Can digital pipes handle swine flu epidemic spikes?
Pandemics change human behavior for millions of people. Our networks may not be ready for those changes. Just stay home. Wash your hands. Advice from the US CDC for people at risk of the 2009 swine flu. Mexican authorities urge avoiding face-to-face contact in many-to-many places like hospitals, museums, theaters, cinemas (releases of X-Men Origins and Star Trek are postponed), churches, sports events, public markets. Working at Home. While television (or streaming video) might substitute in sports and music events, bringing other work home is harder. Can mobile phones and the Internet create alternatives for information, education, service, and entertainment workers? Can employers keep workers home? Can employers quickly offer full digital command, communications, collaboration, coordination, and control services to sites scattered throughout a city? Online communities swarm in response to emergencies and threats. 9-11, Tsunami relief, Katrina, Mumbai invasion, Southern California wildfires had four stages. Spreading alarms ("hey did you see?") through many online media to trigger swarming. today, this includes tags and #hashtags, improving discoverability and transmissibility of the event and the event’s memes. People want to know more. As people flock to the news, they create an overwhelming amount of repetition and echo and noise. So people start… Organizing to improve/concentrate/filter information. People want to make sense of the spew. At the start people create new topical blogs, email lists, facebook forums, YouTube channels. Volunteers transcribe television and radio reports, retweet headlines and commentary, timelines of government responses. In short filtering, digestion, and meaning step in. Then people want to help other people (and themselves). So you see Online serves offline. Volunteers build specific services connecting online news/community to local people/places/activities. For Tsunami relief I participated in an instant call center via Skype community volunteers. Other services put together online databases of victims, or geomashups of hotspots, or fundraising projects, or medical information. Aftermath. People are helped, most of the online world goes back to their lives, and some of the legacy systems persist to serve those still concerned or affected by the event. By contrast, people shun common places and take refuge in their homes in a biological outbreak/epidemic/pandemic. This creates new problems. Stage Leapfrogging. Surprise! Step 1 (alarming, swarming) will take place in hours. You’ll move immediately to Step 2, managing information overload. You could wake up having missed your chance to shape your community’s and business’s response. Or first access to preventive measures. Social Infrastructure Demand Scales. While millions are affected by most major disasters, pandemics could affect hundreds of millions, especially those in big cities where people congregate. Is twitter ready for 100 million new users? Facebook? CDC.gov? Amazon and Google cloud computing? Infrastructure Demand Shifts Home. Capacity is in the wrong place. Are the nation’s ISPs ready to move data to residential pipes at workplace speeds, without residential caps, all day, every day? How fast can mobile carriers supplement residential coverage? Who would fund this buildout? Can we beef up the last mile faster than an epidemic spreads? Can we allocate resources based on where an epidemic hits first and worst, instead of using pure market forces? Cannot Filter Meaningful Signal from Abundant Noise. Today’s tools don’t help people consistently and reliably pick the vital, life changing information from the ordinary. So you’ll miss product recalls, medical updates, neighborhood alerts in the lossy spew of mailing lists, social updates, and newsfeeds. Would you trust your family’s life to a #hashtag ? Local Focus Without Local Filters. Many of our systems depend on hundreds or thousands of people looking intently at one topic. What happens when we have must hyperlocalize news and community? The ratio of participants-per-topic falls fast as people focus on their own lives, their own work, their own neighborhoods. Does your block have enough people updating the network so the social network benefits kick in? We clearly don’t have tough, accurate filters/readers to help us focus by: Geography (streets, blocks, buildings, neighborhoods), Topic (all those people who might have congregated at baseball games, pubs, museums, city hall), and Occupation (by employer, workplace, team, process, project, agency) Clinic (chains of information, care, supplies, volunteers, alerting) Service Gaps. The digital divide has dramatic health effects on the poor, homeless, and underclasses. Tens of millions of the vulnerable are without mobile phones, email, or any frequent internet access. How do you connect offline people to online services? What can we do to prepare? See also: Ushahidi: Emergency Information Patterns and Thoughts on Swine Flu US: PanedemicFlu.gov, CDC.gov/swineflu UK: Health Protection Agency NYTimes: Swine Flu Cases Map HufPo: Swine-Flu News Channel iPhone: Swine Flu Tracker Google: Flu Trends Flu Fashion N95 masks photos credit cc:by Randal Sheppard tags: skype, H1N1, google, wireless, mobile, isp, breakout, epidemic, pandemic, disaster, disasterplanning, infrastructure, disasterpreparedness, scenarios, flu, influenza, swineflu, cdc, who, hyperlocalCall me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.