--- title: "How to Serve Those That Serve Others | Web 2.0 Summit 2008" description: "Jesse Robbins's 2008 Web 2.0 Summit High Order Bit on adapting technology to first responders, government, and military users, and why it needs champions." canonical: "https://jesserobbins.com/mentions/how-to-serve-those-that-serve-others-web-2-summit-2008/" jsonld: "https://jesserobbins.com/mentions/how-to-serve-those-that-serve-others-web-2-summit-2008.json" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qogx6edklng/hqdefault.jpg" doc_version: "1.0" last_updated: 2026-10-28 slug: "how-to-serve-those-that-serve-others-web-2-summit-2008" outlet: "Web 2.0 Summit" author: "O'Reilly" date: "2008-11-08" url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qogx6edklng" type: "Talk" excerpt: "My High Order Bit on the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit keynote stage, on how to productively adapt technology to first responders, government, and military users: the pattern Mikel Maron and I found in disaster technology, and why it needs champions." quote: "Remember that your focus is on serving those that serve others." quoteAuthor: "Jesse Robbins" tags: "Emergency Management, Disaster Response, Humanitarian Tech, OpenStreetMap, O'Reilly" duration: "09:54" thumbnail: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qogx6edklng/hqdefault.jpg" dateModified: "2026-10-28" --- # Web 2.0 Summit 08: Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar), High Order Bit Web 2.0 Summit by O'Reilly · November 8, 2008 · Talk · 09:54 > "Remember that your focus is on serving those that serve others." My High Order Bit on the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit keynote stage, on how to productively adapt technology to first responders, government, and military users: the pattern Mikel Maron and I found in disaster technology, and why it needs champions. [View at Web 2.0 Summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qogx6edklng) In November 2008 I gave a High Order Bit on the Web 2.0 Summit keynote stage about how to productively adapt technology to first responders, government, and military users. Tim O’Reilly had challenged the room to go after hard problems. I wanted to show them one, and how to actually work on it. ### The standoff Big change runs into the gap between people who are inexperienced and excited and people who are experienced and afraid of change. In 2008 that gap ran straight through disaster technology. The hackers were saying, “We’re going to save everyone with this new technology,” and the emergency management community was answering, “it is never going to work and you’re going to kill everyone.” Every so often the roles reversed, with emergency managers excited to use Twitter to save the world and technologists telling them it would never work. ### The pattern Mikel Maron and I had found a pattern for disaster technology innovation that gets past that standoff. There is a disaster. In the disaster, people adapt whatever tools they have at hand. Afterward, a champion has to emerge who takes what was learned and improves it iteratively until it spreads through the community. Katrina was my worked example. The road signs on the Mississippi coast had been blown down, so we navigated with handheld GPS units and Google routes. That was the ad-hoc adaptation. The maps were not live, and aid workers had no way to correct them, so we were routed over a bridge into Bay St. Louis that had been gone since the storm. Mikel emerged as the champion. Through OpenStreetMap, which works like Wikipedia for maps, he worked with Google, Yahoo, the UN, and other aid agencies so the people in the field could update the maps in real time. The end result was better maps for humanitarian aid and better products for everyone. ### The anti-pattern When no champion emerges, the effort stays a one-off. The search for Jim Gray used Mechanical Turk to spread the analysis of satellite imagery across volunteers, one of the best uses of it imaginable. The public assumed it could be repeated. When Steve Fossett went missing, volunteers tried to do the same thing with nothing to reuse, no training, and many false positives, and the calls to search and rescue teams ended up impeding the search. ### Be champions Homelessness, poverty, and hunger are disasters too, and every local community has nonprofits looking for people to help them adopt these tools. Their problems look like the enterprise problems this audience was already building for, and they wanted the help far more. Find the organizations already adapting technology, match your strengths to their needs, and put your boots on the ground to see a day in the life of the people doing the work. Remember that your focus is on serving those that serve others. Improve your own products, make a difference, and be the champion. Full Transcript (AI-generated) So, hello. My name is Jesse Robbins. I'm a firefighter, EMT, and emergency manager. I'm also a CEO of a tech startup, but we're in stealth mode, so I'm not going to talk about that. What I am going