I stumbled across this event. It looks it was a great collaborative effort (remnds me of this place).
Strong Angel 3 About Objectives People Organizations Forum Wiki News Blogs
THE SCENARIO A Complex Contingency: A lethal and highly-contagious virus gradually begins to spread around the globe. Infection rates are high, deaths are frequent, and no vaccine is available. Cities all over the world fall under quarantine. Emergency services and medical centers are stressed and national government agencies, affected just as severely as the cities themselves, cannot provide assistance. And then the situation goes from bad to worse.
A terrorist cell, having long waited for such an opportunity, launches a wave of successful cyber attacks in a medium size city somewhere in the developed world, bringing down grid power, Internet access, land and cellular telephones. Other, more subtle, attacks follow, and it’s difficult to sort out the mess.
If there were ever a time to work effectively together, this would be it.
Recognizing that a comparable scenario might one day unfold in real life, a diverse group of disaster responders, technologists, and community leaders will assemble in San Diego in August of 2006 for an event designed to simulate a truly complex disaster. Over the course of seven days, on the grounds of the San Diego Fire Training Academy, the campus of San Diego State University, and in the streets of the city, we will explore techniques and technologies for responding effectively when the response itself must adapt to cascading losses. By demonstrating what is possible through public and private-sector partnerships within a community, we intend to develop approaches to cultivating local resilience that may be useful for any city, here or abroad.
Strong Angel III Fact Sheet Strong Angel Defined A week-long series of demonstrations to test and show combinations of integrated technologies and techniques that improve information flow and cooperation across civil and military boundaries in delivering humanitarian relief efforts to victims of disasters and conflicts.
Strong Angel III Dates August 21 – 26, 2006.
Location San Diego, CA, including San Diego Fire Department Fire Rescue Training Facility and the San Diego State University Visualization Center.
Strong Angel III Complex Disaster Scenario Humanitarian relief demonstrations to address a simulated lethal pandemic that’s further complicated by a wave of cyber attacks that cripple critical local infrastructure and information systems.
Strong Angel III Director Eric Rasmussen, MD, San Diego State University.
Participants Volunteer experts, including engineers, NGO staff, humanitarian relief workers, academic researchers, policy makers and current and former military personnel.
Strong Angel III Goals To field-test and demonstrate effective means of delivering life-saving humanitarian relief in wake of disasters, to foster close collaboration and communications between humanitarian relief agencies, governments and military in providing disaster relief, and to provide local communities with solutions that can help them cope with disasters more immediately and effectively.
Strong Angel III Funding A combination of public and private sector organizations have provided funds and volunteered resources for this week-long demonstration.
Strong Angel III team members will conduct field trials and demonstrations of solutions that address 49 specific humanitarian relief challenges – both technical and social – that have not yet been adequately overcome in real disaster relief efforts. These experiments and demonstrations will be conducted in adverse environments within the context of a simulated lethal pandemic caused by a highly contagious virus, which is further complicated by the modeling of a wave of cyber attacks that cripple critical local infrastructure and Strong Angel III systems. The Strong Angel III Executive Committee will issue a lessons-learned document on its web site near the end of the year.
Objectives 49 are too many to list. Follow the link.
This event was covered by several major newspapers Disaster simulation in U.S. finds computers vulnerable
New ideas for disaster relief 10/23/06 By Caron Golden, Government Computer News
Strong Angel III demonstrates IT for humanitarian crises
The list of disasters in recent years — Hurricane Katrina, the devastating tsunami that struck Indonesia two years ago, earthquakes in Pakistan and Iran — could make a person shudder. Or, if you’re a Strong Angel participant, get you gearing up to help.
The Strong Angel series is a volunteer demonstration disaster response laboratory that brings together medical, humanitarian, military and technology experts from the public and private sectors, civilian and military agencies and domestic and international organizations.
Human and IT networks
The goal is to solve problems in global disaster response by field-testing and demonstrating technologies to facilitate humanitarian relief. It also could help develop enduring social networks that responders can call on in an emergency.
Led by Eric Rasmussen, an active-duty Navy commander, physician and adjunct professor at San Diego State University, Strong Angel held its first demonstration in June 2000 near Puu Pa’a on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Strong Angel II followed in 2004 on a remote lava bed near Waikaloa, Hawaii. This past summer, Strong Angel III took place for seven days in San Diego at the former Naval Training Center, where more than 800 people participated.
“We do Strong Angel because you get to sit around with the thoughts of some of the best species on the planet right now,” said Rasmussen. “These people are educated, experienced and not shy. And, while we have the participation of a lot of for-profit organizations like Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Bell Canada and Google, we have an explicit mandate that they’re not allowed to market their products. The point is collaboration, cooperation and developing interoperability, not to push or sell. How well can you blend, not how well can you shine.”
Several months after the event, leaders still are evaluating the software and systems that developed over the course of the demonstration, but several, they say, stand out.
Eric Frost, co-director of San Diego State University’s Homeland Security masters program and Strong Angel III’s regional coordinator, was impressed with a group called Drastic LLC of Charlotte, N.C., which installs and maintains broadband Internet connectivity for aid workers in post-disaster situations and in under-served cities, jungles and deserts in the developing world. Drastic was a responder in Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Frost was struck by the company’s beach ball-like GATR (ground antenna transmit/receive) technology — a light, inflatable satellite communications antenna that is easy to transport and, once popped up, provides Internet connectivity. It’s made by GATR Technologies Inc. of Huntsville, Ala.
“They [the Drastic team] got a network going after the tsunami,” Frost explained. “They were also an ISP [Internet service provider] to Afghanistan before, during and after the Taliban. They’re a very unusual group of people and made a profound point during and after the event — that there’s huge expertise among people for Third World countries, as opposed to being U.S. - centric. That’s rare. They’re really developing stuff that could be deployed in the Third World.”
Videoconferencing on the go
Nigel Snoad, the demonstration director and lead capabilities researcher with Microsoft Humanitarian Systems, was wowed by lightweight videoconferencing by Vsee Lab of San Jose, Calif. Using low-bandwidth videoconferencing and collaboration software, VSee provides secure global communication between local and remote participants.
Another company, Tandberg of New York, also got attention for its videoconferencing systems, which utilize satellite and wireless EVDO (Evolution-Data Optimized), a radio broadband standard.
Interact and experiment
There also was a lot of interest in Simple Sharing Extensions, a specification that could make RSS data feeds two-way, and in Bell Canada’s integrated messaging platform, which Snoad said could be used effectively to communicate with staff.
But as important as the technology was, Strong Angel III leaders said, the opportunity for participants to interact and experiment was just as compelling. There was a focus on creating a common operational picture to enhance collaboration and sharing information, and, equally important, on meeting others just as passionate about humanitarian relief.
“A big aspect of this is that a fair number of participants will actually be responders,” said Frost. “The social networking of people here is important so that if something happens, responders have people to call and can make fairly outrageous requests.”
“The point was to take people out of their cubicles and force them to interact with others in a very difficult environment for a very noble purpose,” Rasmussen said. “Take off the corporate hat and figure out how you’re going to help.”
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