Friday, January 22, 2010

NGO Interoperability with governments

The feedback I'm getting on Haiti is that everyone is working their heart out trying to make things happen, save lives, treat the wounded, and keep some stability going.

The feedback that I'm also getting is that information sharing between all the various agencies is very difficult, hamstrings the effective deployment of resources and generally diminishes all the heroic efforts.

I recommend that the NGO leadership across a wide range organizations take the reins of this problem, work with or adopt some of the best principles of OASIS and NIEM.gov, and continue to build a set of interoperable, XML based transactions that can be shared in an emergency. CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), HAVE (hospital Availability) and RM (resource messaging) are great starting points and ready to go after a lot of hard work and testing by the groups developing these.

These are free to the world, and their adopted use will encourage/force system vendors to adopt and expand their use dramatically.

If everyone shoots the same interoperable information "bullets" we'll get some great economies of scale, very good sharing, and the ability to build on this layer with predictive analytics, credential management, volunteer and skills manifests that can all be shared across the organizations in a disaster/incident.

There is going to be a major virtual exercise in August that is open for worldwide participation, email me at peterlodell@gmail.com for details.

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