Strong Angel 3 wrap-up

I participated remotely for the Strong Angel 3 demo (news story here: Disaster tech, this is only a drill).

My big takes aways:
1. Communication is king: being remote really drove that point home, we were to provide reach back for the demo but weren't able to until the last couple of days  because out there when the networks came up everyone (~800 people) jumped on the network.
2. Low bandwidth rules: we found that the high bandwidth tools didn't work as well.
3. Keep online tools simple: Groove had a workspace setup prior to the event for coordination, it worked pretty well before SA3 even though their were 80 people on it. Big problem was that it was meant to be used during the event as well where is became unusable - so much so people stopped using it, real bandwidth hog.
- instead IRC and a wiki should have been used for overall coordination
4. Virtualization: ROCKS! I have a MacBook Pro with parallels virtual machine running Windows XP, I needed it to access the Groove space. Having a big red button to kill XP when Groove locked up due to too many people using it was awesome.
5. Data: the virtualization and Groove space taught me that data needs to be accessible regardless of the operating system/platform. Not everyone has the latest laptop (or even a laptop) or cell phone.
6. Virtual data: data needs to be accessible on any platform.

Take aways:
1. data agnostic, no proprietary formats or lock-in to one platform especially for capabilities that are needed across the mission
2. community collaboration tools must be low bandwidth
3. keep it simple, some folks on the ground wanted to do everything in digital when a yell across the room would have sufficed
4. Who is who and who is doing what? social context is really important for when you have distrubuted collaboraiton going on, especially in an environment where you don't have time to meet everyone. Also hugely helpful for the next disaster.