Transforming Disaster Donations
DISASTER DONATIONS: The Second Disaster
In the wake of a disaster there is often a strong desire by individuals to help. Many will donate money but others often want to donate “stuff” and/or volunteer. While these individuals have the best of intentions, spontaneous volunteers and unneeded donations can result in another problem for first responders to manage. Frustration can build on both sides when there are unmet needs or an appearance of unmet needs, while at the same time individuals are typically being directed to donate cash, but they want to donate goods.
Donors often don’t understand the challenges faced by responders on scene, which may include initial limitations on the capacity to store, manage, and deliver donations. Infrastructure may be damaged, impacting delivery of items. Storage for donated goods may be scarce and donated items may be unneeded, resulting in a diversion of resources (both human capital and funding) to deal with the unneeded items. Monetary donations are almost always preferred as it provides the most flexibility.
But many individuals are concerned with how the funds may actually be used and as a result, would prefer to donate specific items instead. But to whom to donate items is a problem in and of itself as well. Donations management is not a function of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or other federal agencies. This leaves local officials or local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) struggling to deal with how to manage mountains of items. Because there is no single or dominant organization that typically manages large-scale disaster donations, it may result in delays in getting needed items where they can be of most use.
The mismatch between the donor desire to help and the actual needs following a disaster make this area ripe for transformation and disruption. In recent years, several groups have recognized this and spontaneously utilized online gift registries to facilitate donations of needed items. Red Cross Mexico directed people to their Amazon Wish List in the wake of the 7.1M earthquake in September of this year. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a group calling itself Occupy Sandy also utilized an Amazon Wedding Registry to ask for exactly what was needed.
These recent efforts demonstrate creative solutions to disaster donation problems. But the same problems continue to persist. The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was particularly devastating, causing hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars of estimated damage. While response and recovery is challenging enough within the continental U.S., it can be significantly more complicated on an island. Donations cannot just be driven to the location of need and flights are often limited, as is available storage to warehouse donated items. Puerto Rico is still struggling several months after Hurricane Maria struck but getting donated items to the island has been a logistical nightmare. Stories of items collected throughout the country that remain in warehouses, unable to be delivered to Puerto Rico, abound.
We propose developing a platform that combines online matchmaking (matching individuals or families in need with interested donors) with Amazon’s powerhouse capability to source the items and deliver them quickly. Additionally, the product will tap into our love of gaming and rewards by recognizing donors for their levels of giving. This will allow donors to provide exactly what is needed with the added benefit of knowing some of the details of where the donation is going and/or how it is helping. This might include a family profile or information about a first responder team using the donated items.
The above model provides a visual representation of what our team envisions. It will require public-private partnerships and the ability to be flexible and adjust the project as it develops. This is not a strength of government. Most of us now have smart phones and apps for everything you could imagine. We can schedule a ride, buy plane tickets (and digitally store them), and pay bills quickly and easily. But government still is frustratingly slow and archaic in many areas. Entrenched civil service rules and bargaining unit contracts often make government hiring slow and extremely challenging to find the individual best-suited for a particular job. Overreactive and overreaching procurement laws make it difficult and time-consuming to buy the right product. Government agencies tend to work in silos, often creating overlapping or redundant programs and systems.
How do we hack the silos, system development, and procurement challenges that are intrinsic to government in order to deliver on a new digital way of managing disaster donations? And once we break those barriers, there are still considerable challenges to be faced with incentivizing donors and efficiently delivering the donated items. And finally, once we have brought the government into the 21st century, we will have cybersecurity challenges with the system we have designed. These issues are discussed below.
“Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” –General George S. Patton Jr.
Too often in government organizations one has to deal with bureaucracy that impedes the process of innovation. The structure of government organizations often flows in a hierarchy making it difficult to accomplish goals due to ineffective time management, poor resource allocation, and cumbersome waterfall approach type decision-making. Horizontal government structure and employing AGILE systems design allows for innovation, cost-savings, and learning through implementation.
The area of resource allocation is ripe for disruption through collaboration with the networking availability that exists through technology. FEMA in its training modules has recognized that resource allocation in earthquake disaster areas is a major challenge in communities.
