Real-Time National Stability Engineering: Mapping the 2009 Afghan Election

Abstract

The re-building of institutional capacity in post-disaster and post-war zones requires massive engineering efforts. The needs of people on the ground in these situations are often approached from the top-down via emergency groups, NGOs, and governments (Jones, Wilson, & Rathmell, 2005). For actors on the ground, research has shown that such efforts may require ad-hoc capacity to adapt, understand, share, and quickly assess their situational context (NRC, 2007). In the study outlined below, participants were plagued by a variety of barriers ranging from lack of power to lack of trained technical personnel. In a report on improving geospatial support for disaster management the National Research Council identified several critical barriers to successful response to emergencies: a combination of lack of adequately trained staff and technically complicated geospatial software tools, lack of agreement and means for successful data distribution, and data “format[s] which are unrecognizable or unusable [for] responding agencies (NRC, 2007: 157).” A collection of researchers, open source software projects and companies has been developing technology to advance the delivery of geospatial and data sharing capabilities to non-technical users in ad-hoc environments. Recently, a few of these participants coordinated a volunteer effort to test how individual actors might apply such technology in Afghanistan.