Proposed by: NetHope.
Contact (Gisli Olafsson, gisli.olafsson @ nethope dot org, +354-8406909, disasterexpert):
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: through email but also via skype (I am in Iceland so GMT)
When the disaster strikes the first and largest wave of humanitarian responders are those already working on developmental projects for the response organization in the country. They are often required to make use of ICT technologies and systems that are commonly used in emergency environments but not in developmental projects. Successful coordination and information sharing in emergencies is therefore often hampered by the lack of ICT know-how of the field staff.
This lack of ICT capacity by field workers, especially national staff, was one of the key issues raised by emergency response organizations during a recent survey done among some of the leading emergency response organizations. This is also recognized in the recently published Strategy 2020 by IFRC which identifies digital divide amongst field staff and volunteers as a key area to improve over the next 10 year period. Issues such as high turn-over of local staff as well as cost of attending training courses were most often mentioned as the core reasons for lack of progress in this area.
There are a number of ICT technologies and solutions that get used during emergencies but get little usage at other times. Field workers will therefore often not have gotten training in the use of these technologies or have received this training long time ago and have therefore forgotten how to use them. We are therefore looking for ways to create and distribute short and concise self-study training modules in the use of those technologies. Initial focus should be on creating training modules in the use of satellite phones, BGANs and GPS systems. These self-study courses should be available both on-line and as off-line videos that can be viewed on smartphones such as iPhone, Windows 7 phones, Blackberries, etc. That way people can easily have access to the training at any time and have them pre-loaded on their devices before going into the field.
My mobile phone just went off. I am being deployed to an island country called Thule. It was just struck by an 7.6 magnitude earthquake. As I board the plane taking me and the rest of my team there I start wondering if I still remember how to use a satellite phone. I reach for my smartphone and go to the Mobile Emergency Response Training application and start watching the training video. When the plane lands in Smokey Bay the capitol of Thule I have already caught up on my training.
A video highlighting the problem definition can be found on YouTube
Problem: John is at home when an earthquake strikes a remote country. He is being sent there as part of a rescue team. In order to refresh his training he watches short training videos on his smartphone while travelling to the affected country.
Problem: Jose is at the office when an earthquake strikes the country he works as a gender balance advisor. Since he is the only representative of his organization within the affected country he is now being thrown into coordinating the immediate emergency response. Since Jose is not used to dealing with disasters in his day to day job he is not familiar with all the gadgets and technologies used such as Satellite phones and GPSs. As he stares at the Satellite phone wondering how to make a call back to headquarters in the US he remembers the smartphone application he downloaded which was supposed to contain some training for emergency situations. He browses through the training available and watches the satellite phone training. He now can call headquarters and report about the situation in the country.
Problem: David is a traininging manager at Save The Children. He wants to make sure that all of his field based staff has access to training on how to utilize the new SMS texting service that Save The Children just implemented. He uploads a short training video to the Emergency Training Platform and this automatically gets uploaded to field worker smartphones the next time they have connectivity.
The humanitarian worker installs the Mobile Emergency Training application from the App Store of his phone manufacturer. After installing the application the humanitarian worker is offered to download all available training videos or to download only certain categories of videos or videos from a particular provider (organization). The humanitarian worker is then offered to be notified when new training is available.
When the humanitarian worker opens up the Mobile Emergency Training application he can view training videos either in an alphabetical order, by release date, by which videos have been watched, by category and by organization that uploaded the training video.
A humanitarian organization can be given access to uploading training videos to the back-end system. When uploading content they need to provide the name of the content, a category (ICT, Basecamp, Medical, WASH, etc.) and of course the video file itself.
The solution should work fine in disconnected environments, in other words training video should get synchrnonized to the mobile device. The application should work on iPhone, Android and Windows 7 Phones. The back-end system should be a centralized cloud based
Having this work on all types of smartphones and on a desktop client (offline and online) would really make a huge difference. If there could be tracking of what videos get watched and how often and my who then that would be great feedback loop. It would also be cool to have some kind of rating system or review system for training videos.
I am sure we can leverage cloud based video storage systems such as YouTube or Vimeo for the backend, but we need a more specialized system for tagging the videos and then synchronizing them to the different clients.
NetHope would take the proof of concept that comes out of RHoK and try it in field situations. We would then look at finding donors who would be willing to fund further development and the creation of training videos.
To my knowledge no work has yet begun at RHoK on a solution like this.