Tag: resilience

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Resilient Identifiers for Underserved Populations WG Charter Approved

I’m pleased to announce that the Charter for the Resilient Identifiers for Underserved Populations work group (RIUP WG) was approved by the Kantara Initiative Leadership Council earlier this week. This work group combines the legacy work groups (WGs) from the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group, which was formed in 2011 to provide a trust registry under the White House’s National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace and absorbed by Kantara in 2018. I was a member of the UX Committee and wrote the User Experience Guidelines and Metrics document for the ID Ecosystem Framework Registry.

For the RIUP WG, two groups, Federated Identifiers for a Resilient Ecosystem (FIRE WG) and Healthcare ID Assurance (HIAWG) were combined to address identity assurance concerns for underserved people, who are often referred to as “vulnerable populations” by healthcare sector.

1) WG NAME (and any acronym or abbreviation of the name):  Resilient Identifiers for Underserved Populations Work Group (RIUP WG) 

(2) PURPOSE:  The purpose of the Work Group is to support vulnerable and underserved populations in America. At a high level, these populations include those with physical and cognitive disabilities, or who are homeless, impoverished, senior citizens, immigrants, incarcerated, institutionalized and otherwise underserved minority groups that need digital credentials to access online resources; particularly, online healthcare and financial resources. Without an easily reusable identifier, it is nearly impossible for these individuals to gain secure access to the resources and services that may be available to them. 

We will work, in collaboration with other private sector and public agencies towards establishing identifiers and access management (IAM) solutions that respect privacy, promote efficiency, limit redundancy, reduce barriers to use/adoption, increase interoperability, improve security, enhance safety and trust, eliminate identification errors, support resiliency, and achieve greater empowerment across the entire spectrum of online transactions. The RIUP WG will identify, coordinate, innovate and harmonize with ongoing and emerging identity initiatives, standards, and technologies, and communicate our findings to all relevant stakeholders, both in the US and, selectively, with other countries, under the leadership of the Kantara Initiative.  

(3) A SCOPE – Guidelines for Cultivating a User-Centric Trust and Promoting Adoption within Underserved Communities 

About “Underserved Populations”

Why does the RIUP WG use “underserved” rather than “vulnerable” when discussing the needs of healthcare populations? The US Health and Human Services tends to use “vulnerable” or “vulnerable and/or underserved” when discussing needs of people who require healthcare services but do not reflect the typical healthcare technology user.

In human subject testing, the category generally includes the elderly, poor, pregnant women, children, and infants, and recently, incarcerated people have been included in this description. But for the purposes of access to healthcare services, it also includes rural populations, those with permanent and temporary disabilities, indigenous peoples and others who may object to being described as vulnerable, yet need services that may be difficult to find, therefore rendering them “underserved.”

I had a conversation with Dana Chisnell, a founding member of the US Digital Service now serving as Deputy Design Director at US DHS, who convinced me to use “underserved” as a descriptor for identifiers. While there will still be “vulnerable populations” requiring special services, “underserved” puts the onus of care on the service provider rather than the traits of an individual which may or may not reflect their needs, abilities or level of personal agency. This work follows my research interest at the Internet Safety Lab where we are changing the conversation around digital harms, where the outcome of a service or lack of service can be harmful.

What’s Next?

RIUP WG will begin by creating guidelines for cultivating a user-centric trust registry and promoting adoption within Underserved Communities. We will publish a Use Case for Trusted Identifiers for underserved populations. And with a universal design strategy we will emphasize, highlight and prioritize user scenarios/stories from vulnerable and underserved populations to improve services for all users. We will test the use case and user stories across different verticals and persons of varying backgrounds and cultures. And we will create a dictionary that is harmonized with industry terminology.

There are a lot of initiatives that we will be watching. NIST is drafting 800-63-4 Digital Identity Guidelines, so we will work on comments on how to incorporate the needs of underserved people. The HSS Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) referenced trust registries in its work on Social Determinants of Health for Medicaid and we are participating in its information forums. We also plan to update the MAAS draft to incorporate recommendations from these efforts.

Lots to do and a great time to get involved.

Great teamwork!

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Losing Our Third Place

Three women in a liminal space. Digital art generated by Night Cafe.
Three women in a liminal space. Digital art generated by Night Cafe.

I have been working from home for a couple decades, so a number of things were new for me during the COVID pandemic, and the hardest was probably having everyone else at home with me. My husband and my eldest who was in college and studying remotely, and occasionally my youngest who was in off-campus housing at college in New Orleans, but ended up back at home due to COVID and storm evacuations.

