Jeff Jarvis, in Recovery, Version 2.0
Don't worry, Jeff's
not Twelve-Stepping.
He's designing Recovery 2.0:
what happens when Web 2.0 Meets Up with the next disaster.
Jeff has been doing a great job of leading us all to think about
disaster recovery as an open source movement, in case
governmental authorities don't respond to the next disaster as we'd
like them
to (Imagine that).
So Jeff was
interviewed by Bob
Garfield on Sept. 9th, for the On the Media
Internet Radio channel that Bob co-hosts.
My new little company, the Open Resource Group, has organized a Katrina
response team - an adhocracy
- to deliver a host of communications
aids, and one of those is a service to transcribe
recovery-related PodCasts and other audio, overnight, so they're
immediately a searchable, more useful and archivable part of the public
record. We'll
be transcribing any interviews that seem useful to Recovery 2.0, and
post them at the Recovery
2.0 site. Obviously, we've told our virtual stenographers to
follow Jeff
around. And told them to type really
fast, since it's Jeff we're
talkin' about here.
Here's the Real
Audio Link to Garfield's interview of Jeff. It's just 5 mins,
21 seconds, so I
hope you listen in. The transcript of the interview is below.
Jeff lays out our team's marching orders at 2:50 into the interview:
There
are really
about four needs.
We need to find better ways to gather and disseminate
information by any medium. By
SMS, to bulletin board, to Skype phone room, to whatever. So
information
is one. Two is the need to make connections.
People to
people, people to apartments, people to food, people to jobs. So that's
two. Number three is trying to allow people to collaborate. And
number
four is we've got to get connectivity
and technology out there. There
are computers and WiFi networks being brought to the Astrodome. We the
geeks should be taking our laptops and trying to help people to get on
line and do whatever we can to connect people to these great
resources.
Think Tank vs. Do Tank
Our little team is a Do
Tank, not a Think
Tank. Speaking of bringing
laptops to the AstroDome, our Logistics Director is Kerry Dupont
(coiner of the term "Do
Tank"), who sent laptops to emerging Iraqi bloggers at
about the first moment there even were
Iraqi bloggers. her largesse started when she reached out to the new
Iraqi bloggers in spring, 2004 and learned how difficult and expensive
it was for them to blog from Baghdad's first Internet cafés.
So
Kerry sent $1,500 laptops to Iraq, even though it required another
$1,350 of customs and postage. After you know Kerry for a while, you
learn why, because she has one of the best developed, high-speed links
between
her heart and her head of anyone you know. Here's how she described her
generosity:
What
had I done? Yes, I was using my voice, but could I do more? So I
started working on this idea. From this idea a larger one flowed. Free
media. For Iraq first. For Iran, for China, for Cuba and North Korea.
But I would start in Iraq, because of the voices of who I had come to
regard as my Iraqi friends. Zeyad was having a difficult day one day
and I told him what I truly felt, I said, Zeyad, my eyes are on yours,
and they are full of tears, but I will not turn away. I was committed
to doing something, however small, to help spread the voices of the
Iraqis.
We started corresponding, and that is when I truly found what a gift
the internet is. Zeyad and I exchanged e mails about my son's gerbils,
and his ducks, about food, family, and life. I am still
overwhelmed by Iraqis' desire and love of freedom that has become so
strong
in a land of uncertainty.
Jeff introduced Kerry and me to Marc Danziger
when he and Jim Hake were developing the Spirit of America
idea, so I spent the summer of 2004 working with Donovan Janus and
Rhesa Rozendaal on the architecture for
the Spirit of America site, and Kerry became SoA's Logistics Director.
Along the way, she convinced FedEx to ship humanitarian supplies from
the U.S. to Kuwait and Dubai, as a corporate contribution. If you like
heartwarming stories, you'll love this one:
__________________________________________
Kerry called everyone at FedEx who would listen to her:
"Is there any possible way that
we can get this stuff to the Middle East, for the thousands of ordinary
Americans who are donating money to Spirit of America causes, using one
of your charity shipping accounts?"
One day Kerry gets a call from someone at FedEx: "Write down this
number: xx-xxxxxxx-xxx."
"OK," replies Kerry, momentarily wondering if she's supposed to call
someone at whatever this number is.
"Congratulations, that's
your new account number. The next time you want to send a shipment to
Kuwait or Dubai, use that number on the shipping invoice. There will be
no charge. We are happy to work with you to keep doing good work in
Iraq and Afghanistan."
__________________________________________
Wow.
This seems to me a modern day spell, as powerful as any that
Gandolph or Merlin might have conjured in their heyday. This
particular incantation is a FedEx number
that moves goods to the Middle East, but doesn't generate an invoice.
Later on, Kerry spoke
from the heart - her primary modality - after a reception we
threw here at our 43rd Street HQ for Doc Searls when he
was in town last June:
. . . it’s damned hard
to be both. It’s hard to be realistic and keep your idealism.
It’s hard to be idealistic and keep a realistic view of just
how far you can take those thoughts. It’s a battle that plays
out constantly in your mind. These are usually the people that fix
tech, as opposed to building it or envisioning it.
But, in real life, it
works pretty well, when all’s said and done. One
thing’s for certain. You feel everything in life when you are
in the middle. You don’t miss the suffering, but you
don’t miss not having cared for the suffering. And in the
end, that’s the measure of success, in any project. Have you
bettered life on earth somehow by what you have accomplished? That can
mean bettering life in any way. As Marc Danziger would say, "someone
has to wash the dishes."
Washing Other Peoples' Dishes
Our little band is building the best system we can to combine OTP
- Other People's
Thinking - with OPM - Other
People's Money - to build a prototype for Recovery 2.0 as
fast as
possible. How better than to follow Jeff's leadership than by
concentrating on precisely those areas that Jeff describes in the
interview?
