On Drones, Mesh Networks, and Emergency Response — A moral imperative to do the Right thing
Earlier today, we (RightMesh and its parent company Left) published a news release about Flare™, a mesh-enabled emergency communications app. I wanted to provide a bit more detail around that announcement and some the ‘whys’ behind what we are doing.
To start, here are a few relevant excerpts from the news release:
- ‘Flare’ app will allow users to send and receive critical communications even when phone service and Internet are unavailable due to natural disasters or other disruptions.
- Flare is in its final prototype testing phase and is scheduled for public release Q2 2018.
Key features under development include:
- Peer-to-peer text, photo, audio and location messages
- Send an Emergency “Flare” — blast messages for help, sent to anyone available in the mesh
- Ability to post and respond to requests for items such as water, pet food, or a generator
- Ability to share location on downloaded maps so users can geo-locate each other
A short time ago, a few members of our product team also recorded a video describing the project:
We’ve obviously been working on this app for a while, so the question is, why make the announcement now?
Well, for starters, I was down in San Francisco (a big earthquake risk zone) last week when the Tsunami alert came in from the Alaska Earthquake, and I felt quite isolated from the RightMesh team and my family back home in BC (also a big earthquake zone). Given the proximity of the RightMesh head office to the Tsunami zone (not to mention we have 2 offices in Bangladesh, which ranks 5th in world countries at risk of natural disaster), we felt it was the right time.
Also, I just like to tell stories, and in my excitement of meeting with a few potential contributors in San Francisco, I shared this photo with them:
It’s a really early prototype of a mesh-enabled drone that our engineers in Bangladesh have been hacking away on. I then went on to describe the idea we have to use such a drone with Flare.
As reported in the media release:
An additional concept RightMesh has been developing is a drone that can function as a node in the mesh to enhance Flare’s utility to help rescue efforts. With the autonomous connectivity of the mesh network, the drone could fly over affected areas and instantly detect autonomous blast messages or ‘Flares’ asking for help from within 100 meters or anyone that is mesh connected. The drone could then return to a base or Internet-connected zone to relay the information to rescue workers.
I know… it sounds cool right? Imagine that immediately following an earthquake or natural disaster, rescue personnel could dispatch a drone to quickly cover an area to discover if, and where, people need help. Or, imagine a search and rescue team with a missing hiker or skier launching a drone into the wilderness to quickly scour a few feet above the tree line. The drone would only need to get within 100m of the Flare app user to — through RightMesh’s autonomous discovery — grab their location and condition.
There is a problem in this story, though. The problem is not with the drone concept itself; it lies in the fact that, in my excitement, I told two people about this concept. Only TWO people. [One of whom basically said, “That is so cool, shut up and take my money!”]
In the world of capital raising in traditional markets and through traditional means, disclosing information to the community in a consistent and public manner is critical. In the world of Token Generating Events (TGEs also known as ICOs), there no precedent to follow, but it is still the ‘right’ thing to do. And in this case, that is not what I did.
My co-founder Chris and I have, from the very beginning, built RightMesh on the principle of doing the ‘right’ thing. Even in the build up to launch our Token Generating Event, we had the option to go fast and capitalize on last summer’s euphoria. Instead, we chose to do things ‘right’. As Chris likes to say, “We started on this journey [building Left, RightMesh’s parent company] over 7.5 years ago, and we’ve been working towards rethinking connectivity for more than 3.5 years. Every month we earn revenues from our existing businesses to feed more than 100 families. We have plans for the next decade to change the world. It would be a real shame to do things ‘wrong’ and screw all of that up.”
