What if the Red Cross has a Geek Squad?
One of the things that I really enjoy about exercises is not so much that they feed us lunch, although that is nice, it is that there is a lunch line. While it is often dull, on occasion you stand next to someone who needs what you have to offer or vice versa.
Today was one of those days.
I have been trying to figure out how to improve the interface between the Geeks and the Emergency Management community. People who game spend a lot of time thinking about how to improvise with the resources on hand and that is exactly the kind of thinking you need after a disaster. Plus you generally have a lot of technical skills available.
This connection is not there. Our communications people pretty much only use amateur radio people. They need network geeks, but they don't have them. After a storm I am pretty darn sure that if you have a geek with a laptop left anywhere in town you will have a volunteer trying to restore connectivity. The goal is to give them a way to get in touch with us so there is a way to give them data (Cell Tower 6 is still up) and materials.
Other cool things are the citizen training on how to do things like preliminary serch and rescue. I think that stuff like that might actually go over well at Cons- it is the sort of survival training that a lot of people I know have an itch for.
If I really had time to do something I would love to do disaster training RPG modules. We have the stuff for simulating disasters for training scenarios, it would just take people to take this and make them in to adventures.
So today I found the volunteer people and they WANT this. So I wonder if the geek community is also actually interested in having connections to the people who are in charge of knowing where the tarps are when the shit hits the fan and how I can matchmake.
For a simple start I have the training guy ready to go to a Florida Con and do disaster response training, anyone know of a florida con that might be interested? Anything you would be interested in seeing happen between these communities?
Today was one of those days.
I have been trying to figure out how to improve the interface between the Geeks and the Emergency Management community. People who game spend a lot of time thinking about how to improvise with the resources on hand and that is exactly the kind of thinking you need after a disaster. Plus you generally have a lot of technical skills available.
This connection is not there. Our communications people pretty much only use amateur radio people. They need network geeks, but they don't have them. After a storm I am pretty darn sure that if you have a geek with a laptop left anywhere in town you will have a volunteer trying to restore connectivity. The goal is to give them a way to get in touch with us so there is a way to give them data (Cell Tower 6 is still up) and materials.
Other cool things are the citizen training on how to do things like preliminary serch and rescue. I think that stuff like that might actually go over well at Cons- it is the sort of survival training that a lot of people I know have an itch for.
If I really had time to do something I would love to do disaster training RPG modules. We have the stuff for simulating disasters for training scenarios, it would just take people to take this and make them in to adventures.
So today I found the volunteer people and they WANT this. So I wonder if the geek community is also actually interested in having connections to the people who are in charge of knowing where the tarps are when the shit hits the fan and how I can matchmake.
For a simple start I have the training guy ready to go to a Florida Con and do disaster response training, anyone know of a florida con that might be interested? Anything you would be interested in seeing happen between these communities?