The colloquium which was conducted by Ms Natasha Udu-gama and Nuwan Waidyanatha was focused on the material to be presented at the Disaster management workshop to be held in Dhaka.

The Colloquium started off with review of the sessions and programme of the workshop.

Sujatha Gamage stated that the term ‘Last- Mile’ should be used in conjuction with the First Responder Action title for Session III to maintain consistancy. Nuwan argued that this is not the case as the term last- mile is more related to the concept of communication rather than the last respondent.

Professor Rohan Samarajiva questioned if the message relay function can be seen to be as a seperate operation to ICT networks. He noted that we need to stay with either the Government or Sarvodaya model. He questioned what the value of breaking them into two was? Nuwan responded that the IT Networks operate independantly and so have to be considered as a seperate entity, whilst the message relay function is more human intensive with a person physically pushing a button.

Rohan Samarajiva noted if the ICT guardian can be considered to be part of the ICT Network? Nuwan responded saying yes, the argument being that they get the message to the ERP node and hence play a role. However, the guardian is not a technical part and do has a degree of discretion.

Rohan Samarajiva noted that the final results should be stated early on in the presentation, as this is shows something fresh and interesting. Nuwan responded with the results of the reliability and effectiveness of the segments of the disaster warning chain.

Natasha Udu-gama went on to explain the Sri Lanka experience with the Disaster warning process. It was noted that the Foreign Meteorological Agencies report to the local Meteorological department and they relay it to the Disaster Management Center.

Rohan Samarajiva noted that the presentation should be based on the situations and experiences that have occured instead on theory.

Harsha deSilva noted that the focus should be on the recent tsunami alert on the 12th of September and how the existing disaster mechanisms dealt with the crisis. Moving on to a critique of the systems in place.

Rohan Samarajiva noted whether a safety net needs to be made in regard to the ICT Guardians. Should there be only one person per village? One person who has total control over how the alert will be interpreted and determine if it is a high or low priority.

Chanuka Wattegama questioned the value of providing alerts to low priority alerts. Nuwan replied saying that the final decision lies in the community, as they have the right to determine how they will want to respond. The objective behind the scheme is to keep the people informed. Also he said that though it is not built into the system the ICT Guardian would check with another party for his/her own assurance.

Is it realistic to assume that Hazard Information Hub can have a zero reaction time? No. But this will be changed, with a time set for reaction time. The negative impact will be counted after this time.

Chanuka Wattegama noted that reliability cannot be only determined by efficiency, as it is merely based on reaction time.

Rohan Samarajiva noted that the term should then be changed to either efficiency or reaction time.

Nuwan went on to describe the training of the ICT Guardians which were conducted at the Provincial and Village level.

Practical problems with the alerting system were as follows:

The signal strength not being adequet, user accidentally deleting the SMS, Mobile phone battery having zero energy amongst others. These latter reasons are difficult to quantify but are real life problems faced by the users and the system.

One observation made by experience from the project was that through the combining two or more technologies yielded better final results in respect to effectiveness and reliabilty.