The Emergency Information Infrastructure (EII) Project is an organized effort to foster the development and application of advanced telecommunications networks in support of the emergency management community as a whole.
The "emergency management community" includes government agencies, community-based organizations, businesses and corporations, media, and the public. At one time or another, virtually every organization and individual takes some role in the emergency-management community.
The EII Project looks beyond the internal information architectures of individual organizations to address the challenges of cooperation and mutual aid at the technological, procedural, human, and organizational levels. Areas of activity include research, applications, and education. Key strategies are fostering communities of interest, institutionalizing learning, and creating a focus for the building of partnerships.
The Computer Revolution of the 1980's and early 1990's brought widespread change to the practice of emergency management. Today it requires a deliberate effort of imagination to picture the emergency management community without personal computers, laser printers, and data diskettes.
The mid-1990's are bringing changes which are even more profound, in the form of what can be called the Network Revolution. Computers are assuming entirely new roles. No longer just word processors and database managers, they are becoming telecommunications devices; "nodes", "clients", and "servers" linked to integrated networks of voice, data, and image communication.
As with the Computer Revolution, the Network Revolution offers exciting new possibilities to the whole community of emergency-management agencies, organizations, and partners. But unlike its predecessor, the Network Revolution has its greatest impact between organizations, instead of within them. Like the telegraph and the telephone, the "information superhighway" forever changes the roles and relationships of its users.
Of course, these changes are not unique to emergency management. The development of the so-called "National Information Infrastructure" is a key goal of the federal government, state and local governments, and the private sector as well. By analogy, the "emergency lane on the information superhighway" can be called the "Emergency Information Infrastructure."
The ultimate goal of the Emergency Information Infrastructure Project is to apply telecommunications technology to the building of "resilient communities." Resilient communities are not unique or specialized entities; they are day- to-day communities which have the capacity to adapt, adjust, and overcome extraordinary circumstances. The role of the emergency management community can be described as providing a force of resilience to our communities. The EII Project is devoted to this traditional goal of emergency management, using the new tools of telecommunications networking.
Achieving that goal will mean facilitating the work of the agencies and organizations responsible for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. It will also mean binding together the larger community with tools for communication, coordination, and mutual aid. Inevitably, it will also mean exploring new relationships and modes of operation appropriate for the Network Age.
The Emergency Information Infrastructure Project will pursue three core strategies toward the goal of promoting resilient communities:
Bringing practitioners of emergency management together with technologists and theorists to exchange ideas, explore options, and solve problems.
Developing a capability for independent research and inquiry into the applications of networks and information technology to emergency management.
Facilitating partnerships and joint efforts to develop and deploy network-based systems in support of emergency management.
The Emergency Information Infrastructure Project will focus its activities in three areas: research, applications, and education.
Emergency management organizations are increasingly hampered by a lack of institutional knowledge about advanced information technologies. The rapid pace of change causes technical expertise to have an ever-shortening "shelf life." Meanwhile, tight budgets and growing user demands mean existing technical staff have fewer opportunities for training and research.
Lacking the resources to perform independent surveys of technical options and issues, many organizations are forced to rely on vendors and other advocates for guidance. As a result, critical strategic decisions about information architecture are being made on the basis of limited information from less-than-objective sources.
The EII Project will conduct a comprehensive survey of the changing face of information technology, including:
Experience has shown that "top down" approaches to information system design rarely produce useful results by themselves. The most successful systems are the result of an interaction between global vision and specific experimentation. The practice of prototyping as an integral part of the design process has become the norm in modern hardware and software engineering.
The EII Project will encourage and assist this process within the emergency management community through:
It took more than a decade for "computer literacy" to become commonplace among emergency management personnel. Developing "network literacy" is at least as large an undertaking. A complicating factor is that networks don't appear by themselves as new appliances on users' desktops; they are obscured by the deceptive familiarity of the computers we use to access them.
The EII Project will foster awareness of, and familiarity with, networks and information technology among the members of the emergency management community. Key approaches to this task will include: