Wikis and Department of Homeland Security

From a recent Homeland Security publication:

If national safety – the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes – depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that’s a different story.

A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages improvisation is quick to recover. Ubiquitous networks of warning may constitute our own asymmetrical advantage,and, like the terrorist networks that occasionally carry out spectacular attacks, their power remains obscure until they're calledinto action.

Perhaps this is there where the power of social networking in general --- and wikis in particular -- meets deep pockets.

Many years ago I was involved with the Contingency Planning Group at a Wall Street bank -- Irving Trust. Our job was to think about and prepare for anything that could go wrong with the computing functions of the bank and to write detailed 'event/response' directions for how to make thing right. What would normally be a relatively minor event ( - say, a tape drive unit failed and the scheduler had to re-route the information) blossomed into if-this-then-that unless 'a' or 'b' or 'c' in which case... Well, you get the point.

And when you think of it, what we were doing is not all that different from the people who develop how do-everything-for-everyone proprietary software.

Just as with each successive release of some bloated office suite product, you just can't think of everything.

Which, in turn, is why Open Source development has shown itself to be so valuable.

Here's the rub. Command and control disaster containment 'cookbooks' rarely work. Our memories of this are clear as we think about images from the September 11th terrorist attack on New York, or from the cascading failures in rescuing Katrina victims.

In both cases, solutions -- smart ones -- arose spontaneously. People attached photos of their loved ones in hope that they'd been seen by anyone else in lower Manhattan that day. Mom and Pop groceries in that part of the city distributed bottled water to help the fleeing Trade Center workers wash the thick dust off their faces. In New Orleans, ad-hoc flotillas of small pleasure boats moved up and down flooded city streets to save people.

There are decentralized and self-organizing enabling communication tools that companies should talk about with people who need to say in contact during emergencies: mesh networks run on solar powered laptops, the use of SMS features on cell phones that work even when voice circuits are hopelessly overloaded, FRS-radios ('walkie talkies' with specific channels and increased range).

And yes, wikis and blogs will play an important role here.

Bet on it!

Comments

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