R08 Mayday
"Courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin, and that every warrior, every humanitarian, every citizen is built to live with both. To win a war, to create peace, to save a life, requires of us - of every one of us - that we be both good and strong."
Eric Greitens
Strategic Intent​
An App that that links up urgent needs in a disaster area with those who can match those needs, recognises that help and incentivises others to fund those who help.
The following is drawn from a discussion with an experienced first responder and this paper on Disasters and the Theory of Emergency Management.
From those, it appears that in order to be effective the App needs to consider the following aspects of emergency response:
- Comprehensive — situational awareness needs to be throughout the area at threat. E.g. if there's a Mayday call in the middle of a warzone, it may make things worse if responders turn up to an area under fire. Likewise, if there is a shortage of a certain resource, that resource should not be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Progressive — the app should provide a means to anticipate Mayday calls, take preventive and preparatory measures, and ideally stop urgent situations cascading more widely.
- Prioritised - all calls for help are not necessarily equal, and not all calls for help carry the same risk. Depending on the situation, the App should allow assessment of what is urgent and simple to resolve, versus what is less urgent and risky or difficult. Ideally, a method of analysing the impact should a call be resolved should be considered.
- Integrated — to properly resolve an urgent call may require the awareness of more than one group. E.g. if an ambulence enters an area to extract a casualty, other groups in the area should be aware of that this is happening, and if necessary take steps to assist in the safety of that crew.
- Coordinated - emergencies may be single step, but often are multi-step. I.e a number of things need to go right in parallel or series for assistance to be effective. For anything other than the most simple of cases it's often the coordination that dictates the outcome.
- Collaboration - for anything other than one-offs, it's been shown that trust, awareness and consensus within an area where responders overlap leads to better results. E.g. if three ambulences turned up at the same incident and competed with each other, the overall result would be worse than if one did.
- Flexible - those responding and providing resources should, with integration and coordination, be left to innovate responses as they see fit on the ground. Under a circumstance of an emergency, often the people at risk do not and should not be asked to detail what they need in terms of resources or response, just what is happening and what outcome they're seeking. Leave the rest to the crews.
The scope of the App is to aid in the coordination and provision of timely resources in order to allay an urgent need. As such, it is intended to operate in any disaster area from fire, flood, war, famine and so forth. Typically, such areas do not have reliable power or connectivity, have scarce resources, may include risk to the responders and are likely to have degradaded infrastructure.
Tactical Intent​
With this in mind, the App would have the following characteristics:
- Provide a means to allow all users to gain overall situational awareness of the responders available, the resources available, the broader situation (e.g. whether the cause of the Mayday call is localised or large in extent), the response currently underway, the people involved including the callers, and the desired outcome. This situational awareness should also allow the anticipation of need prior to a Mayday call.
- Provide a method to overlay onto that map other source material that may impact on the situation. E.g. information about fallen bridges, enemy forces, fire-fronts, weather and wind direction and so forth. Such information should not be provided as 'fact', as often there is uncertainty around such information during a disaster, and so a method of applying probabilities and verification sources to that information would be helpful.
- Provide a means for users to broadcast a Mayday call. Initially this may be with scant information, and so there should also be a way to update that information, add additional information from other sources (contextualise the call), ideally verify the need, and add details of the response and the outcome.
- Provide a means for responders to assess priorities against potentially constrained resources, and judge actual urgency.
- Provide a method for responders to coordinate between themselves, and resource providers to coordinate the provision of resources, based on a clear view of what is available and who is responding.
- Provide a broadcast system that communications to all users in a set area, not only for calling local assistance but also to raise awareness if the threat is widespread.
- Provide a method of communication between a chain of responders in order to update with details on the ground. E.g. a paramedic team should be able to contact the precise team in A&E who forms the next link in the chain.
- Provide a method for groups of responders and resource providers to interact as a group prior to any Mayday call being received, not only in order to build trust but to take anticipatory actions and forward provision of resources e.g.
- Should allow responders and resource providers alter plans and have those plans reflected in the emergency chain and the situational awareness board.
- Recognise responses through the issuance of NFTs to those who interacted with an emergency response.
- Provide a means for those outside of the area to provide assistance, for example donatations, where the use of those donations is linked to there use on the ground. That use and the outcome of the response, as well as real time, should be updated as further information comes in over the following hours, days or weeks.
- Provide a means for groups and individuals to broadcast their capacity and reputation for successful responses, in order to be better matched to suitable emergencies in future.
- Operate in an area where communications networks are likely to be degraded, non-existant or untrusted, and where electricity provision is likely to be sporadic, leading to a fluid and every-changing communications topology.