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CHIPS, the Department of the Navy Information Technology Magazine, has published an article on the ways that Haiti earthquake response teams used widespread collaboration to facilitate more effective relief operations. This reflected the leveraging of distributed talent and public-private partnerships that TIDES has long advocated. The article also covers ways in which TIDES helped catalyze knowledge sharing for relief efforts between the U.S. Southern Command and a global community of civilian technologists dedicated to the use of geographic information systems tools in crisis response.

Read the full article at: http://www.chips.navy.mil/archives/10_Jul/web_pages/STAR_TIDES.html

Building ICT networks is all well and good but maintaining them is key. One of these keys is having a good monitoring system in place. For both rapid deployment networks & more long term ones, one possible solution is a remote centralized monitoring solution. Using a a service like Linode (linode.com) and a ready to use system monitor solution like GroundWork (groundworkopensource.com) along with a VPN it should make it possible to stand up a systems monitoring system in no time flat. While I haven't field tested this particular idea yet, at my current job we use a similar system. It even works over VSAT.