The Do-Good Imperative

BusinessWeek built a special report in July 2008 called the CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness, and I ran through several of the pieces as a practitioner: EMT, Hurricane Katrina responder, Velocity co-chair, technologist on the ground.

The state of the art vs. the state of the practice

I had been driving through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, delivering temporary secure shelters for emergency supplies. American Red Cross workers were navigating with Google Maps, but the maps were stale. 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 was not a technology gap. The tools existed. The problem was that sophisticated tooling designed for stable environments, by people who had never been in a disaster zone, fell apart the moment it hit 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,” I told them about the Red Cross workers using Google’s mapping tools.

Collaborative infrastructure for crisis

BusinessWeek placed me alongside a larger group 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.

These were not abstract civic projects to me. They were operational infrastructure problems. Reliable maps during a flood were a version of the same challenge I had been solving at Amazon: how do you build systems that degrade gracefully under load, recover quickly from failures, and stay useful in the worst conditions. Emergency response just made the stakes undeniably human.