Gav's Blog

It is great to see our Sahana products being used more widely, and we’ve taken a big step recently to go beyond just being used as a tool for Response and Recovery.

The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center and partners have released their Disaster Risk Reduction Project Portal for Asia and the Pacific which is built upon the Sahana Eden platform. This is designed as a means of sharing who is doing what and where. As well as listing proposed, active and complete projects, it also provides a list of relevant frameworks. At time of writing it lists 414 projects, and 90 frameworks.

Big congratulations to Michael, Fran, and the others involved in delivering this solution.

Something that has concerned me for some time, is that a lot of information systems used for emergency management tend to focus on just one or two phases, rather than providing a comprehensive system. This is important as often the information used in one phase, e.g. risk reduction, can be useful to have available during response and recovery. I’m hopeful that this deployment will be the first of many that extends Sahana into a useful to for both reduction and readiness, and will eventually become an EM system that can be used right across the Four R’s.

Note – image links to Flick photo page due to Flickr terms and conditions. I’ve put an additional link in the description that takes you to the website.

Over the weekend, I had an interesting realization about the challenges of staying motivated as an individual. I came to thinking about this when looking at how I geocache, but what I observed suggests that it applies to anything in life.

In some regards, this is a fairly obvious point to note, but like many things in life – they aren’t always as obvious as they should be.

In looking at the way I geocache, I find that I tend to fit into two distinct patterns. When caching with others, I will cache very hard, I am motivated, and I feed off and motivate others that I am caching with. However, I find it much harder to motivate myself to go caching by myself unless I am in just the right mood.

When I recognized this, it also became instantly apparent to me that this behavior was also present in other aspects of my professional and personal lives. This led me to ask two key questions:

1. How can I better motivate myself when others around me are not challenging and motivating me?I cannot expect or demand others to always be there to motivate me when I need it, hence I think as a means of general personal improvement, I need to find better ways of motivating myself to action. Of course, there are always the obvious means of goals and rewards, but I’m honestly looking for simpler tips and tricks that motivate me to action. I am spoilt for choice when it comes to caching and outdoor activities, and indeed other things in my life – the challenge is choosing what to do, and then having the mental fortitude to continue to motivate oneself until the activity is completed. Even with enjoyable activities and hobbies, you need a means of challenging oneself to action – such as processing photos after a good photography field trip.
2. How can I better challenge and motivate others around me?Whilst people respond differently to stimuli, I’m sure some of what I learn as to how I can motivate myself will also be able to be applied to others. So, I hope that over time I will be ale to learn what motivates me to action, and then be able to turn this around to motivate and challenge others to action.

Coming back to my original observation of hunting geocaches, I think that one of the reasons I am sometimes a little ‘slack’ caching by myself, is a result of trying to leave a buffer of unfound caches in Christchurch. In my mind, this means I am less likely to cache when traveling by myself. Why? I thought of it this way – if I had no buffer in Christchurch, and had found all nearby caches, then I would be forced to travel to find geocaches. I believe this is why a good friend of mine – Moneydork – is so driven to find caches, especially when traveling, because he doesn’t maintain a buffer at home, and this motivates the hell out of him to find as many caches as possible when he is away from home.

So, I think a good first step for me to motivate myself to more caching, is to work on finding all the of caches near home, so when considering a days caching, I haven’t got a fallback position to just ‘just doing a few around town’.

Decreasing the number of nearby unfound caches is likely to provide greater motivation for day trips caching, as well as ensure I drive past less caches when traveling as I do now.

It’s kind of a catch-22 really, my actions will probably lead to greater motivation, and greater motivation will definitely lead to more action. I guess there is a bit of wisdom tied up in the Nike slogan ‘Just do it!’ – only one way to find out…

I figured that I’d try to research and find some of the publicly available information about the ongoing complaints that Darryl J Dixon has been making against IAEM Oceania and its office holders. It appears that the first records in the public domain are starting to become available, so I will be trying to track them in this post.

