than 40 pages of post-event interviews, the participants at SA-III were pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of the event in generating both new learning and unexpected outcomes. SA-III was initially a struggle for many taking part because the design forced participants to embrace new responsibilities through constructively interacting with others. The collaborative process of jointly defining and solving problems took many well outside of their comfort zone, and the enthusiastic response has proven to the Strong Angel team that it was well worth it. Participants and observers have repeatedly stated that they have learned more at SA-III than in any other planned exercise and have developed a new appreciation for the capabilities and limitations of other actors in a response environment.

Monday

“Establish operations, communications and links to the community”

Infrastructure & Operational Support

Evaluation

• Small scale power provided by commercial personal generators and GM Hybrid Powertrain trucks, which had built-in 2.4 kW generators and four auxiliary electric power outlets (120 volt, 20 amp) to provide power to construction tools, BGAN satellite units, efficient lighting units, public address systems, HAM radios, and laptops.
• Larger scale power—local, generator, solar (including a new report describing the development of a four-fold increase in solar efficiency, coming to us now and sparked by reporting on SA-III.)
• Lighting within the site was designed to be both rugged and highly efficient. We found value in area LED lighting from Carmanah in Canada, TekTorch handheld LEDs, and compact fluorescent lighting within rugged metal cylinders from Husky.

Discovery

• Desalinated water by Aqua Genesis was delivered through a new process using waste heat and seawater, with purity levels several orders of magnitude better than conventional requirements. That invention was described during SA-III, and there are now investors involved in further development.

Innovation

• Low-cost family shelter and cooking solutions were made available through the Hexayurt shelter, wood gasification stoves, composting toilet, and other technologies appropriate for supporting a displaced family. The Hexayurt refugee family shelter, a structure built from four-by-eight sheets of hexacomb insulation and duct tape for under US$300, was used to provide accommodation at SA-III. The shelters were then further adapted as meeting spaces, communications centers, and visitor reception areas.

Communications

Evaluation

• DRASTIC and GATR demonstrated an inflatable VSAT communications antenna, made of ultra-light racing sail cloth and transportable by backpack. It inflated on the SA-III site to a roughly 12 ft diameter VSAT satellite dish and worked reliably all week. At least one international NGO CIO thought it was the most interesting new technology on the site.
• Amateur radio (HAM) had multiple successes, including robust email messaging capabilities in the San Diego area and around the globe (e.g. Spain and Russia) over HF radio. An abbreviated report on HAM radio results can be found in Annex 3.
• Video teleconferencing from VSee and Tandberg to SA-III field sorties with Border Patrol vehicles, San Diego police stations, Harbor patrol boats, SeaBotix underwater robot, and MedWeb’s mobile communications van. VSee also established live video links with international remote locations in Afghanistan and Indonesia.
• A highly efficient, very small public address system was found to be effective in several locations for crowd management and information dissemination. Such a capability is critical in emergency circumstances. A long-range directional audio system was also evaluated and found to perform as described (spoken voice audible at ½ mile range) but was not used on the site since it was not needed.
• FM radio broadcasts were used to deliver messages to five separate classes of participants (security, network, medical, EXCOM, and NGO) through the Microsoft SPOT watches. Those proved effective for subtle notification of conditions on the SA-III site.

Discovery

• Hastily Formed Networks turned into “Inadequately Formed Networks” at SA-III. Internet communications and on-site communications networks failed for the first 2 days and were unreliable thereafter. This occurred despite the presence of a huge amount of satellite bandwidth on-site. The wireless mesh was regularly unreliable, and personal WiFi networks continually disrupted well-planned professional networks. Key learning—those responsible for networks identified the importance of establishing a multi-vendor working group (led on the Strong Angel site by Bell Canada and Cisco Systems) to develop flexible but standardized operating procedures for ad hoc disaster communications in the field.
• SeaBotix Little Benthic Vehicle robot was linked up via Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) to provide live video feeds on VSee from underwater remote sites back to EOC over EVDO and WiFi networks. One result was the altering of security procedures at San Diego International Airport with the full cooperation of the Strong Angel team working with the airport staff.

Innovation

• A unified notification gateway was developed under the Codespear platform that allowed for multi-cast group messaging and alert notification to SMS, voicemail, cell-phone, email, SPOT watches, and police-EMS-fire radio and family band radio.
• Boost cell phones were modified for persistent and multi-modal geo-location through software developed by Autonomechs. Those locations were broadcast to maps every 5 minutes through an extremely efficient data transfer. That system was developed for Strong Angel and was used throughout the demonstration for near-real-time localization of participants.

Tuesday

“Assess and evaluate the community situation, needs and priorities.”

Participants designed their own experiments to conduct during the event, with the Executive Committee providing a scenario, a set of objectives, a realistic and somewhat austere disaster environment, and inputs and challenges to keep it interesting during the week. The Demonstration Objectives can be found in Annex 5 and on the SA-III website: http://www.strongangel3.net. The Objectives there, and the corresponding solutions, addressed six main categories of disaster relief domain sets and potential solutions. In ascending order, they were:

• Infrastructure & Operational Support,
• Communications,
• Integration & Mesh,
• Tools & Services,
• Community & Social Network, and
• Policy & Practice.

Within these domain layers, the participants’ experiments were cross-cutting and had three exploratory methods:

For 5 days in August 2006, more than 800 participants, observers, and local volunteers came together at Strong Angel III (SA-III), an international humanitarian response demonstration held in San Diego, California. The purpose of the demonstration was the development of a laboratory for experimenting with cutting-edge techniques and technologies to facilitate improved cooperation and information flow across the civil-military boundary in post-disaster and post-conflict field environments.

Over the course of 5 days, on the grounds of the San Diego Fire Training Academy, Eric Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP, and the Strong Angel team—a group of medical, military, humanitarian, and technology experts—encouraged participants to explore the development of technical and social tools. Those tools were designed specifically to address roughly 50 real-world challenges that support the principles of community resilience and effective cooperation in response to a complex emergency. The Strong Angel team chose the scenario of a lethal pandemic coupled with a cyber-terrorist attack to provide an adverse context designed to stimulate learning, sharing and experimentation. Teams from the public and private sectors, including engineers, UN staff, humanitarian NGO workers, academic researchers, journalists, active-duty military officers, policy makers and others, formed a working laboratory for disaster response innovation.

Strong Angel III was an international disaster response demonstration held in San Diego, California from 21-26 August 2006. During the demonstration week there were roughly 800 participants from more than 200 organizations working in an abandoned building on a set of Objectives within a simple Scenario. This report explains the design of the event, our shared perceptions of the results, and our view of the way ahead.