July 2007
Hexayurt Press Coverage
I’ve been surprised and delighted to discover that Shane Deichman and Thomas Barnett both covered the new Hexayurt web site in their respective blogs today.
Shane and I did an interview that you can see at the 13:00 minute mark of this short film that Lindsey Darby and I made at Strong Angel 3,a disaster response demonstration, in San Diego last year. It’s a good little video - really reveals a lot about how the disaster relief world is changing.
Shane hasn’t made it to Burning Man, though. Perhaps Jeff Jonas needs to lead the way here…
UPDATE: The Seitch also has coverage. This is really the fun bit.
Amory Lovins (one of the indirect fathers of the Hexayurt Project) talks about finding “transideological consensus.” When you get the engineering right, suddenly all sides of the political spectrum are on the same side of the issue.
I think this is true of not just politics, but culture. When the .mil types and the greens see the world the same way, odds are something is inherently right.
The Economist on how mobile phones are changing humanitarian aid
Flood, famine and mobile phones
Technology is transforming humanitarian relief—and shifting the balance of power between donors and recipients
Those ingenious victims
While the joys of gadgetry may seem obvious to aid workers, how much has it really done to help victims? The full answer to that question has yet to emerge, and it is aid recipients who will give it. The Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, a group of agencies bent on learning from past mistakes, notes that “local people themselves provided almost all immediate life-saving action and the early-emergency support, as is commonly the case in disasters.”
As the example of Mr Sokor shows, people affected by catastrophe are not necessarily helpless or hapless. Their ingenuity is likely to change disaster response by rich-world donors in unexpected ways.
Already, mobile telephony is transforming the landscape. The World Bank says the number of mobile-phone subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa increased sevenfold between 2000 and 2006. India nearly doubled its mobile-phone subscriptions last year to 150m and the government expects 500m (mobile and land lines) by 2010. Natural and man-made disasters do not only strike rural areas; nearly a billion city dwellers (who use mobiles more) are vulnerable to disaster.
In several recent disaster zones, victims surprised their benefactors by asking not for food or medicine but money. Save the Children, at least, has responded: it has been handing out cash in addition to food in the Horn of Africa and South Asia, and it says UN agencies should do the same.
Hexayurt.com is now Live
Hexayurt.com is now live.
There you can see a tiny video about the project, and links to the primary project repository at Appropedia.
I’ve also posted the mass evac. sketch that I showed to the Red Cross in January. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in decentralized disaster response. They liked it. A lot.