Gav's Blog

So, before I kick into writing about what we did, I need to provide a little background.

A very good friend and business partner of mine, Dave Brunsdon, has been heavily involved in earthquake engineering in New Zealand for a good 20-25 years now. I’ve had the pleasure to be mentored by him, and work alongside him with Kestrel client projects. One of his many hats is that of the Past President of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE).

Over the past few years, Dave has led a combined project between the NZSEE, the Department of Building and Housing, and the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management. This has resulted in the creation of the Building Safety Evaluation in a State of Emergency: Guidelines for Territorial Authorities. To provide a brief summary here:

The NZSEE Building Safety Evaluation Guidelines provide guidance for Territorial Authority Building Control Managers to prepare for, implement and manage building structural safety evaluation activities after major earthquakes or other disaster events, and for engineers and others assisting with the process in the field. The document was produced with support from the Department of Building and Housing (DBH) and the Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management (MCDEM).

The original version was a 1998 document, that had its roots in the US-based Applied Technology Council’s Postearthquake Damage and Safety Evaluation of Buildings (ATC 20) that were initially developed in 1995. Over the past five years, the NZSEE guidelines have seen a number of improvements and refinements.

On the 20th of December 2007, Gisborne, in the north-east of the North Island of New Zealand experienced a 6.8 M_L earthquake that caused 1 fatality, a number of injuries, and damage a lot of structures in Gisborne, including heavily impacting the central business district. I believe this was one of the first events where the updated building safety evaluation guidelines were utilised.

Naturally there was a draft update in August 2008 incorporating learnings from Gisborne, and then a full August 2009 update.

On the 30th of September, 2009, a 7.6 M_w earthquake occurred just offshore from the Indonesian city of Padang. This earthquake caused the deaths of over 1100 people. Within a week, New Zealand had committed to sending a 10 person project team of structural engineers under the banner of the NZSEE. It was at this point I became involved at very short notice (Saturday evening, engineers departing Sunday morning) to purchase and kit out the team with suitable GPS units to be used in the assessment process. I’ll write more about this decision in another post – I recommended, and purchased 6 Garmin Oregon 550 handheld GPS units with an inbuilt 3.2MP geotagging camera.

The NZSEE team spent around 10 days in Padang initially, and during this time assessed around 200-250 structures – mostly government facilities, hospitals, schools and the like. It was during this trip that the information management issue first became apparent to the project team. Dr Clark Hyland developed a spreadsheet to capture the assessment information whilst in Indonesia, and continued development of this solution upon his return.

As a result of Padang, and indeed Chile (another NZSEE team was sent, although the Chile team was more a research team) the NZSEE guidelines were undergoing further revision in New Zealand in the months leading up to the September 4 Darfield Earthquake.

I am aware of at least two other similar building safety evaluation frameworks.

• ATC-20 – the original US framework (first edition 1989, second edition 2005). Please note that this is a paid-for framework – it currently costs USD$24.
• An Italian framework (that I need to find more links and information about)

Since I had heard about the spreadsheet used in Padang, I became interested in implementing the NZSEE framework (and indeed also being able to support ATC-20, and the Italian frameworks and others) in a Sahana product. Whilst over at the Sahana Forum held in Taiwan on 30 July, and the SahanaCamp from Saturday 31 July to Tuesday 3 July, I started playing around with an implementation in Sahana Eden. Unfortunately my programming skills, and other activities meant I was nowhere near having a working implementation ready for use immediately following the 4th of September earthquake.

Note – as per Flickr’s linking requirements, the image goes to Flickr not directly to the NZSEE website. The other links in the text do.

I had the opportunity on Monday (6 December 2010) to attend a great workshop held in Wellington. This started off with a set of three presentations by Mark Reichardt who is the President and CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Mark presented a number of presentations during the morning, starting with CEOs, followed by one focused on OGC and Disaster Management, as well as finishing with An Overview of OGC Standards and Programs. Hopefully these will be publicly accessible in Google on portal.opengeospatial.org – I’ll put links up when the files are openly available.

I got a great buzz to see Sahana, OpenStreetMap, CrisisCommons and Ushahidi mentioned in slides by Mark, and these event got coverage in the presentation to the invited Government CEOs at the breakfast session. In the open presentation on OGC and Disaster Management in the morning, Sahana got its own slide and was recognised for incorportating various OGC standards including Web Map Service (WMS), Catalogue, KML , Web Feature Service (WFS) and the Coverage Service. It is great to see the significant geospatial efforts that the likes of Mifan, Fran, and David have put in – amongst others and sorry I can’t recall everyones names!