to talk about is the way that Web 2.0 tools are currently transforming humanitarian aid. And in so doing, providing an opportunity to make a difference in the world and actually improve your product. And by your product, I mean the people here that have Web 2.0 services and products that they're trying to develop. The first thing I'm going to say with everyone here going, you know, go after the hard problems and tackle the big things, they're actually really hard problems. And they're hard. Does everyone get that they're hard? And the reason that they're hard is that when you want to make big change in the world, what tends to happen is you fight against this difficulty between being inexperienced and excited and being very experienced and afraid of change. And what we see right now is a lot of the geek community, the hackers saying, "We're going to save everyone with this new technology that we've developed and the emergency management community responding back and saying it is never going to work and you're going to kill everyone." They are terrified of new things. Conversely, the emergency management community every once in a while gets excited and says, "Man, we're going to use Twitter to save the world." And the geek community goes, "Oh my god, no. It's not going to work and you're going to kill everyone." So it's a little bit of a challenge innovating in this space and so I wanted to explain how to actually do it and then how to take that home to your own organizations. So there is a way about a year ago Mikel Maron and I discovered a pattern if you were for disaster tech innovation and this pattern is really simple. There's a disaster in you know be it Katrina or the San Diego wildfires or the tsunamis and in the disaster there tends to be ad hoc adaptation so people are going to take the tools and resources that they have at hand they're going to make them work in order to do what they need to do in order to survive and recover in the disaster the way to get things done is after that event champions need to emerge who will take what was learned from the disaster and improve it iteratively in order to distribute that broadly throughout the community. So my own experience I was a task force leader in operation hurricane Katrina. I took an unpaid leave from Amazon for a little while. I was their ops person at the time. Fourth quarter they didn't really like that very much but such is life. These were the structures that we built. They looked like this. These are Quonset structures. We used them for a variety of purposes ranging from transitional shelters for people to medical centers and points of distribution that served thousands. So you can see the line there on the bottom. There was a huge need and the organization that we worked with was the American Red Cross. What we did was we built shelters that they could operate out of because their operational plan required that they have buildings with hard sides and not filled with sewage and there weren't really very many buildings that weren't filled with sewage at the time. So, one of our challenges in operating in the field was the fact that all of the road signs had been blown down and we didn't have, you know, the iPhone yet, so we didn't have the ubiquitous mapping. We did have at the time handheld GPS devices and the ability to use Google mapping for routes. And so this was the ad hoc adaptation to overcome the transportation challenges at the time. Unfortunately, we ran into a couple of problems. Namely, this is a picture of the I-90 bridge and that starts in Bay St. Louis. You can see there that it exists according to Google Earth. This is my picture from 2005. Unfortunately, this is what the bridge actually looked like. So obviously a little bit of a difference between the two. There is the bridge and there it's gone. And the problem was that the American Red Cross didn't know that Google Maps wasn't real time and the satellite images were not, you know, a live satellite feed. And so they would say things like, take the I-90 bridge. And our volunteers and aid workers would say, it's still destroyed. It's been destroyed the whole time and you'd argue with Google. So the problem was it wasn't real time. So the mapping data was not current. There was a timeliness problem and there was no way for aid workers like me to update Google Earth and Yahoo and all the other routes in order to actually be effective in the field. After we returned, we met somebody named Mikel Maron who is a geohacker and one of my personal heroes. He emerged as the champion. And what he did was he began working actually he had the project at the time OpenStreetMap which allows people sort of Wikipedia for maps to work with Google and Yahoo to be able to update the maps and also working with the UN and other aid agencies in order to improve their ability to do these kind of updates in real time. The end result was better maps for humanitarian aid and better products for everyone. So opportunity to improve your products and make a difference in the world. So here's the pattern. There's