First, please note the following:

• To the best of my knowledge, all this information is available in the public domain and based entirely on known facts.
• I will not allow supposition, rumours or attacks to be posted either by myself or by people in the comments. I will delete them.
• I will only provide information that has links to the source information for corroboration.
• It should be noted that the complaint by Dixon against IAEM Oceania was dismissed by ACAT on 15 NOV 2010.
• I was requested to make a witness statement as part of the original complaint that Dixon made against IAEM Oceania, and I did make a written statement.
• I have been involved with IAEM Oceania and the Executive members since the founding in 2007, and know a number of them both professionally and as friends. This includes both Scott Milne (Vice-President IAEM Oceania) and Kristin Hoskin (President IAEM Oceania).
• Yes, I’m also I was the webmaster for IAEM Oceania and posted the original announcement on the IAEM Oceania website. This website has since been removed as IAEM Oceania is no longer able to fund a website due to the cost of legal fees, and hence I am no longer IAEM Oceania webmaster.

Yesterday (17 NOV 2010), the President of IAEM Oceania made the following announcement to members (this link no longer works as IAEM Oceania was unable to maintain its own website due to the costs of legal fees).

Attention all Oceania Members:

On Monday (15 NOV 2010) the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal (ACAT) heard and dismissed the discrimination complaints a former member raised against IAEM Oceania and its officers in late 2009.

On behalf of Vice-President Scott Milne, and myself, I would like to thank members for their patience with our limited ability to discuss these matters while they were ongoing. We also wish to thank you for the support and the words of encouragement expressed through the last year as we have continued to strive to advance Oceania’s goals. Thank you.

Kind regards

Kristin Hoskin
President, Oceania Council – IAEM
Membership & Marketing Director, Global Board – IAEM

I’ve just been for a quick search on the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal website and found the listing that contains the complaint by Darryl J Dixon against IAEM Oceania. The hearing listing can be found on this page. I have include a screen capture in the image to the right in case the ACAT website should later archive this information. As of 2011-01-27, this information is still publicly listed.

As it appears that some decisions are published, I have contacted ACAT to see if they are going to be publicly releasing the decision on Dixon’s complaint against IAEM Oceania. If it is released, I will add it here to the record. The summary hearing details are quoted below.

Discrimination List
15 November 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010 – ACAT HEARING ROOM 1
9:30 AM – DT2010/9
Hearing
BEFORE: Mr Alan Anforth, Member

• DIXON DARRYL (Applicant)
• INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF EMERGENCY MANAGERS OCEANI (Respondent)
• MILNE SCOTT (Respondent)
• HOSKIN KRISTIN (Respondent)

At this point, all this does is publicly confirm that it was Darryl J Dixon that made a complaint against IAEM Oceania, Scott Milne, and Kristin Hoskin. Up until the listing of this hearing it has not been possible to confirm who the complainant was. The hearing was held on Monday 15 NOV 2010 in the Australian Captial Territory. IAEM Oceania have confirmed that the result of the hearing was a dismissal of Darryl’s complaint.

Update 2010-11-18 1342:
I have just received a confirmation via email from ACAT that a decision will not be published, as the Tribunal determined that they did not have the jurisdiction to hear the complaint. I have copied the email I received below.

Good morning,

In response to your email below, there was no decision made as the Tribunal did not have the jurisdiction to hear the complaint.

Kind regards,

Danielle Campbell
A/g Team Leader
Deputy Registrar
ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal
6207 2393

So, it appears that a discrimination complaint was made by Darryl Dixon to the ACT Discrimation Tribunal that fell outside of their jurisdiction and it was dismissed.

Update 2011-05-23:
The ACT Human Rights Commission make its decision in Dixon’s complaints against me. The key paragraph in the decision that vindicates all my actions, including the information contained on this page, is:

I appreciate that you [Dixon] have informed me you [Dixon] have suffered as a result of Mr Treadgold’s actions. However, as discussed aboive, on the basis of the material I have considered it appears that your complaints of victimisation, discrimination, and/or unlawful advertising as lacking in substance

A couple of other key points supporting my position stand out in the determination:

…I [ACT HRC] consider it plausible that Mr Treadgold’s actions, that resulted in IAEM taking action against you, which although was distressing to you, other reasons (such as Mr Treadgold’s concern for the organisation), were the essential cause of his actions. Therefore, this aspect of your complaint does not appear to raise issues of victimisation under the Act.

And further on:

Having considered the information provided Mr Treadgold’s actions, although distressing, appear to be reporting on publicly available information and also appear to be a result of his concern for the IAEM organisation, rather than because you made a complaint of discrimination.