Thread by @dpatil

This hurricane is incredibly dangerous and I hope that the White House is fully staffed up for it. That's from the Situation Room through all the need agencies. Given the past I'm not sure they are, so here's some advice from the tech angle

1/ Make sure you have tech people in the room. THE. SITUATION. ROOM. Don't call them after. Make sure they are at the table. Having people at the table changes the context and gives a massive advantage to solving problems

2/ Here's a real example. We had a massive hurricane bearing down on FL and there was a question of how we could figure out how many people had evacuated. And where they likely were.

3/ Because we were at the table, we had context and could throw out ideas quickly for the group to iterate on. For example a) call up Verizon, ATT, Sprint, etc and ask them for the ratio of bytes going over the wire from a normal day to currently

b) Take that ratio and use the census data and other local data sets to figure out the % of populations that is likely to be there. It preserves privacy and isn't a heavy lift for the carriers

4/ Once you've got that, you can go even further to understand where people likely are. The White House has a unique role to help coordinate and push for these efforts. But is takes ONE thing above all else

5/ Great talent on staff and they have to be AT the table. Not outside the room. Not on an email thread. AT. THE. TABLE.

6/ There are great people in the Federal Gov and the White House should deputize them to help on these kinds of events immediately. For example, @USDS & @18F as well as the great tech/data talent at FEMA and NOAA

7/ There's going to be lots of damage, so getting through the storm is just the start.

8/ The White House should push to have high res satellite imagery done ASAP as the clouds clear. Then engage the data community to apply A.I. & machine learning algorithms to identify
-bridges that are out
-people on roofs
-areas of devastation
-much much more

9/ The EPA should have data scientists combine data from #8 w/ chemical storage areas to figure out where contamination and other issues might be. This information needs to be COORDINATED and that happens mostly through FEMA. That's good, but NOT good enough.

10/ ..there needs to be coordination from the White House

11/ Think about the transformation in tech from Katrina (the current Secretary of DHS was the White House point person back for that one...). We have
-micro sats
-drones
-DATA SCIENCE
-the cloud
-an active base of tech people who want and know how to help

12/ Let's give our first responders the superpower of tech. We can do better.
If you're a tech person, start digging in, I'm sure we can figure out how to help directly with the cities and counties. If the White House won't step up, we must
/eom