Open Source Homeland

Strong Angel III | Strong Angel III
THE DEMONSTRATION

What will happen? Organizations and individuals participating in Strong Angel III are volunteering their time and resources to explore innovations in humanitarian response capabilities. This is not a trade show or a technology fair, with vendor booths, demos, and product literature. Nor is it an Exercise in the usual sense, with teams of first responders and a highly-scripted scenario. Instead, SA-III will focus on simulating those aspects of post-disaster conditions that specifically impact communication, information sharing, and coordination. The week-long demonstration will consist of a series of collaborative technical and non-technical experiments based on both lessons learned in past disasters and on emerging requirements for integrated operations. They are designed to test the interoperability, reliability, and flexibility of proposed social and technical solutions. Strong Angel III is a chance for vendors, humanitarian practitioners, First Responders, the military, and community leaders to explore capabilities, inter-operability, usability, and deployment with the specific intent that the solutions proposed be accessible globally. Strong Angel will provide an adverse environment designed to maximize learning, sharing and experimentation.

It’s odd to see the classification methods in these alert systems — neighborhood, hotels, financial.  My AlertSF – Home

I don’t see any reason why we can’t start our own Memorandums of Understanding amongst ourselves and share video data feeds among a huge network of private citizens.

City Council approves ordinance for surveillance cameras in private Chicago businesses | Chicago News, Politics, Culture and Commentary – WindyCitizen.com

The Pet Connection Blog has a follow-up post to the widely reported number of 300 deaths due to the pet food recall of earlier this year:

Which, of course, it won’t ever be, for reasons ranging from the lack of death certificates for animals to the number of pets especially cats who never showed up again after eating tainted food, to political issues involving powerful corporate and governmental interests.In other words, if you’re waiting for the government you pay for to tell you how many pets died, how much it cost the citizens of this country and how close the tainted ingredients came to affecting your children, well … don’t hold your breath.

This site had done their own grass-roots database in an attempt to get to the real numbers. Data sure is easy to manipulate, isn’t it?

We’ve all seen the Captivate Network in high-rise office buildings all over the country. This post over on ScreenWerk got me thinking about the possibilities for emergency broadcasting to those screens in municipalities. In situations where people are still encouraged to use the elevator (i.e. the danger is nearby but not in the building) it could provide a valuable, consistent communication platform.