When dealing with government organizations it is often recognized that agencies have overlapping and redundant systems that lend itself to inefficiency. Eggers describes this as a vending-machine government approach that provides stand-alone services which may work for routine tasks, but disasters are complex events that require collaboration across department and agency boundaries. By creating a horizontal or flattened approach through technology offering a platform for resource allocation at disasters offers efficiency, cost-savings, real-time tracking, and opportunity for agility of the system.
The problem of resource allocation has riddled past disaster areas such as, “Following 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, finding loads of boxes on an air strip in that were filled with winter coats (it was summertime in Honduras).” Often these disaster areas become inundated with donations from humanitarians that cause a second wave of problems due to lack of clear communication about the needs of a disaster area. A digitized resource allocation platform would create a user-centric or a customer driven approach. A digital platform allows for immediate feedback based on resources to adjust or manage allocation for the disaster. This idea is echoed by former digital chief in the United Kingdom Mike Bracken explaining that a platform approach is additive serving everyone so every new user would add value saving considerable amounts of money by sharing systems or consolidating others. Evidence suggests that other governments, such as the United Kingdom has saved over 80 million dollars by implementing digital platform approaches.
Digital platform resource allocation provides data that can be used to assess current resources and inform future resource allocation. Walmart has generated billions in profits analyzing data and used this process for disaster preparedness for Hurricane Frances in 2004: “Executives wanted to know the types of merchandise they should stock before the storm. Their analysts mined records of past purchases from other Walmart stores under similar conditions, sorting a terabyte of customer history to decide which goods to send to Florida (quantitative data).” The quantitative data allowed for proper resource allocation after studying areas that experience similar disasters. This not only suggests better performance for future disasters it also shows increased efficiency by employing a horizontal government approach.
NEXT GEN RESOURCE ALLOCATION
Implementing a digital platform approach for resource allocation could create opportunities to employ sensor networks paired with artificial intelligence capabilities. A study conducted by Mainland, Parkes, and Welch shows that using Self-Organizing Resource Allocation (SORA) by employing the use of nodes through reinforcement learning could teach the nodes to organize by rewarding the behavior. The implications of this technology paired with resource allocation could increase efficiency to levels beyond human comprehension and capacity. The current research suggests that nodes self-organize to take the set of actions that make the greatest contribution to the global task. The time to start embracing a digital platform for resource allocation in government is now. “Emerging cognitive technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence could augment cognitive governments.” The possibilities are endless for learning and optimization of the network capabilities.
HACKING DELIVERY
In order to avoid seeing pallets of supplies sitting on airport tarmacs, while the contents become ruined in the elements and never reach their intended recipients, the use of drones to deliver donated items to disaster site warehouses, or even directly to the areas of need, should be considered. In the instances where survivors are physically unable to reach shelters or warehouses due to massive flooding, downed bridges, medical reasons, etc., drones could be used to deliver 2–3 day provisions of medication, food, water, or other emergency supplies directly to those in need. This could potentially save the lives of disaster survivors as well as the first responders that may attempt rescues in extreme situations.
The cameras attached to the drones would capture the delivery of the necessary items, and the video could be fed live to first responders and FEMA representatives. This would provide the government with real-time status updates of the affected areas so they may better allocate resources. The video could also be shared with news outlets and perhaps prevent future discrepancies in reporting, (i.e., Puerto Rico.) which result in bad optics for the government. This method would have the added benefit of demonstrating to donors that their contributions reached the intended recipients, which may encourage increased incident-appropriate donations for current and future catastrophes.
Changes in the current delivery system should focus on the needs of the disaster survivors rather than the modes the government currently uses. Fostering public/private relationships are a worthwhile pursuit, as some in the private industry have already developed frameworks that could be useful if modified to fit the needs of the user/disaster survivor. For instance, collaborating with Amazon representatives regarding the company’s intended plan to use drones to deliver packages to customers could provide viable solutions for disaster response.
