Open Source Homeland

The Department of Homeland Security NGO training that I wrote about here are available only until April 30, 2007.

Over at the Department of Homeland Security site today, they announced that the “Science and Technology (S&T) directorate has established a program, TechSolutions, to support the first responder community by accelerating delivery of emerging technologies. TechSolutions is designed to collect technological requirements and provide solutions for first responders”.

“No one understands the needs of first responders better than first responders,” said Jay M. Cohen, Under Secretary for S&T. “Every day, hundreds of law enforcement officers, fire fighters, emergency medical services personnel and bomb-squad members think, ‘there’s a better way to do this,’ and we want to hear from them.”

S&T’s commitment to spiral development and rapid prototyping ensures funding for selected proposals within 45 days, and a solution demonstrated within 12 months of funding. Costs of the solutions should be commensurate with the proposal, but less than $1 million per project. Solutions also should deliver up to 100 percent of identified requirements, and first responders will partner with the department from start to finish.

First responders are encouraged to submit ideas that would aid the first responder community by increasing efficiency and on-the-job safety at: www.dhs.gov/techsolutions.

When you hit the Tech Solutions link, it redirects to a mailto (techsolutions@dhs.gov) for people to send a submission “limited to 3 printed pages”.

I hope to God that first responders don’t bother typing documents, waiting for days and months, and waiting for the government to spend “less than $1 million”.

I recognize this mumbo-jumbo from large software development projects. Wikipedia says “the spiral model is favored for large, expensive, and complicated projects.” Not what we need. When first responders say, “there’s a better way to do this”, they ought to find the cheapest, most suitable tools at their disposal to do it better. That’s a better “rapid prototype”.

Nicholas D. Kristof, one of my favorite NYT writers, wrote an article yesterday called “You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor“, where he describes his experience with kiva.org, a website that “lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world“. Couple key points that are relevant to anyone using the internet to build applications that interface with people in the developing world:

Forging Real Connections Between Real People Makes People Safer

Direct financing by American to solid, market-economy type people with live in frenemy countries is a good idea. The children of loan partners are less likely to hate you, no?

Economic Relationships Provide Dignity For All Parties

Instead of handouts.

Lightweight Technology, Coupled with Offline Followup, Gets Things Done

Simple shopping cart, lots of due diligence (including a check of the Terrorist Exclusion List), no big time commitment.

Do Offline Things Offline and Online Things Online

When launching something like this, you’ve got to be like water— flow where you can, flow around where you can’t.

Mr. Abdul Satar said he didn’t know what the Internet was, and he had certainly never been online. But Kiva works with a local lender affiliated with Mercy Corps, and that group finds borrowers and vets them. The local group, Ariana Financial Services, has only Afghan employees and is run by Storai Sadat, a dynamic young woman who was in her second year of medical school when the Taliban came to power and ended education for women.

*

Microfinance institutions typically focusing on lending to women, to give them more status and more opportunities. Ms. Sadat’s group does lend mostly to women, but it’s been difficult to connect some female borrowers with donors on Kiva — because many Afghans would be horrified at the thought of taking a woman’s photograph, let alone posting on the Internet.

In the wake of the pet food contamination recall crisis, where pets are being poisoned from pet food, a database created by veterinarian Dr. Marty Becker has gotten a lot of attention. Good things:

• It’s great that someone other than the government is collecting this information
• It’s great that they link to the FDA site– government/private cooperation

But

• They only display the aggregate numbers
• No ability for others to analyze the data
• No geographic representation of the data

Tools like Google Maps and Frappr make it easy to do more with data. Data presented publicly can be analyzed by the crowd, making for more connections, more thinking. Publicly collected data ought to be displayed publicly.

Marketwatch.com has just come out with prediction markets for stocks. Another commercial usage for something that has tremendous utility for terrorism prevention.

MarketWatch MarketPerception Prediction Market Google