So the idea is this:
“…for example, Rasmussen could send a message about a patient with untreated symptoms in Laos (near Vietnam) via SMS on his phone, which might only have one signal bar of service. That message could then be broadcast to anyone subscribed to his messages, including aid workers at UNICEF or InSTEDD’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which could show his location and note on a Google Earth map.”
The project, called InSTEDD, has received $5 million from Google.org and $1 million from the Rockefeller Foundation. From an engineering perspective, this would be easy to do. There’s probably a Google Android tie-in here where you’d use a Google phone as the handset of choice for entering these SMS messages. Does that mean that Google would turn off Google AdWords for phones in a disaster area? I’d assume they would.
It’s a nice start to a pretty significant problem but I’m not sure if nonprofits have adequate supply chain management and enterprise resource planning solutions to respond to random individual SMS messages in a particular geographic location. You’d end up having to spread the response over multiple nonprofits, many of whom have yet to establish a record of data sharing, much less resource sharing. It would require a pretty large realignment on the part of even the largest nonprofits to have that kind of emergency services available.
That said, I really do hope that they build what we programers call a loosely-coupled solution where there’s just enough services to bring data communications to the very doorstep of a nonprofit that’s expected to respond to these communications but not so much as to overburden them with having to set up an entirely new infrastructure (because they won’t do that anyway). What I don’t get though is how funding for nonprofits would be available to respond to emergency messages like this. At the very least, you’d need to hire someone to receive these messages and respond to them. I’ve seen a lot of technical projects fail not because of the technology but because the business case wasn’t made adequately and I don’t think it’s been made yet for this project. As always, it’s good to have an open mind when approaching this problem.
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