Right now, this second, you can create a world without borders with zero geographical and legal borders. As you read this blog look past the thin curtain of pixels in front of you, what do you see?

If you have ever been involved in building a community league or association, the planning of a neighborhood, or even the building of a home you would have identified some sort of boundary. Who lives in the community or neighbourhood, where does the border begin and end on a map, who lives in the home, and where does the fence go. It was pretty easy, just draw a line.

But when our communities are within physical and digital landscapes and reach past national borders, culture, or ethnicity how do we manage them?

• Cryptocurrency is being used to develop economies that governments and capital markets have no control over. Communities are forming outside the box of our ‘normal’ economy. Soon, neighbourhoods will be using crypto to develop their own self-sustaining markets for food and energy. How will this fit into resilience and preparedness outreach materials?

• Smart contracts are being used to bypass expensive lawyers saving time and money between organizations. Will governments adopt blockchain contracts during response to speed up logistics?

• How will emergency coordination centres take advantage of advisory bots during a crisis? Either for staff or for the public? What is the opportunity for an advisory bot to manage volunteers and donations? It is getting difficult to know if the driver next to you is driving the car, or monitoring the computer that is driving it, what difference does information from a bot make for the public during disaster?

How we work, live, and build trust is changing. For centuries governments, churches, and hospitals were our sources of truth and trust. We once relied on trained experts with recognized credentials to inform our decisions. This is no longer the case.

Chances are you now go to your smart phone and Google before calling an expert. Or maybe you have curated a list on Twitter that you refer to for most things. How ever you are setting up your system of trust, it likely depends more on data and algorithms than picking up the phone to call an expert or inquire with government.

So what does all of this have to do with working remote from home?

If you are a public safety related business owner, employee, or volunteer finding news online, buying products and services on the Internet, researching databases, or hiring through Social Media you have to start considering how you will remodel trust during the tensions that will arise with a changed world.

1. How will you verify the data you use to make decisions? Are you ready to use people and machines to validate what you need to know second by second?

2. How do you set digital boundaries? Will you measure more and everything? When your entire life is digital and searchable how will manage hyper-vulnerability?

3. What will privacy look like when you create anything but block it all as well?

Emergency management leaders need to tackle the issue of trust now. If we don’t have it in the physical and virtual world we won’t have it at all.

Changing beliefs to remodel trust for situational awareness

I know in the past it’s been talked about but not seriously….but it’s time to address the elephant in the room. When will incident commanders and emergency managers use artificial intelligence, more than their GUT, to make response decisions? And no, I don’t mean a cyborg in the ICP dong the job of an Incident Commander, I mean the use of sophisticated algorithms processing data from newly installed sensors, the Internet of Things, smart phones, and social media simolatansley which will provide situational awareness that was never before available. This is already happening on small scales but how are teams preparing to verify the data they get before they make a decision?

On a routine basis, Emergency Coordination Centre Directors and staff will one day rely on smart contracts to procure goods, they will use advisory bots to manage the influx of questions from the public, and they will need machine learning and artificial intelligence to help them make preparedness and response decisions.

Working virtually is more about how we will build new systems of trust and less about how we will set-up our desk in a tiny two bedroom apartment.

Author: Brad Ison is the founder and CEO of Hazardscape; a tech based disaster and emergency management company that specializes in virtual reality training and coaching within its virtual 3D Hub. Brad has held position specific roles in the Alberta Provincial Operations Centre and had a decade long career at the Alberta Emergency Management Agency where his focus was on Disaster Recovery and Training, Accreditation, and Standards.