an anti-pattern and it's very simple. When there's disasters that occur and no champion arrives, there is no iterative improvement and the public tends to demand that they are capable of doing the same thing again and again. So an example of this is the search for Jim Gray the tenacious search. It was a large project using distributed analysis of satellite imagery from search and rescue organizations. And they use Mechanical Turk. It was one of the best uses of Mechanical Turk imaginable. A huge effort to send possible hits and looking for Jim Gray who went missing at sea. Great story in Wired that covers this. Unfortunately, there was no champion that emerged afterward. And so this one, it was a one-off. It was a one-time effort, but the public believed that it was easily repeatable, that it should be possible to do that kind of search again. And it wasn't. And so when Steve Fossett went missing, there was a large number of volunteers that tried to do the same thing, but they weren't able to reuse any of the infrastructure. They had no way of doing the same thing with the same resources. There were no training for volunteers. There were many false positives. And in fact, they ended up impeding the search by people simply calling the search and rescue teams directly. This got so bad that the people in charge of the search and rescue operation just simply said they wish that it hadn't been there that maybe this technology has some potential in the future, but they're not ready today. Fortunately, there is a new champion that's emerged, the Internet SAR organization, which is looking to take the lessons that occurred here and build a better organization. So, that's the anti-pattern. What I'm hoping you're all asking yourselves right now is okay, so Tim issued this big challenge and we're all supposed to do this. Jesse, how can we possibly be champions? I mean, this is the Web 2.0 space. And the answer is there's many kinds of disaster. There's homelessness, there's poverty, there's hunger. There are challenges too numerous to name, but all occurring in your local community and all in desperate need of champions to work with nonprofit organizations who are desperately seeking people to help them get to Web 2.0. They're the same as the enterprise. So if you're making products that are intended to serve the enterprise, you probably could also serve the same challenges posed in the nonprofit community. And the major difference here is that they're actually ready and desperate for Web 2.0. I don't know if any of you are trying to sell Web 2.0 stuff into the enterprise, but it's hard. And in the nonprofit space, they want it so bad. So how do you do it? Well, the first thing is that you find and embrace nonprofits who are already looking to adapt existing technologies to your organization. You find where your strengths match closely with theirs. Work to understand their needs. And the most important part of this is actually getting your boots on the ground. So, if you're working with a homeless shelter and trying to deploy a CRM, actually go and see what a day in the life of one of their workers is. Get a real feel for actually how to do it. And remember that your focus is on serving those that serve others. So work with the organization by improving your own products, be able to make a difference and ultimately be champions. Thank you. ## Also Mentioned - [Jesse Robbins Cofounded Chef and the DevOps movement. Created GameDay at Amazon, which is the foundation of Chaos Engineering. Investor in AI developer tools.](https://jesserobbins.com/) - [Tim O'Reilly Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. Now focused on mechanism design for the human-AI economy through the AI Disclosures Project, which he cofounded with Ilan Strauss.](https://www.oreilly.com/people/tim-oreilly/) - M Mikel Maron person - [OpenStreetMap Open-source collaborative mapping project](https://www.openstreetmap.org/) - [O O'Reilly company](https://www.oreilly.com) ## Topics [Emergency Management](/topics/emergency-management/) [Disaster Response](/topics/disaster-response/) [Humanitarian Tech](/topics/humanitarian-tech/) [OpenStreetMap](/topics/openstreetmap/) [O'Reilly](/topics/o-reilly/) ## More Mentions [Venture Hacks Five Whys: Try to Learn a Dollar's Worth of Lesson for Every One You Spend in Failure November 17, 2008 · Quote Eric Ries quoted me in his Venture Hacks guide to Five Whys: try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure. The line came from Amazon GameDay practice. “Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure.”](/mentions/five-whys-jesse-robbins-quote-venturehacks/) [BusinessWeek The Do-Good Imperative July 7, 2008 BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness covered my work at the seam between emergency response and technology, including the Velocity conference I founded. “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.”](/mentions/do-good-imperative-businessweek/) ## Sitemap See [sitemap.md](https://jesserobbins.com/sitemap.md) for the full list of pages on this site.