Presence - Homeland Security Dashboards
When we engage and create personal dashboards for presence under who's control should it be? The links below suggest that it will be central servers. By contrast I believe that Personal Presence Servers will prevail. Presence solutions for the field and individuals need to follow emergent self-organizing principles.
Quite a few weeks ago I was pointed to a post by David Stephenson on presence applications for Homeland Security. I set it aside. One particular line caught my attention.
However, IMHO, the really exciting aspect of presence is real-time "communication dashboards," which allow you to visualize all these components -- such as names of team members, actions such as "meet now," or " send file" -- on a single screen. You can see instantly whether a team member was available, and how best to contact him or her.In a crisis, the ability to visualize this kind of information and factor in real-time, location-based information could be invaluable.
W. David Stephenson
He also linked to a short piece by Nemertes Research. Bringing the data together in the traditional telephony model will be too difficult.
to best leverage presence, companies will need to accept and manage a vast array of presence sources—including applications-based presence, telephony-based presence, and location-based presence. Doing so will require presence servers. Today some vendors play a limited role in that game, by managing one or two different types of presence information from multiple sources Nemertes
This in my view is too limited. It's easy to think of presence today as your buddylist, however later your presence info may even relate to places you've been "shadow" connections or devices that are close by. Some of those devices and places may even have information about others you know.
I believe there is a real opportunity for "crisis" style use of presence information today. From the army to the corporate boardrooms the crisis and real-time capability is just too important.
I'd just hate for the solutions to be thought of as centralized. P2P presence systems controlled by the individual will ultimately bring richer solutions and more effective sharing.
Comments
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I can't agree more than we DON'T want centralized strategies: the heart of my "smart mobs for homeland security" strategy (http://www.stephensonstrategies.com/stories/2004/09/29/10pointPlanToMakeSecurityM.html)is a decentralized approach that would empower everyone for homeland security preparation and response. After all, there's a very good chance that the centralized authorities may have been vaporized before they can tell us what to do!
--David Stephenson
Posted by: W. David Stephenson | May 17, 2005 06:59 AM