Press ReleasesAt Strong Angel III Disaster Response Demonstration, Internews Advises on Information Dissemination
(September 5, 2006) "A lethal and highly-contagious virus gradually begins to spread around the globe . . . Emergency services and medical centers are stressed and national government agencies, affected just as severely as the cities themselves, cannot provide assistance . . . 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." This scenario, as described on the web site of Strong Angel III, provided the framework for a disaster response demonstration held in San Diego, California August 21- 26, which gathered over 800 disaster responders, technologists, relief workers, and military and civil officials to test out an array of technologies and tools for responding to a humanitarian crisis. Internews representatives Mark Frohardt and Kathleen Reen contributed their real-life expertise in using local media to disseminate life-saving information during and after a disaster. "In a disaster, typically the messages sent out by emergency responders are very controlled, and local media are viewed with some suspicion," said Frohardt, Internews' Director for Africa and Humanitarian Media. "Our aim was to convey that local media should not be seen just as channel for disseminating official information, but as active participants in the disaster response." Reen, Internews' Regional Director for Asia, said, "We helped the Strong Angel leadership recognize the importance of using public and private media to keep people informed during a crisis and to correct and control rumors and misinformation." At Strong Angel, Frohardt and Reen focused attention of the importance of public and private media in both gathering and disseminating critical information during a disaster. They also worked with Dan Gillmor, Director, Citizen Media, in his efforts to involve local citizens in gathering and sharing information about the disaster via SMS text messaging and blogging, where the disparate reports could be geographically mapped to improve disaster response. Frohardt collaborated with Microsoft to test the use of their SpotWatch, a commercial FM based messaging service during disasters. After distributing such wristwatches to six participants with a journalism background, Frohardt experimented with sending them messages such as could be sent to journalists in a real-life emergency, when normal cell phone and email networks may be down. Microsoft and Internews are discussing the possibility of testing the SpotWatches for use in a disaster, such as the May 2006 earthquake in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Reen worked with SpeechGear and Virage, two participating translation technology companies, to experiment with automatic translation of emergency audio and video messages into local languages. "The test was to see if we could get produced and live video, streamed and TV programming from English out into other languages to enable remote or minority communities to access accurate information in real time," she explained. "The real-life application would be UN or other international or national agencies broadcasting urgent messages or programming that need to be available to local-language or ethnic communities." Internews has experience helping local, independent media to serve survivors of the Asian tsunami, victims of major earthquakes in Pakistan and Indonesia, and refugees from Darfur, For more information: Interview with Mark Frohardt by ICT for Peacebuilding Internews' "emergency response" work Mark Frohardt, Internews Director of Humanitarian Media |
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