During this time, I needed to change my routine. Sharing my office with my husband was difficult because he took frequent calls that broke my concentration and he’s a noisy typer. I moved my “office” to my son’s room and had to negotiate when I could and couldn’t socialize or use the kitchen, since everyone’s lunch schedules were all a bit different.

The other thing that was different was that my normally “out of the house” activities were also back in house. I teach at a local college that was online for several semesters. (I’ve been teaching on campus for the past semester, with some online weeks, but a lot of students are still in hybrid classes). The evening meetups and other professional networking that I used to go out for a night or two a week were still happening from home, which can be awkward when the family expects to eat and relax together normally at that time.

Posting the schedule on the door or through a shared calendar has been helpful for coordinating my family activities. My husband or one of my kids cook dinner and feed the cat on the nights when I have an evening meetup or when I am teaching online, just as they would have done when I wasn’t here. Taking calls outside when the weather cooperates was also helpful, though not ideal. The alternative to evening meetups was to find similar activities during the day, and I found quite a lot that fit my schedule, but it meant negotiating midday things again.

My students at CUNY City Tech, who are mostly college junior and seniors, are also only now getting to classes on campus. They have been under a lot of stress about finding internships and post-college jobs and generally negotiating their own living spaces with family. Having to attend school from home was one of the added stresses that pandemic lockdown caused for students. And negotiating hybrid schedules can be exhausting.

A few semesters ago at the beginning of the pandemic, I had a student I’ll call Fatima who was attending my class from home. Her brother was also at attending school from home and space was tight. Fatima complained to me that her mom was always on her to clean up and complaining about why she wasn’t doing her part. It was causing her a lot of stress worrying about sick relatives, schoolwork, and extra home chores on top of it all, when she would normally be taking classes on campus and have had the “excuse” of not being at home.

I think what was going on at her house and in the homes of many of my students at the time was similar to what was happening with household supply shortages at the beginning of pandemic lockdown, where things you would normally use at work or school were now being purchased and used at home. Only for Fatima, instead of a shortage of toilet paper and bleach, there was a shortage of liminal space, the time and physical passages between her school and home life, that allowed her to adjust to and negotiate the activities that happen in those spaces.

Fatima was at home. Her brother was at home. Her mom and dad were also at home. The stress of being the busy student, helpful daughter, and goofy friend crammed in one space was exhausting. When her mom was complaining about the mess, Fatima was operating in busy student mode, not helpful daughter mode, which caused conflict.

What seemed to click for Fatima and a lot of my students was the idea of the lost “Third Places” or those special places and conditions outside of home or school or work that define different aspects of our being, but that are now collapsed into a less private and more awkward home/Zoom life. Interestingly, Fatima’s mother was losing her third place, as well. She used to have space at home that was her own to be who she was when she was not surrounded by all the extra activity, people and messes that everyone, her children, her husband, living in the same space all the time created.

And with hybrid classes and workspaces continuing to conflate our work, home, social, spiritual, and mental lives, conflict and negotiation will likely continue as we sort out these disparate spaces. It is important to recognize these conflicts, and to be a lot more forgiving of ourselves and others as we negotiate this new way of living. Because we aren’t back to “normal” yet, if we ever will be.

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No Longer, Not Yet

Hex & Co game cafe planned to move from its current location on Broadway and 112th to Broadway and 114, the site of The West End Gate near Columbia University.

Today I had a dentist appointment. There weren’t any open appointments until October, but they had a cancelation, so I took it. I had just been there two days ago with my grown children, each reporting wisdom tooth pain, lost fillings and sensitivity. Mine pain was attributed to “Coronivirus Stress”. It’s something supposedly very common whether you’ve had the disease or not. Dr Cheung said he has it, too. No one is immune from dental stress these days. He recommended a night guard. And now I was heading back for a cleaning.

Taking a Lyft the other day, after a three month break from automobiles was strange. Traffic seemed to be going too fast and close for comfort. I didn’t want to touch the seat belt. Or the handle. Or the seat. This time, I decided to walk to West 79th Street this time and set out early for 40 minutes of late morning exercise.

Storefront with scaffolding and a torn For Rent sign

It’s been so hot in New York, but the air was cool today. I walked over to Broadway and then down and across at West 97th before taking Amsterdam Avenue the rest of the way.

At this time of day, essential workers are readying stores and restaurants for lunchtime sidewalk service and street-side dining. Areas in the near lane of the road, tented or open are set with tables and chairs, not quite 6 feet apart, and surrounded by 18 inch planter barriers, some already planted but most empty and awaiting something cheery.

Many of these settings cleverly expand into space unoccupied by the adjacent store, boarded up or dark and bearing a “For Rent” sign. I counted a lot of closed up stores on my walk.

Lulu lemon store “opening early Summer 2020”, has been shuttered since March.

As I stood waiting for the walk sign to light, I was thinking about these boarded up places. Especially the ones that have “Coming Soon” signs, offering hope but already beginning to fade.

On these New York streets, dry cleaners and restaurants have closed. In the operating businesses, behind the plexiglass of the curbside, contactless payment center, lie abandoned spaces where patrons used to eat.

Many have gone out of business. We aren’t allowed to dine in these days, and the streetside capacity is too low for them to make a profit, so they remain closed or close for good. Anyway, The 18 inch planter barriers aren’t exactly cheap. And you don’t need to clean a “Zoom shirt” that often.

Architecture_MPS, a research group where I manage social media, had an article some years ago called “No Longer and Not Yet” by Edward Hollis. It’s about a seminary near Glasgow that was built in the 1960s but abandoned almost immediately. What happens when there is no more use for a place?

As the light changed, I looked up and saw a young, nicely dressed woman, awkwardly carrying a magazine file full of Manila folders and a potted plant. She was wearing a mask, like most do these days, so I couldn’t judge her expression. Her eyes were watchful, dry. Perhaps she was just let go from her job. Or on her way to set up at a new one.

Another store. Another job. Coming soon.

The images for this story were taken by Noreen Whysel on July 16, 2020 near Columbia University. Each of these sites except The Vitamin Shoppe has been closed since the state PAUSE in March 2020.

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Dreams, Resilience and Making a Difference

Noreen Whysel’s address to the 2017 Initiate Class of the Beta Phi Mu Theta honor society at Pratt Institute School of Information given on May 17, 2017. Slides are available at Google Slides.

Thanks to Dean Tula Giannini, Vinette Thomas, Beta Phi Mu initiates, graduates and guests. And especially to Karen Erani for inviting me to speak today. This is an honor.

Today I am going to talk about Dreams, Resilience and Making a Difference. Our goal as we embark on this journey is to make a difference. Whether we leave Pratt to become a school librarian, a legal or medical librarian, a UX designer, an archivist, we do so to serve the information needs of some group of people.

We came with our dreams of what that life will be like. We study, we make sense of all the messes. (I think I see every class I took here in this picture)… and we deliver a neatly organized and usable semblance of information our users and patrons need.

But between our dreams and our goal of making a difference is resilience. Resilience is a quality that allows us to cope with whatever the world throws at us. And because we stand between the deluge of Information and the people we serve sometimes it can feel like this [photo of lone house after a flood]. We hope to be strong like this house built to survive the floodwaters of Hurricane Ike in July 2008. We don’t expect to face this exact scenario of course….

800px-Home_designed_to_resist_flood_waters

Usually, it’s a smaller disaster, a mess that you wish was neater…Even this [photo of moldy files] is probably more than most of us will ever deal with, but we studied to learn the frameworks for sorting through whatever is thrown at us, and we persevere.

So let’s unpack this. Resilience. It’s the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. In materials science, it’s elasticity or the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape. We call this “bouncing back” for a reason.

So, when I told Karen that I wanted to talk about resilience, I didn’t know that was also going to be the subject of Adam Grant’s address to the graduating class at Utah State University last weekend. I guess it’s a common theme.

You may know that Adam Grant is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and that he recently published a book, Option B, with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on the topic of resilience. Grant’s speech reviewed typical topics for commencement addresses and boiled them down to three virtues: generosity, authenticity, and grit, for which resilience is the key component.

  • Being generous on the days when you lose faith in humanity
  • Staying true to yourself on the days when others lose faith in you
  • Persevering on the days when you lose faith in yourself

In Grant’s words, too much of any of these three qualities diminishes your ability to bounce back from adversities. We may think that grit resembles resilience the most. Toughness and an ability to persevere can get you through trouble, but go too far and you are no longer able to help others or align your actions with the dreams that make you who you are. If you are too tough you can’t bounce back. If you are too generous, you may lose yourself.

I had trouble with the idea of being too authentic, but maybe it has to do with holding to tightly onto ways that have worked in the past that may not be helpful in the current situation. We’ll get back to this. But enough of Adam. Back to my talk.

Resilience is the quality that lets you follow your dreams so you can make a difference. It’s more than grit (and this is where my presentation departs a bit from Adam Grant’s). To practice resilience, you need to have an action plan for when things don’t go your way and another plan for mitigating the bad things that do inevitably happen [See NYC’s Ready New York Guides]. This is essential practice in emergency management, which is an area I have studied for many years, predating my time at Pratt.

If you are safe, whether that means financially or physically secure, you are in a better place to help others. If you are mindful, you can understand where your needs and capabilities fit into a given situation, and where you don’t, or where you may need to ask for help. And with a solid plan, you have a framework for doing your best even if it is something you haven’t done before or aren’t sure you are up to.

Security and planning are the same in institutional resilience. There are elements to mindfulness in institutional resilience but it manifests itself as a kind of transparency and situational awareness that is common throughout the team and the partners dealing with an incident. Emergency responders call this a COP: Common Operating Plan (or Picture). It’s a playbook that everyone knows by heart and can be augmented by information technologies.

I came to Pratt for guidance on the frameworks that help to sort information, particularly about the resilience of Cities, because I, along with many other GIS people who had volunteered at the 9/11 rescue and recovery, had a dream to ensure that the work of those who mapped the disaster would be preserved and understood as a component of our city’s core resilience.

9/11 was a difficult experience to go through—I don’t know how many of you were in NY at the time—But while it was unique in its own way, disasters of its magnitude are not uncommon here in the US and worldwide. Whether man-made disasters like 9/11/2001 or natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on the Gulf Coast in 2005; or a combination, as in the Tohoku Tsunami that led to a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan in 2013. Preparation for an emergency event begins with gathering resources, mapping them, and ensuring that the action plan is delivered to the right people.

Fireman soot

What happened next was a kind of mass, volunteer mobilization that could never have happened by the book. I was a part of a GIS user group called GISMO, who had been working slowly and not particularly successfully to get city agencies to exchange maps and underlying data. Unfortunately, we weren’t really prepared for this magnitude of devastation. But we had some hope and some really smart people, who were already figuring these things out.

The first meetings in response to the WTC attacks took place at the Department of Environmental Protection, who had responsibility for water, sewer and air quality systems throughout the city, which were particularly vulnerable. It soon became clear that a larger space would be needed to produce the maps and information required by emergency response teams. The Emergency Mapping and Data Center, or EMDC, was established on Pier 92 on the Hudson River and served as a headquarters for the rescue, recovery and mitigation efforts of city, federal and military teams.

These initial efforts and the partnerships that arose out of the EMDC formed what would become policies, toolsets and a “common operating picture” that would prepare the City for future incidents requiring collaboration among many different agencies and partners.

Innovations in response processes, tools and equipment have been documented and were presented at a ten-year retrospective held at the Technology in Government conference in 2011, called the NYC GeoSymposium 2001-2011-2021.

This is a poster I created for the symposium outlining ten years of incidents reported by the Office of Emergency Management:

OEM-Timeline-Detail

Here is a detail from my ArcGIS Explorer presentation:

WTC-ArcExplorer-Example

Some of the tools and artifacts that were created include updates to the very first citywide basemap, to be called NYCMAP. This map, first shot in 1999, combined aerial photography with street and building data to give a bird’s eye view of the City and its surface infrastructure. NYCMAP has developed into many versions of publicly accessible maps that are now available on the City Planning department’s website. For example, the Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder was created in 2006 in response to Hurricane Katrina. During Hurricane Irene in 2011, WNYC.org and The NY Times created their own versions of maps that users could update with their own conditions reports.

After the WTC attack, a new Office of Emergency Management was built in Brooklyn, away from City Offices but with quick access to downtown Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. It was originally created as an office of the Mayor but has since become a fully fledged Emergency Management department. Here is the floor plan of New York City’s Emergency Operations Center, located in Brooklyn near Cadman Plaza north of the courthouses.

OEM-Floor-Plan

It gives a sense of how various response partners are organized on site. It’s sort of a physical information architecture. During a large-scale event, including weather events, multiple agencies are on hand to inform and take guidance from Emergency Management. Agencies are grouped by type of service with GIS at the “prow” and Admin/Logistics in back, with public (left) and infrastructure groups (right) flanking the Command Station. This space is used during active incidents. The Watch Command Center is Operational at all times.

Here are some photographs of what these facilities look like:

OEM-Photos

This is what a command center looks like at individual departments like FDNY:

FDNY-Command-Center

One of the results of allowing a large-scale volunteer collaboration like we had at Pier 92 (perhaps also due to the huge economic hit 9/11 had on our City) and a convergence of new technology and crowd-sourcing solutions was an increase in transparency of data and citizen participation.

This included open data initiatives from Federal to local levels, nationwide, app contests, hackathons and growing participation from citizen mappers and data scientists. This Year’s BigApps Contest will present its Finalist Expo and Awards Ceremony at Civic Hall on May 23. Go to Bigapps.nyc for tickets. They will run out quickly.

Notify NYC was another effort to inform citizens of localized incidents, via phone, web, email and SMS. Staffed by OEM Watch Commanders, Notify NYC is also available via Twitter & RSS. Multichannel public communications, including social media, allow citizens to connect with government agencies, report nuisances like rats and electric outages and access emergency preparedness resources.

So back to the dream my colleagues at GISMO and I had about creating a center of geospatial information. It’s becoming a reality.

The Center for Geospatial Innovation has been created with funding from the Fund for the City of New York. Alan Leidner, former GIS Director and Assistant Commissioner of the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications is the director. A 9/11 Geospatial Archive is a key project along with the Coalition of Geospatial Information Technology Organizations, or COGITO, which I am coordinating with additional funding from FCNY. We have collected over 650 digital and physical items including videos, maps and electronic geospatial data, as well as all of the presentations from the 2011 NYC GeoSymposium and other events.

Here are examples of some of the materials we have collected.

  • Maps of Restriction zones and affected facilities prepared by the FDNY and geographers at the Emergency Mapping Center at Pier 92.
  • Aerial photos.
  • LIDAR images showing the extent of damage. (These were created at the Emergency Mapping and Data Center on September 17).
  • We also have heat maps showing the extent of the fires burning beneath the rubble.
  • Maps showing the Structural Status of buildings in the vicinity of the attack. (These were created on September 21, 2001 by Urban Data Solutions, a commercial partner).
  • Maps of recovered personal objects and human remains.
  • We also have a large number of photographs of activity at the Emergency Mapping and Data Center at Pier 92. [Alan Leidner is in the white shirt and beard over here on the left].

EMDC-1 EMDC-2

We have been able to collect names of geographers who participated in rescue and recovery from sign-in sheets, meeting notes and other documentation. LinkedIn has been a great way to find out where people who participated then are now, so we can interview them to discover additional artifacts that may be hidden in personal or official collections. We also have video interviews from the week following 9/11 identifying participants.

Handwritten notes and sign-in sheets from Department of Environmental Protection

An interesting document outlined the chronology of activities from September 11 to October 12. This document contains information about participants and lessons learned in the weeks following the attack. This is resilience in action, since it was deliberately created at a time of crisis but forms policies and planning for future events. The chronology also lists participant agencies, vendors and volunteers.

In addition to the archive, the Center for Geospatial Innovation is developing outreach to GIS and Geospatial oriented groups to advise on research and development activities. COGITO: the NYC Coalition of Geospatial Information and Technology Organizations is comprised of leaders of several NYC-area and regional GIS groups. It serves as the center of an organized geospatial ecosystem in NYC and is developing activities to keep its constituent members informed of GIS opportunities, education and resources in the region.

COGITO participants include local and national GIS associations, Meetup and affinity groups, as well as university spatial data and visualization labs, including Pratt SAVI, Hunter College, CUNY Graduate School, Columbia and others. We also work with GIS offices throughout New York State to report on tools and processes that can build resilience in other local areas.

The vision for the Center for Geospatial Innovation is a City that has the ability to bounce back, Resilience, through collaboration, communication and transparency, to meet challenges like climate change, “bad actors”, or anything else that comes our way. And to recognize the historical importance and value of those who participated in creating the systems that make our City resilient. We welcome you to participate and learn about the geospatial tools that support our City’s ability to return from adversities, stronger and better prepared.

Thanks again for the opportunity to present and congratulations graduates!

If you would like to learn more about COGITO, the 9/11 Geographic Archive or if you have materials or stories that may be of interest to our future researchers and partners, please feel free to contact me.

Correction: The Center for Geospatial Innovation was referenced as the NYC Geospatial Technology Center in the original talk. Center for Geospatial Innovation is the correct name of the institution.