Here’s the abstract:

The Disaster Dispatcher is a Voice Mashup that integrates Twitter, Broadworks and RSS feeds to provide a one window communications tool for emergency operators. In emergency situations, communications between fire and police are often hampered because they use different radios and equipment. For domestic natural disasters, these communications issues are exacerbated by the addition of the national guard, NGOs like the boy scouts, and common citizens. Not only don’t these groups use the same equipment, but because no one knows where the next earthquake, tornado or flood will strike, it is impossible to a-priori know who will be involved. Communications channels must be setup ad-hoc, and quickly.

This mashup uses the most common denominator of all these groups: the cell phone. By using Broadsoft Broadworks, we are able to immediately contact the right person, saving precious time. In addition, Broadworks can front end a call center that can scale with the size of the disaster in real time. By using twitter to notify the disparate groups of status in real time, communications are bridged between not only all the active groups, but the passive groups as well including concerned family members and the press. By keeping all of the data seen by the participants, emergency personnel can analyze them after the fact to optimize response procedures.

Here’s the business point:

The whole purpose behind web services is that you can write useful, powerful and scalable applications quickly and easily. This mashup took no more than ten hours of my time, and if you actually counted the number of Broadsoft lines of code, there are probably like ten. Not much more than that for twitter.

How do you use it?

Register for the site, and give your broadworks information, your twitter account and an optional RSS feed for outside news sources. Then, you can see your twitter account and the status updates of everyone you follow and everything you say. Then, when you type into the upper box, everyone who follows you will get your update. When you want to speak to somebody directly, you can add them as contact, then dial them with the “dial me now” button. Both sides ring and pick up. The use case is this: many field workers report on their issues they see using twitter updates, which you can see on your screen. You can then call an individual person to give them advice (there’s a hospital on the corner, or put the fire out on maple
stree) or you can text all of the people by sending them a tweet. Non-emergency personnel can simply follow your twitter feed.

There’s some great nuggets of how-to code in there, which I’ll pull out and post tomorrow or the next day. Right now, it’s time to play some GTA4 and go to bed. On second thought, perhaps Sarah Palin’s still on TV…