The International Telecommunications Union – Development (ITU-D) sector recruited me to introduce ways in which the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) interoperable emergency communication standard could be operationalized in the region. The audience comprised member state delegates from their respective telecommunications regulatory authorities and their emergency operations centres (or disaster management centres). The workshop: “Use of Telecomunications/ICT for Disaster Management” took place in Bangkok, Thailand; 20-23 December 2012. First, “CAP essentials” were introduced to the participants and then the policy and procedural steps for operationalizing CAP in one’s own country were explained. Thereafter, the participants assembled in to groups to experiment with the Sahana CAP- enabled Messaging Broker (SAMBRO).
Patrick Gannon (President & CEO, Board Director at OASIS), in an email, “You provide some very interesting information on the open source Sahana effort and examples of using citizen volunteers for disaster situation reporting. The issue is being highlighted in the 2012 CAP workshop FINAL REPORT.” Get more details on the voice-enabled alerting and situational reporting project from the video: “Do you hear me?” The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) community has nick named us “CAP early adopter” (lol & \0/). This is because in 2005 when the CAP content standard was first released, LINREasia was quick to test it in the HazInfo project.
The P.800 Difficult Percentage (or Difficulty Score) is an International Telecommunications Union Standardization sector recommended method for testing transmission quality in one’s own laboratory. We adopted this method in our feasibility study to enable Freedom Fone for emergency data exchange. The project studied the design challenges for exchanging the Freedom Fone interactive voice data with the Sahana Disaster Management System. This entailed taking situational reports supplied by Sarvodaya Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members in audible (or speech) forms and transforming them to text.
Does this picture remind you of the default Windows XP desktop background? That’s what most of Mongolia looks like. Roughly 40% of the Mongolians live in Ulaanbaartar (UB). The rest are sparsely scattered in thinly populated communities in the vast open terrain. The cultures vary across the desert, meadows, and hills.
Looks like international law is being made as we speak. According to the UN, basic human rights are violated when countries cut off Internet access. Burma is not the first. King Gyanendra of Nepal cut off everything in his palace coup. If cutting off Internet is a violation of human rights, what is cutting off phone service to entire regions like Jaffna?
World now has 4b phone lines, says UN | Sep 05, 2007 | telecomasia.net (Associated Press via NewsEdge) Largely because of the mobile phone boom in developing countries, telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to 4 billion lines worldwide, according to a report from the UN telecommunications agency.
The Grameen Foundation has announced a new online assistance center to help microfinance institutions (MFIs) bring the benefits of telecommunications to poor communities around the world. The Village Phone Direct Assistance Center, was launched in Nairobi, Kenya during the International Telecommunications Union’s “Public & Private Sectors Partnership Forum” (PPPF-Africa 2007) conference. It features a how-to manual, a message board, customizable templates and other information that will help MFIs work independently with local telecommunications providers to develop Village Phone Direct programs for their clients. Read more.