Mississippi’s Hinds Community College has designed various drones to deliver emergency medical supplies for various incidents. For instance, their prototypes could deliver medical equipment to augment first responder supplies in the event multiple victims are encountered. These same supplies could be used by those on scene before the first responders arrive. Antidotes could be airdropped to remote locations for snake-bite victims or those suffering from anaphylactic shock due to bee stings. In addition, Swedish researchers have used drones to deliver automated external defibrillators (AEDs), and found in that all tests conducted, the waiting parties received the devices faster by air than first responders could arrive. Despite the potential to save lives, some issues must be overcome for these projects to proceed. Presently, there are questions about drone payload limitations, ability to fly in inclement weather and medical liability should a technical difficulty be encountered. However, medical facilities in Rwanda are currently using drones to save lives. In July 2017, a patient suffered complications from surgery and urgently needed blood. Doctors contacted a facility in a neighboring community, which sent the blood via drone in time to save the patient’s life. This living-saving option was made possible by Zipline, a California company, which is now offering its services in Tanzania. Zipline’s battery powered drones can travel 100 miles, round trip, and can accommodate a capacity payload of three pounds. Zipline would like to operate drone service in the U.S., but for now is somewhat stymied by FAA regulations.
Drones intended to assist bystanders with providing care in emergency situations would include an additional feature. Along with the delivered medical supplies, a communication device would allow a physician to provide instructions to those administering care. These so-called “telemedical drones” would be able to reach victims faster than first responders, and doctors, with the help of those on scene could accurately assess the needs of the victim, and direct appropriate treatment, which would likely lead to improved patient outcomes. Google Glass is partnering with the Mississippi engineers to provide doctors with the ability to clearly see the patient. This feature may have the added benefit of providing a calming effect to those on scene because they know that they are being guided by a trained physician. Another California company, Matternet, has developed drones that deliver HIV testing kits in Malawi. Urban Aeronautics, an Israeli company is developing an “unmanned flying ambulance” that can distribute medical provisions or extract victims from remote areas.
The research entities and companies detailed above demonstrate that there is no shortage of technology and expertise that could be leveraged to improve the delivery of emergency supplies during a disaster. Overcoming payload limitations and the difficulty of flying in inclement weather can likely both be achieved through further innovation. Once payload limitations are no longer an issue, drones could be employed to deliver specifically requested items to disaster survivors from volunteers who access the DisasterMatch.gov portal. This prevents communities from being flooded with inappropriate items that become an economic liability, and allows the public to make meaningful contributions, thus easing government, and by extension, taxpayer burdens. Donors would have the added benefit of being able to track their contributions and would receive confirmation that the items reached the intended recipients in a timely manner.
The use of drones allows for the delivery of supplies to all types of terrain as well as islands that may be cut off from mainland services for extended periods of time. The geographic remoteness associated with inhabited insular territories such as Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands presents a significant vulnerability in the government’s ability to adequately respond to disasters in these and similar areas. The proposed use of drones to deliver supplies via DisasterMatch.gov may help alleviate this problem. These locales are at risk for various natural disasters and coupled with their isolated location make disaster response particularly challenging. Disaster survivors and local governing agencies can request specific supplies, as those on the ground are in the best position to assess needs. Donors can then access the DisasterMatch.gov site and fulfill specific requests. The items are then delivered by drones that are not hampered by large bureaucratic issues. This agility keeps the process moving so that the supplies do not get stuck at a particular point in the chain, and the survivors receive the help that they so desperately need.
The largest remaining hurdle, government regulation, may also be overcome. According to the FAA website: “On October 25, 2017, the President announced a new initiative that pairs unmanned aircraft operators with state, local, and tribal governments to safely expand cutting-edge unmanned aircraft operations. The program will shape a regulatory framework that balances the benefits of UAS technology while lessening the risks to public safety and security.” Perhaps this will enable the private sector to realize more technological gains and in partnering with the government, may solve the problem of delivering disaster supplies.
But all of these ideas require disrupting one of the biggest hurdles of government — procurement and acquisition.
HACKING PROCUREMENT
The method government entities use to procure IT-related products is antiquated and needs an overhaul. The rules and regulations in place were originally meant to save the taxpayer money, but now often results in waste and abuse. Currently, when a contractor wins an award to build a new IT system, it is based off of a written proposal, and a low ball bid. Months (or years) later when the the product is delivered it may not be at all what the government envisioned or wanted. But, the contract has already been awarded and the money spent.