I also talked about my experience around geospatial data and building safety evaluations following the Canterbury earthquake, and there seemed to be some real interest in using that as a possible test bed geospatial project that we may be able to undertake here in NZ. I must get onto blogging more about that.

As always, it was a great opportunity to catch up with some colleagues that I hadn’t seen for a while, and it has been particularly reassuring to see some great minds that were thought lost with the State Services Commission restructure now turning up in Land Information New Zealand. LINZ taking on these people definitely sends a positive signal about open data and standards. In particular I want to note Richard Murcott who is now the Geospatial Standards Leader at LINZ.

Anyway – what were some of the points I took away from the workshop?

• It sounds like Land Information New Zealand is going to become a full OGC member in 2011.
• The OGC GeoSMS standard is going to be coming soon! A discussion document from Freburary 2010 on OGC GeoSMS is available here (link to agreement page, then pdf download). This will be great to have a GeoSMS standard to work to, as we had created our own in Naval Postgraduate School Disaster Relief Experiments previously.
• Mark highlighted that demonstrating standards – through test bed projects and the like – is one of the most important aspects of standards promotion.
• The Taiwanese have been doing quite a bit of work with OGC, and have been doing some very interesting debris flow monitoring projects with OGC Sensor Web. There is supposed to be a good pdf available that outlines the Taiwanese work with Sensor Web.
• Geosynchronisation. OGC has within the last month announced the formation of a GeoSynchronisation Service Standards Working Group. This of course has a lot of potential – not only for taking OpenStreetMap data out into the real world, editing it, and coming back and syncing it later, but also of course for emergency management. I intend to watch this one quite closely.

One of the closing quotes of the emergency management presentation came from the Chairman of the OGC, David Schell.

What the OGC is doing is facilitating a common picture of reality for different organizations which have different views of the reality, the disaster, the catastrophe, that they all have to deal with collectively

The use of OGC standards is probably the only clear path forward towards a Common Operating Picture – well, one that has anything to do with location anyway.

In the afternoon, Richard Murcott of LINZ led a workshop discussing standards and interoperability.

One of the big takeaways for me was the model of Conceptual Interoperability from Simulation Theory. Basically it builds up from nothing – no interoperability, to a state of full interoperability – where fully conceptual models are used to integrate data consistently from multiple sources.

Of course, we are a long way from this in emergency management, a lot of the current interoperability we have is at level 2 which is only a common data format. The OASIS work with EDXL is taking us a step higher (level 3) with increasing semantic interoperability through the use of more clearly defined standards. I think there is a very long way to go using this model though to ensure we have interoperability that considers methods and procedures (level 4), assumptions and constraints (level 5) to a “fully specified but implementation indepentent model” (level 6).

Some other quick takeaway points that I and others came up with:

• There is a spectrum of the reason for interoperability – from selfish to altruistic. A selfish organisation wants to bring any data into its system and processes, whereas a truly altruistic organisation wants only to publish and share information.
• There is a spectrum of the management approach of interoperability – from adhoc/chaotic to extremely structured. Some organisations want full control over how interoperability is managed that require a very structured and formal approach, and even agreements or MOUs. At the other end is complete anarchy and chaos.
• Risk aversion is a significant barrier to interoperability, so clearly taking a risk management approach to interoperability is likely to provide a better means to manage risks, and hence make true interoperability more acceptable to management.
• Restrictive licensing of standards creates barriers to entry. Nothing new there.
• Data sets provide an excellent focal point for collaboration and communities may well form around a released data set. E.g. NZ Open GPS Maps project around released LINZ roads.

One of the final points Richard made in closing was more targeted at New Zealand in general, and certainly a sentiment I think we should take to heart. New Zealand, as a country, needs to behave more like a city of 4 million. Dispersed from Northland to Southland we pack nowhere near as much punch than if we better bring our expertise together from across the country. If we want to be more successful on the world stage, then we need to lose our small town mentalities, and start thinking bigger and broader!

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.

