Metanomy^™ 

We have been watching the situation in Haiti and are amazed at the great work being done by the social networks that have grown from past events. Lots of good stuff happening to help the people of Haiti. No doubt the response has not gone as smoothly as people might like, but given the situation on the ground I still think it's impressive.

One of the organizations we have worked with in the past, Project KID, is currently assessing the situation and preparing to commit resources to Haiti. Project KID specializes in training and equipping responders and volunteers in order to

address the specific needs of children in times of disaster and devastation.

We are helping them address some of their communications needs and hope to help them as much as we can in this important mission. You can read more about Project KID on their site:

Project KID

After a hard push to get new capabilities integrated into the M2N2, we rolled out yesterday morning to support the Sustainable Living Fair in Ft Collins. After a short drive we were in position at the Fair and set-up and running our wireless network in about 30 minutes. It took us another few hours to make the site look presentable, but we'll call that marketing time. Needless to say we were very happy with being able to roll in and be operational in 30 minutes. This is what our basic deployment looked like:

• M2N2 with living quarters etc. (including fridge with cold "sodas")
• Two solar powered remote wireless network nodes
• Load balanced 3G internet connection
• Weather data capture
• Over the Air digital TV
• Small field server (not running any services yet)
• Two laptops

One of the projects we are helping to test/develop with Sofcoast is ASAP. If you can imagine a really big kite with two helium bladders to help lift it in low winds you can imagine ASAP. Sounds like a pretty simple idea, and it is , but we think the potential utility of ASAP is huge.

ASAP is designed to be deployed by two people in less than 30 minutes and carry a payload of 13lbs in no winds at sea level. With a primary use case of lifting a radio repeater to up to 500ft it has the potential to help provide/restore communications to very large areas simply and affordably.

It's been a busy month here at Metanomy - Among our active projects we have had the pleasure of forming a relationship with Sofcoast, Inc.

Sofcoast's focus is designing, building and delivering whole product solutions targeting critical information delivery to eliminate problematic localized information gaps that exist at critical times of need.

I will be working as an adviser to Sofcoast as they bring some new and exciting products to the first responder market that promise to be not only exciting, but affordable and usable as well.

You can read more about Sofcoast here:

http://www.sofcoast.com/

And I will blogging about some of our first field tests in short order.

This is an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times written by my former Commanding Officer. It's another reflection on Golden Phoenix and how it could serve as a new model for multi-agency collaborative training for disaster/crisis response. Of course I think it's a great idea as I was involved as a Marine the first two years and as a civilian analyst in 2008.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/opinion/18ganyard.html?ref=opinion