Rapid Information and Communication Technology Assessment Team (RTAT): Enabling the "Hands and Feet" to Win the "Hearts and Minds"

Large-scale disasters severely damage local information and communication technology ICT infrastructure. This negatively impacts responders ability to communicate and collaborate with one another. As a result, humanitarian assistance HA response organizations cannot maintain situational awareness and efforts remain disjointed and inefficient. Out of the rubble of the Haiti earthquake, a cross-organizational collection of first responders created the Rapid ICT Assessment Team RTAT to conduct and share a holistic assessment of the ICT environment. However, RTAT has yet to solve the problem of efficiently and effectively collecting the ICT data and creating a shareable, common, ICT operational picture. Employing a campaign of experimentation COE, this thesis analyzes RTAT with an Enterprise Architecture framework and Savvion process modeler and employs the Android based, mobile, spatial data collection applications Lighthouse and Open Data Kit ODK Collect to exploit the open source form builder ODK. RTAT founders, along with Bicol University and local volunteers, field tested the ODK forms with crowd sourcing techniques and when Typhoon Haiyan struck they validated the organizational RTAT model and integrated assessments into the Pacific Disaster Center s PDC DisasterAWARE collaborative website.