- Aggregate and transform information
Scour the web for all relevant text and transform it to data.
Audio-to-text, transcribed like Jeff's interview.
Voicemail-to-text, transcribing from a Vonage voice mail box.
Fax-to-text, using efax to manage faxes as scans for
transcribing.
- Connect
People: Aggregate text from the many Katrina lists and re-publish as
data
The Katrina Portal - an API to transform Katrina text lists
to data.
- Collaborate,
using an extension to the framework that Spirit of America
uses
Many volunteer organizations have skilled people and
knowledge
We're rolling out a framework within which they can
amplify their efforts
- Connectivity:
We're providing a free collaboarative space so that the great folks at NYCwireless.net and
their peers around the country can facilitate the rapid deployment of
wireless networks in recovery areas.
The theme that resonates through all of this 2.0 thinking is to
understand the difference between actionable data and data-based
action. There's a ton of compelling, actionable data on the web right
now, so much that it's heart-breaking for those of us who can only
watch from the sidelines and contribute what we can to . . . what,
exactly? Where does all that money really go?
Data-Based Action
|
Actionable Data |
| + |
A qualified
person |
| + |
A clear request |
| + |
A clear response |
| + |
Money
(usually) |
| + |
A hard deadline |
|
=
Action |
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Bob
Garfield Interview with Jeff Jarvis at On the Media:
(9/9/05; Length: 5:21)
Bob
Garfield: When the levies broke and the water rose it was
reporters on the ground
in coordination with their news organizations based in New York City,
Washington DC, and elsewhere who were able to start piecing the picture
together. They were equipped and trained and had the right instincts.
National authorities were not and did not. In the aftermath the
calculus appears much the same. While authorities scramble, media
technology is being harnessed at a grassroots level to start solving
the problems of displacement.
Jeff
Jarvis says the users of the web
have to be even better prepared next time. He joins me now.
Jeff,
welcome back to the show.
- Jeff Jarvis:
Hi Bob.
Garfield:
First of all tell me the 'Net environment out there in the wake of
Katrina. What has sprung up?
Jarvis:
There are a lot of really good efforts to bring people together. If you
go to nola.com,
associated with the newspaper The Times-Picayune, there's a
board where family members can go and search for their missing
relatives, There's another board where people can say: I am OK!
There's another board where people can try to get help with their pets.
There are even boards where now people are going up saying
"I'm still
out here please rescue me!" There are similar efforts of the TV
stations, the Red Cross has those, there are a lot of those, and so
Yahoo came along and tried to create a kind of a meta search of those.
And there are some other really need efforts out there: Craig's list
people came along and offered apartments, then moveon.org
did a great
effort to allow people to offer homes. There is even a Skype phone room
where people can call in and have someone there who is connected answer
their questions or find things. That is just starting. There are a
tremendous number of disparate efforts.
Garfield:
Now you have often spoken and written about the key of the Internet
being how decentralized it is. In the midst of a catastrophe like
this, though, is the Internet so diffuse, not withstanding any linking
that is going on, that 50 boards are not as useful as one centralized
site where everybody can turn.
Jarvis:
I think that is an issue. I think that is something that we have to
fix. The web 1.0 and life 1.0 way to look at this is, well let's just
have one official agency of the missing and all go there, but that's
not the way life operates. People will gravitate around their own
communities, around their churches, their newspapers, whatever. What
we, and the Internet, need to do is find ways to make better
connections.
There is one effort to create a new data standard for missing people
records. There was another effort out there to take the data on all
this 50 plus boards and retype it manually into one database to try
to make connections. We can do better than that I think, though.
Garfield:
Now you're in the thick of one such effort, an idea you had called
Recovery 2.0, what would it do?
Jarvis:
I am not really sure yet. All it would do is to bring people together
who were smart, who were trying to figure this out. There are really
about four needs. We need to find better ways to gather and disseminate
information by any
medium. By
SMS, to bulletin board, to Skype phone room, to whatever. So
information is one. Two is the need to make connections. People to
people, people to apartments, people to food, people to jobs. So that's
two. Number three is trying to allow people to collaborate. And number
four is we've got to get connectivity and technology out there. There
are computers and WiFi networks being brought to the Astrodome. We the
geeks should be taking our laptops and trying to help people to get on
line and do whatever we can to connect people to these great
resources. So my hope is Recovery 2.0, which is really at Recovery2.org
is just a Wiki where various smart people can come in and change a page
and add what they think, and the meeting that is going to occur
in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Conference in October. All I am trying
to do is to bring smart people together and start to swarm around
standards and efforts. And that is what the internet also does well is
that the diffusion of creativity happens but then we bring people
together around the things that work.
Garfield:
As this evolves, will the government's role diminish, will we need to
turn to the government in times of crisis to the extent that we do now?
Jarvis:
Isn't the government just the people, Bob? Isn't it better if we can
rely on all of our neighbors, if our neighbors are brought together
with the resources that are necessary that we can bring in police and
churches, and hospitals, and whatever we need to solve a problem. I
think that's a better way to do things. And so how can we open-source
our society, how can we open-source government and relief and
enable people to do things efficiently. So we don't have 50 different
means to find the missing, we have one coordinated means to use 500
great ideas. If the government doesn't do it, maybe we can. And what we
have to do as a people is not just demand better from government
but also demand better from ourselves, and use these tools, and make
them available and show the way. We have to lead the government and not
wait to be led.
Garfield:
All right. Well Jeff, as always, thanks very much.
Jarvis:
Thank you Bob.
Garfield:
Jeff Jarvis consults at About.com,
blogs at BuzzMachine.com.
Jeff mentioned sites. We will link to them at On the Media.org.
11:22:03 PM 
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