Development Seed

Yesterday we handed off the beta version of the new Disaster Assistance component Kit that we built for the American Institute of Architects’ Communities by Design Initiative. The kit is a fully functional disaster preparedness curriculum that aggregates AIA Communities by Design’s excellent resources to one website that runs off of a usb drive that’s actually smaller than my thumb nail.

The kit is more than just a great resource library – it also bridges the gap between disaster preparedness and disaster response in an exciting way.

All of the website components – the site itself (powered by Drupal), the server that runs it (powered by Xamp), the browser (Firefox on a stick), and the PDF viewer (Sumatra) — are all self contained on the drive. This means that the kit will work on any computer in the world regardless of whether it’s connected to the internet, and it will run on both PCs and Macs.

Daniel Lobo, the project lead over at AIA’s Communities by Design, is on his way to Vancouver to present the first batch of sticks and have AIA members test them out. If all goes well, these sticks will be sent to communities across the country to help prepare and equip AIA members to better respond to disasters.

This was really a fun learning experience for us. We learned a lot about how disaster relief works from Daniel and his colleague Erin Simmons, and we learned how to get a website running efficiently on a usb drive.

The second point is what I want to explain in more detail. In this post, I’ll focus on how users will access the site, which is what I worked on, along with the project lead Ian and our designer Young. The guys behind the more technical inner workings of this project and how the stick runs — Jeff, Tim, and Earnest– will be filling in the technical details later in the week.

Here’s how to use the kit:

1) Put it into your computer. An icon will pop up.

2) You’ll see a start screen (a graphical user interface or GUI) that shows that the server is being booted up. It will take only about 30 seconds for the front page to load.

3) Once the front page is loaded, you can

• Jump right into the kit
• Make a database backup of the kit, important since the drives are small and could get lost
• Redeploy an older version of the kit that you’ve made before (all back ups you’ve made are shown by date and you can select to redeploy any of these)

4) If you decide to jump into the kit, simply click to enter. You’ll then see the five main sections of the website:

• A digital notebook that allows regional groups to add custom information. This becomes the actual AIA kit itself for local components. Here people can turn samples into customized versions that they can use locally. You can also add more pages in your notes section and edit pre-existing sample pages.

• A card creator that makes it easy to generate an emergency contact list. You just need to fill in a couple of forms and push save to generate a PDF of a nicely formatted emergency contact card that you can then print, cut out, and laminate. A contact card is the single most important tool that someone can have with them when a disaster strikes, and we hope this feature encourages more groups to carry them.

• A digital AIA Preparedness Handbook that provides guidelines and essential resources designed to help AIA regional groups develop their own customized response plans and resource kits to use during a

disaster.

• A contacts directory that shows contact information for AIA’s board, its staff, its volunteers, and each state’s governor.

• A documents section that offers additional resources and templates related to the component kit, as well as information on different types

of disasters.

While this kit on a stick is really amazing, it’s still just a proof of concept that needs some kinks to work out before we have the ideal solution. One example is that the write speed to a stick is not very fast, which could dissuade people filling out the handbook. Also, just who is going to prepare for a disaster offline?

A better way to present this information is as a hosted solution that gives an online kit to each of the AIA’s local components and lets regional teams work on their own site together. This would make collaboration easier and the experience faster (again, the stick isn’t fast for writing, although it’s super quick for referencing information). It would allow AIA to crowdsource their regional members for local contact information, something that is incredibly hard to keep current using a traditional centralized method. Another benefit is that it would decentralize distribution. Just think, any local group could distribute the kit by simply picking up a few usb drives and hitting the copy button.

Additionally, this method wouldn’t require any syncing between the stick and the main site, as updates would be on the main site and the newest version could overwrite what’s on the stick. And there are ways to keep the stick up to date without overwriting it. One way is to hook an aggregator up to it so that as long is it’s plugged in, it will pull in all new documents that AIA Communities by Design posts to its main and regional websites and stay up to date with the latest information. Lastly, having the kit as a hosted solution will make it easier to maintain for AIA, therefore reducing overall costs and the burden to AIA’s IT department since it could be hosted and supported by a third party Drupal vendor.

I’m excited to see where this all goes, and I know there are a lot more possible applications for tools like this. Post some ideas if you have them : )