Mission Statement
The Asia Quake website is meant to serve three goals.
- The short-term and immediate goal is to help coordinate relief efforts in
the quake-affected regions. We seek to do this by providing realtime database
searching, sorting, and analysis features.
So far, we have made a large phonelist that has addressed this need to
some extent from the early days, however its use is limitted.
- The medium-term goal is to add transparency to the relief process by
highlighting how monies are being utilized and how efficiently relief efforts
are proceding in each area. There will be supply tracking, volunteer matching,
doctor/hospital location, missing person list, and some other miscellaneous
registries. At best it will help planners in scheduling deliveries, and perhaps
reveal inadvertant waste. It would also help to expose fraud or inappropriate
spending of the tremendous amounts of money that have been donated for the
cause. With this amount of money in the billions of dollars, it is obvious that
there will be irregularities. The question is how many, for whom, and how many
will we detect?
- The long-term goal is to provide for an open infrastructure for direct
community involvement in the preventative protocols for disaster mitigation,
and in designing the systems for disaster recovery. With some luck, this will
become part of a broader movement for direct involvement of skilled experts and
community members in creating the tools necessary to navigate the challenges of
the future.
The only solution is clear accountability, transparency, and careful review
at every level. Other governmental efforts to date have been obviously
ill-prepared in recent years for a variety of catastrophes, and this is no
surprise; governments and politicians are notorious for being slow moving in
these types of matters. This time, individuals will take the lead, and invite
governments to cooperate, but will not be held back by political inattention.
Now that there is a spectacle that has focused our attention, we should utilize
this concentration to create a foundation for solid preparation against these
and other matters of global importance, such as:
- Climate variability and global warming
- Biodiversity preservation and conservation
- Oil crisis management and shift away from the cheap energy and driving economy