One question that I’ve had about building a solution for Building Safety Evaluation (BSE) is whether it should be built into an existing council system, or indeed implemented on existing council systems, or perhaps a standalone solution should be used. Clearly there are pros and cons both ways, but I’m definitely tending towards a standalone solution – at least initially. I certainly gained some insights in the 7 days that I had working within CCC’s BSE team.

There are certainly benefits to be gained from integrating a BSE into existing council systems. These include:

• Information as it is captured goes directly into the business-as-usual systems.
• Building information is tightly linked to existing council data structures e.g. building records, ids etc.

But there are problems associated with systems implemented on a per-council basis:

• It requires each and every council to build and integrate a BSE system into their existing systems – something which most don’t have the time or budget to do, especially for relatively infrequent events.
• It is harder to bring in staff from other councils to provide surge capacity for the data entry tasks (data entry is another problem I’ll get to as well) – they would be more likely to be trained in a different system that their council uses.
• As an inhouse solution would be limited by existing council IT systems – don’t underestimate some of the issues associated with getting large organisations IT systems working following a disaster of this magnitude.

I will admit to being slightly biased, but I believe a more sustainable solution is to create a free and open source software tool that can be used in a standalone manner for the first few weeks, and then council IT staff can find a means to import the information back into the council system. This would likely become easier if the BSE data was able to be implemented in a standard XML format. I’d like to see an OASIS Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) extension created for representing BSE information.

Why do I think an open source source solution would be best?

• The system will be relatively infrequently used, so it is easier to justify a consortium approach to development. This will be far cheaper than multiple councils thinking about building their own bespoke solution, that probably won’t be compatible with neighbouring councils. This means multiple councils, and indeed governments worldwide may be able to contribute relatively small amounts each to build a better system than any one single organisation could build.
• Being free, it is also likely to be widely deployed, and this means that rather than just having one councils staff trained in their systems use, there are likely to be an order of magnitude more people trained in its use if it is open source. This greatly increases the ability to have surge capacity for data entry.
• An open source solution is also likely to implement open standards, whereas a bespoke council system is likely to forgo the additional cost associated with implementing a recognised data interoperability standard. This means that bespoke council BSE systems will be inherently closed, and potentially incompatible with their neighbouring councils. An open source application with open standards automatically means that neighbouring councils can either share the one system, or at least use the same software on separate instances, and use the interoperability standards to allow easy aggregation of the BSE data for reporting.
• Open source would also allow the creation of what is effectively a BSE kit in a box. A wireless hub, a handful of netbooks etc and it would be quite easy to have a portable, redeployable and standalone kit for implementing BSE without having to depend upon any existing organisational IT infrastructure.

So, for the time being, I’ve convinced myself that a standalone open source BSE application is probably preferable to councils implementing their own system in house.

Update: I’ve updated this blog entry to become my index page for all of my post relating the the earthquakes in Canterbury and Christchurch triggered by the 4th September 2010 quake, and including the 22nd February 2011 aftershock.

This isn’t a blog post so much, rather it is going to be an index page to an increasing number of posts that I intend to make on what I learnt on both a personal and professional level during the September 4 Darfield Earthquake that hit Canterbury. I’ll be breaking these out into various groupings, and will also include links to other relevant sites.

The main intent in sharing this information, is to give some of my colleagues that develop software for emergency management, particularly within the Sahana Software Foundation, a better insight into real life experiences, so that can be factored in when developing new IT capabilities. I’m also going to be specifying capabilities based on my observations during response.

Personal Experiences
I’m a past Civil Defence volunteer (joined in 1997, mostly headquarters/incident management, but also rescue) and a director of an emergency management consultancy – Kestrel Group – since 2003. I’ve reviewed and written a number of emergency response plans for public sector and infrastructure companies, as well as the National Disaster Plan for Niue Island.

• My first hour of the Christchurch M7.1 Earthquake – my immediate reaction and through to daybreak
• So there’s been an earthquake. What next? – what I did with my Saturday morning

Building Safety Evaluation
I spent most of about 6.5 of the first 7 days (afternoon of Sat 4 through Fri 10) working in the Building Evaluation team at the CCC Emergency Operations Centre based at the Art Gallery. Previous to that, one of my colleagues, Dave Brunsdon, has been heavily involved in the Building Evaluation Guidelines for the NZ Society for Earthquake Engineering, and I’d taken quite an interest in it. Just a month before I had actually started implementing an application in Sahana Eden to provide a means of managing BSE information. Sadly this was nowhere near a workable state to be used following the 4 Sep earthquake. So, the articles I’ve written below are a means of capturing my observations in the hope that we can use these learnings to create a system before the next time a large urban centre is struck by an earthquake and needs a system to handle the thousands of assessments required.

