STAR-TIDES Fall Demo in DC--Week of Oct 6

I haven’t written lately about what’s been happening with STAR-TIDES, but it’s been a time of exceptional activity. We’ve had demonstrations at conferences and exercises in the US, Central America and Europe, supported real world contingencies ranging from the Canadian Arctic to Myanmar, completed six months of exposure testing for some types of shelters and increased emphasis on analyses of different infrastructures, communications equipment and “sense-making” approaches. Most importantly, the STAR-TIDES network now has grown to over 400 members.

As a next step, STAR-TIDES will have its Fall field demonstration at the National Defense University (NDU) campus in Washington, DC from Monday, October 6 to Friday, October 10. This will be qualitatively different from last year’s demo and the static displays we’ve done in the past.

Reflecting the project’s increasing maturity, the focus will be on working demos of integrated infrastructures, vice stand-alone sections for shelter, water, power, etc. All activities will be independent of the power grid and terrestrial communications.

Preliminary planning is for four integrated infrastructure sets:

• A family-sized solution set oriented towards hot, dry areas (solar cooking, AA batteries, water pasteurization bags, One Laptop Per Child computers, etc.)--think sub-Saharan Africa and Vinay Gupta’s construct of not separating the owners, operators and protectors of an infrastructure.
• A camp-sized infrastructure for wet, tropical regions (water purification units for 500-1,000 people, wind and solar power, micro-hydro if possible, disaster management software, etc). This could be a prototype for what we'd use in Central America in 2009 in support of the international Crisis Management Experiment IV (CME IV), but also could draw on recent experiences in the Southern Philippines and Myanmar.
• An Afghan-centric approach (with heavy emphasis on what’s being done now in Nangarhar Province, info sharing/sensemaking, links to San Diego State’s Visualization Laboratory and the Fab Lab that MIT has in place near Jalalabad, near-real-time delivery of imagery and useful products without caveats to NGOs, plus whatever shelter/water/power/etc is appropriate)
• A domestic US module--probably based on an earthquake in Winter (DHS/ FEMS/ Northern Command links, use of the commercial supply chain, empowering citizens, Resilience Networks, etc.)

If anyone would like to demonstrate equipment during this event, or participate in other ways, please let Walker Hardy and me know (c/o this site) by September 1. Space will be limited, so earlier is better.

Also, anyone who would like to participate in, or learn about, particular subsets of STAR-TIDES activities (shelter, water, power, etc.), please let us know, and register on the site if you haven't done so already.

Thanks.

Lin Wells