Best practices for TGEs and ICOs are only being established now. Players in this new business space need to be responsible for working with regulators, lawyers, accountants, and the community itself, to develop, and self-enforce best practices. [For example, KYC/AML checks for every single contributor are arduous, and in our case with so much contributor interest, have inundated our adviser and agent Bitcoin Suisse. It slows the process down, but we know it is the right thing to do, and we thank our enthusiastic community for their patience!] Disclosing important information through proper channels is a best practice that I did not follow. Going forward though, this is how we intend to disclose material information:
- Announcements will be made first on our official Telegram Channels (https://t.me/RightMesh_Official and https://t.me/rightmeshannouncements).
- In conjunction, any accompanying material will be published on our blog and/or press statements will be published on our press page.
- Then, we will share the news through other social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn).
- Our regular e-Newsletter will contain the news; however, these are only sent out once a week (to avoid inundating our community’s inboxes), so the news may not be immediate. (EDIT from original post: in order to keep our community well-informed, we will also send email blasts of critical or time-sensitive information on an ad hoc basis.)
If the community has any additional or different recommendations for best practices, please let us know, and we would be happy to modify this process. I will edit this blog post should we change the process.
But back to Flare…
There is more than one reason for RightMesh to develop Flare.
It is no secret that mesh networks require density. We will create that, we believe, using our infrastructure stack and the RightMesh SDK, and by working with app developers on identifying use cases that create density by bringing more users into functioning mesh nodes. However, Flare will be the first app that will create density by redefining app ‘users’ in the mesh.
Traditionally, consumer apps measure success and growth in daily active users (DAU) or monthly active users (MAU). With RightMesh, what matters is active ‘nodes’, meaning devices that have installed our library (and have not uninstalled it) by downloading and initializing a mesh-enabled app. So a ‘user’, in our new definition, may not actually be actively using the app; however, with our library installed, they can still be an active node by contributing passively as a routing node and can still be reactivated in times of true network disruption. These are the ‘users’ we need to create the density required.
We, in fact, hope that people will never use Flare — meaning, we hope they never experience a catastrophe that requires it. But, our intention is that they also will never uninstall it. It will remain on their devices ‘just in case’. The secondary purpose for the app, then, is to create ‘users’ (defined now as ‘nodes’) to build density.
Flare will be free and accessible to all Android users (sorry, we won’t be releasing an iOS version any time soon) as a critical emergency preparedness tool and as a way to build density. When it is published, Flare will be shared to the community as open source on our GitHub repository. It is our hope that the community will continue to improve upon it, localize it into other languages, and build variations that adopt the same principles, thus bringing this public service tool to the world and helping to spread RightMesh network density worldwide.
It is our eventual hope that device manufacturers and launchers will choose to install Flare as a pre-installed app. We will be pursuing partnerships in this area, and we will announce this to the community should any materialize.
Flare is also important to the company because of where we are located and to support our mission of helping those in need.
Our head office is in Vancouver, which, as I previously mentioned, is one of the top at-risk cities in the world for ‘the big one’. Personally, I want to download Flare ‘just in case’, particularly so I could get word to my son whose school is about 1km away that I am okay and coming to pick him up as soon as possible.
We also have two offices in Bangladesh. It is one thing for an emergency communications app to exist and help those in need in already developed economies where we already have very good infrastructure, earthquake proof buildings, and emergency response systems in place. However, one only needs glance at the top countries at risk for natural disasters and realize that most are emerging market economies like Guatemala, Philippines, Cambodia, and Bangladesh.
As the following analysis published in the Daily Sun in 2016 infers, developing nations suffer most in the aftermath of natural disasters.
“When it comes to aid measures following extreme natural events, the challenges mostly lie in the ‘last mile’ of the logistics chain: organizing transportation despite destroyed streets or bridges and ensuring fair distribution when there is a shortage of (for example) water, food, and shelter,” explained Peter Mucke, Project Manager of the World Risk Report and Managing Director of Bundnis Entwicklung Hilft.
Crumbling transport routes, unreliable electricity grids, and dilapidated buildings not only hinder humanitarian aid from overseas, but also delay crucial aid for those affected in the event of a disaster, Mucke noted.
