The Do-Good Imperative
BusinessWeek by Janet Ginsburg · · Article
"One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice."
Part of BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness special report, this piece and its companion coverage featured Jesse Robbins' work at the intersection of emergency response and technology — drawing on his experience as an EMT, Katrina responder, and co-founder of the Velocity conference.
In July 2008, BusinessWeek dedicated a special report — the CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness — to technology’s role in emergency response. Jesse Robbins appeared throughout the coverage as a practitioner: an EMT who had worked disaster zones, a Velocity conference co-chair who understood how infrastructure fails under pressure, and a technologist who had seen firsthand the gap between what tools promised and what they delivered when the stakes were highest.
The State of the Art vs. The State of the Practice
Robbins had driven through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on a mission for World Shelters, an organization providing secure emergency supplies. American Red Cross workers guided him using Google Maps — but the maps were outdated. Roads shown as passable had been washed away. Directions led to dead ends.
“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.”
The gap Robbins identified wasn’t a technology gap. The tools existed. The problem was that sophisticated technology, designed for stable environments by people who’d never been in a disaster zone, routinely failed the moment it encountered real-world conditions. “Frequently, you’d be working with them and they’d give you directions over closed streets or places that didn’t exist any longer,” he said of the Red Cross workers using Google’s mapping tools.
Collaborative Infrastructure for Crisis
The BusinessWeek coverage situated Robbins within a larger movement of technologists building disaster-resilient tools: GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture were all working on collaborative mapping systems that could be updated by anyone with knowledge of a place — letting communities correct the record in real time as conditions changed.
For Robbins, these weren’t abstract civic projects. They were operational infrastructure problems. Reliable maps during a flood were a version of the same challenge he’d spent years solving at Amazon: how do you build systems that degrade gracefully under load, recover quickly from failures, and remain useful in the worst conditions? Emergency response just made the stakes undeniably human.