Some campus staff members recieve e-mail notice about bomb threat as late as 3:14

Well, it's too late to dig a well when you're already thirsty.

I've been thinking about emergency response mechanisms for data distribution all day, only to find a real life situation in the afternoon. I'm angry and upset about it, so I did what I could do--blog about the emergency and try to track how the news articles emerged on Google news. I'm interested how the flow of information actually reaches our community at present. In part, because this is such a large campus and it just seems that we need to take the matter seriously and leverage emerging technologies to our advantage. I'm also interested in this, because data delivery is a large part of what I do here and I've been brainstorming with some of the campus' brightest all afternoon on how to quickly implement a next-gen emergency-data delivery system on campus. I didn't think we'd need it this afternoon.

It was instructive that I could get news from Jerusalem before KARE 11 picked up the story on their site, for example.

Tracking how the news unfolded on Google was actually very edifying. I found that there was a 20-30 minute lag between when articles became available online and when they were picked up by my news aggregator. That's disturbing and it underscores the need for an in-house "push" system for data delivery.

Although we're not relying on e-mail to evacuate buildings, one of my colleagues only received an e-mail about the campus emergency at 3:14, roughly two hours since the emergency was announced. This is two hours after the emergency began.

I was discussing emergency data transmission procedures today via e-mail with the Innovation Fellows board on campus, and there are some very good ideas out there about how we can more effectively propagate information to the campus than we are presently doing. We're looking at incorporating push technologies, possibly video and almost certainly IM to cell phones for these sorts of events. I find it particularly frustrating that although there is a sense of urgency, the matter could get bound up in politics.

What I propose is that the central X.500 directory tools page at the University, where UMN students, staff and alumni set up their directory information (http://www.umn.edu/dirtools) contain a form where UMN community members and register a cell phone number. During emergencies, messages could be sent automatically to any cell phone numbers which are subscribed for emergency notifications. Students could put their parents' phone numbers down for emergency notification as well. Then, when we have emergencies on campus, we can broadcast messages over IM to anyone subscribed.

Additional benefits of such a system would involve password resets--when people forget their passwords, they could go to a page to have a new password assigned and sent via IM to their cell phone. I can open up an Instant Messenger client right now and send my cell phone number a message.

As always, these are my ideas, opinions and thoughts. They're not "official" by any means, and don't reflect the views of the University of Minnesota, the Board of Regents, etc. Everyone stay safe out there.

Also, with that said, I hope the police catch whoever did this, and if it's a student, I hope he or she gets expelled and tried in the criminal courts.