If you can’t count on governments, first responders, telcos, or even the Red Cross to keep communications going during a natural disaster, who ya gonna call? Open source decentralized emergent organizations, apparently:

Volunteers eager to help disaster victims have begun to draw on open source models of organization to mobilize and coordinate vast resources from around the world. This paper investigates two such groundbreaking efforts, involving responses to Hurricane Katrina and to the South East Asian tsunami. The study sheds light on how these organizations evolve so rapidly, how leaders emerge and confront challenges, and how interactions with traditional, more hierarchical disaster recovery efforts unfold. Lessons from these early efforts show how they can be improved, and also point to the need for more research on networked non–state actors that are playing increasingly prominent roles.

Open source disaster recovery: Case studies of networked collaboration, by Calvert Jones and Sarai Mitnick, First Monday, volume 11, number 5 (May 2006),

Decentralized, cooperative, global reach: all the things the Internet was built on. Rapid, flexible, usable response. That sounds like good risk management to me.

-jsq