Government in general has an abysmal record of successful IT projects. The most recent example is the catastrophic rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s healthcare exchange website. The U.S. Government, while already sporting a less than stellar record on IT successes, attempted to undertake a project, building a website for millions to purchase health insurance, experts say should have taken three years, and tried to do it in ten months. The President pleaded for patience and said even Apple has issues with some of their rollouts. The problem is, people weren’t mandated to buy Apple products or depending on it for essential healthcare, as was the case with the exchange websites. In the same sense, procuring the correct software for this project is essential as it involves relief to disaster areas. The procurement process must be done differently.
Delivering on Digital offers excellent insight on selecting an outside company to build the platform/software used to run the system. Rather than the typical procurement process that includes detailed specifications of exactly what should be designed and built, this request for proposals will seek prototypes based upon the design envisioned here. The five best concept proposals will be awarded a sum of money to develop a prototype. These prototypes will then be submitted to the selection committee along with revised cost proposals for the full system. The idea behind awarding small sums of money to build a prototype is that in the long run it could save an exponential amount of money to awarding the contract to a company without seeing a prototype, and the end product not being what was envisioned, or not conducive to the end user.
As Delivering on Digital points out; “Agencies that deliver digital services need to talk to their customers — and more importantly, they need to listen. Whether through customer feedback or analytics, digital services must be attuned to changing customer needs, responding with minor tweaks or entirely new versions depending on demand. And building a functional digital service is only part of the puzzle; to scale, operate, monitor, and optimize it is just as critical.” The first time this is officially rolled out will be during a crisis or emergency situation, which is a bad time to begin analyzing customer feedback.
Receiving five prototypes would also allow the selection committee to use them in an exercise, prior to deployment, with the end users to see how the prototypes perform. After these exercises and being able to view new cost proposals, the selection committee will be able to choose the best proposal based on functionality and cost.
While the initial procurement to develop prototypes requires upfront spending, in the end the cost savings could be exponential. In lieu of awarding a large contract to one vendor without ever testing the application, we will award small amounts of money to several vendors to develop prototype applications allowing selection of the best one based upon functionality.
HACKING HIRING
Through the procurement process described above, the project can avoid one of the bigger stumbling blocks in government — hiring the right people. The nature of civil service laws and rules along with collective bargaining contracting, can often severely limit the ability to find and hire the right people. Delivering on Digital offers insight in how to insure the right people are in place when attempting to bring new technology into government institutions, and is the best model that should be taken in this hiring and training process.
The first hire needs to be a “Political Sponsor” for this application. This person does not have to be technically savvy, but have the political know how to navigate through the red tape that is involved in introducing the new technology in the realm of government. This person should come from the upper management of a Federal agency who has demonstrated they have the ability to lead institutional change despite the hurdles of governmental regulations.
The political sponsor will also be responsible for hiring the technical advisor who will lead the search for the correct vendor to develop the application and be the liaison between the winning vendor and the agency during development and roll out. The political sponsor will need to have the power to convince the agency this job search needs to be outside usajobs.gov which is the typical conduit agencies hire through. It is an archaic system and hiring a technical advisor able to lead the development of a cutting edge application requires recruitment and head hunting, not hoping the best and brightest are attracted to an out of date website. The technical advisor should be recruited from inside the tech world, but be a civic-minded person who would want to undertake a task like this as they will likely be giving up immediate monetary benefits the private sector can offer. Further, the technical advisor needs to apply the west coast tech culture to D.C.
Once the technical advisor is hired he or she must work closely with the political sponsor in developing a specific and consistent plan for what features the application must have and what abilities are required. This will give competing vendors a clear vision of what is expected during the prototype development phase.
This project will be new technology not meant as a patch for an old legacy system. It should be built with the latest technology and a savvy political advisor will be required to navigate the regulatory hurdles, which will definitely be encountered. The technical advisor needs to be from outside government and free from the “That’s how we’ve always done it” mentality that is systemic in its institutions. Outside of the box thinking during the hiring process, in governmental terms, will give this project a much larger chance of success.