• Some background to building safety evaluations… – a brief introduction and history to the NZSEE Building Safety Evaluations and how I became interested in it
• Saturday afternoon and evening – helping get the process set up for a big day Sunday

Geospatial and Photography
I’m a bit of a techno-geek and I love mapping, GPS and photography. In October 2009, I was involved in purchasing and preparing 6 Garmin Oregon 550 GPS units with inbuilt geotagging cameras for use in the NZSEE team that went to Padang, Indonesia to perform BSE evaluations following the earthquake there. I’m very interested in the collection of geotagged imagery following an event, so that these can easily be plotted on a map to help visualisation of damage.

Until I get around to writing more about this, some of my publicly available earthquake photos are available:

• Canterbury Earthquake 2010 – my set on Flickr. Note that the position of all the photos, including those from the Iroquois have been geotagged with GPS, allowing you to click on the map to view fairly accurately where they were taken.

Ideas and Things I’d Like to See Done
Coming soon. I learnt a lot, I have a bucket-load of takeaway points, and I think there are a lot we can build so that not only New Zealand, but other countries have excellent building safety evaluation systems in future. Not only this, but we also need to think carefully on how we can share this information with multiple systems.

• Inhouse solution versus standalone? – a quick overview of the key pros and cons of the bespoke vs open source approach to building a BSE software tool
• Christchurch Recovery – A Centre of Excellence – one idea towards rebuilding Christchurch better, to consolidate and strengthen the various emergency management and related disciplines into a single campus.

The issue of community-produced maps has reared its head on the IAEM email list today – closely linked to my post back on the 26th. The following issue was raised, and I wanted to share my reply to this.

Lack of citation was my major concern with the other available maps that have been in wide circulation. The second concern with the other maps is that they showed push-pins when they did not have or could not cite the data to support specific points.

My reply follows:

I think you’ll find that most of those maps do actually have references, in the case of the Google Maps mash-ups, they are contained in the hundreds of comments accessible from the same page as the maps. In fact, it is generally from the posting of these references in the comments, that the Google Maps get updated. What they have failed to to is to make it easier to reference the citations, by not including the reference in the popup bubble above the marker. But if you read through all the comments, you’ll likely find most of the citations there.

Another big failure is to create a timeline/history so that one can see the growth/change in numbers over time for each marker. Most of the maps are purely a snapshot of the here-and-now, and give no context via history.

The real point that emergency managers should take away from this is the following.

Agencies that ‘own’ the source information (e.g. CDC, WHO, and health agencies in every other country in this case), really should be publishing authoritative georeferenced data at the source. If agencies did this, then there would be no need for these ‘amateur’ cartographic efforts to hack together information from news, rumours and other sources. It would sure save a lot of time and effort in people trying to recreate information that already exists and either hasn’t been released, or has not been converted to a georeferenced format.

Likewise, it isn’t really the role of companies to provide this information. Once again, they are just filling a gap that we, as emergency managers, have failed to meet.

The mashup culture is a direct result of a failure by emergency managers to make information available in a form that end users clearly want it (as evidenced by the time and effort they will put into recreating the data in the form that they want to use it).

Perhaps we really should start thinking seriously about how we can produce authoritative information in formats that our communities want.

If you have a look at the example map I created in under an hour on the 26th, you’ll note that I created a little table in each popup for a marker that contained a link to the source article, and in the case of the San Diego marker, included daily figures for three days so it was possible to track the state of that marker over time.In addition, I scaled the marker images so that they were more proportional to the number of cases – a marker for each infection quickly produced an unreadable map, hence it seemed a better approach is to produce summary markers for each location, with the size of the marker indicating the numbers.

The real trick is going to be to produce a web application to track and manage this information, that can then export it in a suitable form to display the information as discussed above. This is clearly something we should look at for Sahana.

I haven’t blogged about Sahana for a long time, and I’ve got plenty to write. So much that I can’t decide where to start, so I’m going to pick a nice small piece to start with.

The Concept

Last year, I was involved in a project in New Zealand to produce an investigative report on Public Alerting Systems with the New Zealand Centre for Advanced Engineering. This report will hopefully soon go public, and I’ll provide a link when it does.

This report was looking at the different technological solutions for getting alerts out to people in as timely a manner as possible. At one point in the search for different systems, we started discussing means of injecting HTML in web pages via an ISP, so that a public alert could be sent out to anyone on the Internet. I’ll talk about this and other options later. Let me get to the point of this post.

After starting at the HTML injection idea, and progressing through a few others, I reached a kind of natural conclusion that a more suitable means of alerting users via a web browser would be a browser plugin that can subscribe to Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) feeds, and when a relevant alert comes in via CAP, this is displayed to the user in their browser using the XUL:notificationbox at the top of the webpage.

Draft Requirements

Anyway, a possible idea for a Google Summer of Code 2009 project is that of constructing a browser plugin for Firefox that implements this alerting capability, and expanding Sahana to support full publishing of CAP alerts. Here are some features it could/should support.

Firefox Plugin

• Bundle publicly available CAP feeds (ideally listed in a nice Country/State taxonomy – this will make it easy to discover and utilise existing CAP services.
• Allow users to optionally register location in some manner, so as the plugin can identify relevant alerts (by location) and give them higher status than say remote alerts. Users should be able to register multiple locations – whether it has home & work, or multiple cities. Privacy is of course king and this information must be protected.
• Provide a means of adding additional user provided CAP feeds to the plugin.
• Provide the ability to open the alert in a new tab and format in a human-readable manner, including niceties such as embedding Google Maps to show geospatial information and links back to the source website of the alert for verification.
• Implement means of verifying messages that are digital signed, and decrypting encrypted messages.

Sahana

• Implement a CAP feed in Sahana so that Sahana can act as both a producer (in terms of creating a CAP message) and a publisher (in terms of making it available via a CAP RSS/Atom feed).
• Implement a CAP proxy or similar, so that say all users of a Sahana server can obtain CAP alerts directly from the Sahana server – rather than going to an external website. This may be useful for distribution of alerts within an organisation or centre without having every client browser connecting to an external server.

What would be very nice, but may be beyond the capabilities of Sahana servers currently, is making the CAP service on a Sahana server easily discoverable on a LAN via zero-conf services such as Bonjour.

Draft Outcomes for Assessment

The outcome of such a project would be to produce a working solution whereby a Firefox Browser plugin is capable of working with public CAP alerts and that CAP within Sahana is capable of fully acting as a CAP server via RSS/Atom feeds to the CAP alerting plugin.

Compulsory

• Implement the specified requirements
• The browser plugin works as expected with publicly available CAP feeds.
• The browser plugin works as expected against the Sahana demo server. (Yes, this means that your modifications to CAP on SahanaPHP need to be implemented).

Optional

• Implement the Sahana CAP server in SahanaPY
• Provide one or more standalone CAP clients for a mobile platform e.g. Google Android, Apple iPhone/iPod Touch etc
• Write an Internet Explorer plugin with similar functionality – it is important that this functionality is also provided for IE given its widespread usage and deployment.

Whilst the plug-in can and should operate completely independently of Sahana, it should also be designed to work well with Sahana servers (e.g. SahanaPHP and SahanaPY).

Anyway, this is just an idea I wanted to float and get out in the community for discussion. I’d welcome any further comment or ideas to build upon this!

Mark has been doing some great digging on Section92. He’s just found and blogged that the Officials responsible for reviewing the Copyright Bill at the time suggested that section 92 be removed as existing arrangements already provided the tools required.

I’m still convinced that Section 92, and the ACTA negotiations, are part of a larger effort preparing the ground for a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Copyright and Intellectual Property are one of the biggest exports from the US, and they are trying to expand controls globally to protect their interests. This however comes at the detriment of small creative folk that can’t compete with large multi-national organisations. This is clearly indicated in the structure of the complaint process within the new act that favours large organisations and makes it difficult for small copyright holders to make complaints.

These changes in legislation are non-negotiable, and likely a pre-requisite to start more formal Free Tree negotiations with the United States. This would likely explain why both major parties (Labour and National) have been for this bill all the time. They see it as a pill that has to be swallowed with the intent on snagging a United States FTA at the end of it all.