Helping Hands - SNA to create disaster recovery network

Helping Hands - Disaster Recovery network

Situation:

Natural calamities like floods and heavy rain are frequent in those areas around Yangtze River and this part of southern China is a victim of triggered landslides, heavy rains and flood which led to destruction of many properties claiming people lives. Authorities put in their valiant efforts to save people from this natural destruction aftermath. Our current existing methods though perform their best I feel they are not sufficient. Communications networks will not be functioning efficiently during disaster and it ill is difficult task for the government to reach each and every individual and help them

Some locations in the city can withstand the floods and other forms of destruction but not everyone knows about their whereabouts. My Idea is to identify all these building or locations .Use this information and use SNA to identify the people who are connected well with others and then build a community or tack team, which acts during a natural disaster.

Idea is to make the Disaster people know about their network, safe locations and prepare them for the disaster.

Disaster recovery locations (Safe houses): Locations safe during natural calamities.

Disaster recovery personnel: People who are willing to help during the natural calamity

SNA:

To make this disaster recovery plan,

• 1.    We need to identify disaster recovery personnel
• 2.    We need to know identify their age groups.
• 3     We need to know the Safe houses or Safe locations.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) helps and provides us with effect way of determining people who have strong relations and helps identify their age groups and can help us dichotomize people who don’t show the willingness to participate.

Surveys can be used to gather data and the data can then be organized based on attributes. Surveys can be done online and also can be distributed through voluntary organization and interested parties. The survey will help us get basic contact information and the other main important question set include

All the data we collect will be handled with complete disclosure and only will be used for disaster recovery purposes

• ·      “In case of disaster, would like our disaster recovery to contact you”
• ·      “Basic questions about gender, age group, marital status,job”
• ·      “Do you have been in Military or any other rescue operating organizations”
• ·      “Who are the people you fraternize in your neighborhood”(choose from the list
• ·      “Who are the other people you know in the town“”(choose from the list
• ·      “Are you willing to be a volunteer in case of natural calamity”
• ·      “Which among this disaster recovery locations are near to you”

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With the help of this data we can build a network and group them with attributes. Dichotomize the data to identify the network influencers. The software can help is the influencer based on their connectedness to others. This gives us a simple way to prioritize their potential targets.

After applying centrality measures and the person with high connections (high degree), high out degree can be selected as the influencing personnel.

Special People:

The software allows us to find out the relevant specialists and who have handled this kind of situations and these people can help in training other people on how to handle the disaster recovery.

Bridges:

Software allows us to find the people who seem to form key links between clusters. They should be handled carefully as they are important to hold the network and other people or family members should be encouraged to be looped in to keep the network bridge safe .If we have many people who have form key links among them in their clusters. We should prioritize based on the attributes instead of targeting all of them.

These people will be given training in how to act in disaster and they will be trained to locate the people in their network and inform them with the safe locations and help them

Existing Methods:

There are many voluntary organizations, government set ups to act in the case of disaster and they do extremely good job of taking care of people. But there are still deaths. With the help of SNA we are identify people who talk with each other, know each other and there will be extra sense of motivation for these people to help their own and also at the time of disaster, voice from known friend can be soothing and trusting. So I believe this thing can work and make peoples life better in it’s own way.