But now we also need to secure the system.
COMBATTING CYBERATTACKS
As the threats posed by hackers become more sophisticated and morph over time, so too, should the government’s posture in regards to prevention and response. This requires fresh approaches to address the continuous barrage of attempts, and include the following:
In order to best address the issue, the mindset of those tasked with cybersecurity must change, much like that of those who combat terrorism in other parts of the world. Terrorism experts in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Israel operate under the belief that they cannot stop all attacks. Instead, government officials focus on reducing the number of successful attacks, mitigating damage and recovering from those that do occur. As such, “cyber risk is not something that can be avoided; instead, it must be managed.” Recommended actions that may be viewed as troublesome to employees, but can inhibit hackers and reduce their success rate include, enhanced encryption, two-factor identification and moving particularly sensitive data to offsite locations or off the grid entirely. Employing scheduled maintenance to include software upgrades and mandatory patches provides a method to measure the success of cybersecurity protocols and hold those tasked with these duties accountable.
FEMA has been the target of hackers in the past. Bad actors have created bogus websites purporting to belong to FEMA and have also attempted to lure the public with phishing emails. Those responsible claimed victims by offering weather and other emergency alerts, with the intent of obtaining personally identifiable information or gaining control of an individual’s computer. Government officials are also concerned that “Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA)” may be vulnerable to hackers. In some instances, FEMA relays messages to the public in the vicinity of an emergency via the WEA. Hackers could potentially exploit this communication method and incite panic when no threat is present, or direct the public to flee to a particular location where they may be vulnerable.
Emergency first responders are familiar with conducting exercises to ensure that their agencies are prepared for disasters. This same practice can be quite useful for issues of cybersecurity. Various threats, such as “data breach, website defacement, denial-of-service attack, or sophisticated malware on a network,” can be addressed with drills. The acumen of participants can be tested, as well as the effectiveness of the agency’s tactics in neutralizing diverse threats. Prior to the launch of DisasterMatch.gov, the site should be fully tested to ensure that it is prepared for a real catastrophe. The testing phase should also provide verification that the site can withstand substantial web traffic. Much could be learned from the problems that plagued the Healthcare.gov roll-out. Using some of the government’s existing security measures as well as those proven most effective in the private sector may be the best way to safeguard the site. Engineering stringent security protocols into the application and website will be key to ensuring that the new program runs smoothly. For instance, a padlock would appear in the address bar so that users can be assured that the site is secure. Two-factor identification, including password authentication and a specific temporary transaction code would be required for access to the system. Both donors and recipients would be able to access the site from a portal on the FEMA webpage.
Once we’ve hacked all of these typical government barriers and designed and built a functioning, secure system, how do we attract and keep donors engaged?
HACKING INCENTIVES
Commonly we are called to take action to help fellow citizens in time of disaster relief. There are many reasons to help from being humanitarian to knowing a disaster victim personally. Some need an extra push to become involved in the mission of achieving the proper amount of resources for a disaster. The Masters of Disaster are here to provide you with that incentive.
DIGITAL LEADERBOARDS
Our digital platform provides a leaderboard to visually see the impact you are having on the disaster. The leaderboard has many options from personal donation leaders, private company leaders, non-profit leaders, and overall impact status on the disaster. An example of the personal impact leaderboard is below:
A study conducted by Meckler suggests leaderboards contribute to effective means to support short-term performance without decreasing motivation. Government resource allocation through integration of a leaderboard interface incentivizes interactions with users that could increase donation performance. User engagement and gamification was studied by Hamari et al. (2014) and Koivisto & Hamari (2014) and found indications that gamification could promote short-term engagement. The implications for this study would indicate that during times of disaster, generally a relatively short-term window of opportunity, leaderboards could increase user engagement of the digital platform.
A picture paints 1,000 words
Digital gaming can create a sense of personal satisfaction that through community one can accomplish goals together. The digital community can offer a visual accomplishment for stated goals. Using digital visualizations allow users to see what we know in terms of needs instead of what we think. Users are able to identify what the donations are being used for and how their donations are making an impact in the re-building of the community. Leveraging incentives such as digital visualization techniques creates a community around the disaster event.