“The international community must invest more in the establishment and development of critical infrastructure even before disasters occur,” Matthias Garschagen, Scientific Director for the report and Lead Scientist at United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security, observed.
“Sufficient, high-quality infrastructure, which is well-managed institutionally, can not only prevent the often catastrophic consequences of natural hazards such as flooding or storms, but it can also play a crucial role in the distribution of humanitarian aid supplies in the event of a disaster.
In other words, the economies that are most in need of a break are the ones that never seem to get one. Our primary target markets for RightMesh are those nations that suffer most from the digital divide incurred by lack of connectivity. These nations will also benefit most from Flare, and we feel we can help.
More about Drones
Okay, back to drones and how they fit within the RightMesh project vision. One of the things we have talked about previously is the coming future of autonomous value creation, where your device works for you and earns/creates value simply by walking around… existing.
I made this comment on the VersionOne.vc blog last year talking about the Four Waves of Crypto Disruption:
“I think one of the other elements that all of the above also lead into is the ‘Rise of the Machines’ … not in the sense that AI bots will take over the world sort of way, but more in the sense that with those four waves of disruption, you will be able to have your bots do ‘work’ on your behalf (where work is simply ‘value’ creation). A bitcoin mining rig today is simply a server-shaped robot doing work of crunching/processing transactions and being paid for it. In our context [RightMesh], imagine it is a few friends who purchase a WiFi delivering drone and set it free to go deliver connectivity over a festival. Initial startup capital for the drone purchase is done via a redefined firm (wave 4), disrupting telecom monopolies for WiFi delivery (wave 3), sharing in the proceeds of the micro-transactional revenue it self-earns (wave 2), all while collecting data on where and when to deliver value and optimize its performance and revenue-earning potential (converting data into a store of value, wave 1). The same could be said about a car-sharing, self-driving, vehicle fleet that would use its proceeds and rules to determine that a new car should be purchased given the demand it is seeing.”
A few days after that statement was published, I was in Bangladesh talking with the team and I referenced it. Before I knew it, our team had taken a ‘poke the box’ approach and started to create a mesh enabled drone. One of our company’s core values is “Failure is an Option”, which encourages us all to create and try things — if it works, we’ll go with it. If it doesn’t, we’ll stop it and try something else.
I’m so proud of our team for taking the initiative, and we will keep hacking to see what is possible here. What we have realized though, is that although our CTO, Dr. Jason Ernst does have experience building robots himself, we much prefer not to build hardware. We believe software will eat the world. Does this mean that we will never build hardware? Life changes too rapidly to make statements like that. It is just that we are much more likely to partner with existing hardware companies who are manufacturing devices on which our software can run.
Recently, we came across a Canadian group (David McAntony Gibson Foundation/GlobalMedic) that is working on solving the same problems we are, but with a hardware approach. This is how they describe their technology:
“In the chaos left behind after an earthquake or a tsunami, every minute counts. Rescue workers often lack the information needed to determine where help is needed most — whether to search for survivors, or deliver supplies and rescue equipment to the worst hit areas.
The RescUAV project will use Canadian-made Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to fly over disaster areas, helping aid workers to better visualize the extent of damage and to decide which areas should be prioritized for immediate search and rescue efforts. These aerial views will help emergency responders to see the terrain they are heading into and help them get help to where it’s needed most.”
So, although we have an initial prototype of a mesh-enabled drone, perhaps partnering with organization like this will be our best approach. We will reach out, and I will update this blog if anything develops.
In Summary
Flare is an essential app both for emergency communication and for the density it will build in the network. Mesh-enabled drones, of our own making or through partnerships, will enhance the value of the app.
While I didn’t announce Flare and the drone concept the ‘right’ way, we have now identified what our best practice for communicating announcements like this will be, and we will move forward in our usual manner: we will march forward with the fundamental belief to try and do things Right.
PS… About 2 hours after uploading this post, the team took the drone for a test flight for the first time. How cool is that!
