Situational Awareness: Assuring Cross-Boundary Information-Sharing in a Geospatial Environment.

The LNW Program announces the formation of the Harvard University Executive Session on Situational Awareness: Assuring Cross-Boundary Information-Sharing in a Geospatial Environment. The Session convenes its Members in a formative meeting May 20-21, 2008 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Harvard Executive Session on Situational Awareness convenes senior-most government and industry executives, together with Harvard faculty, to address one of the most critical issues facing leaders today: assuring the accuracy of their "situational awareness" in dealing with choice, decision and action in major policy arenas -- whether a fast-moving disaster such as hurricane/flood, toxic spill, or pandemic, or persistent risks involving, for example, child welfare, food and drug safety, or occupational health and safety.

In our current environment, shared missions have become the norm, and inter-agency, even global coordination is expected by the public. Yet information-sharing across boundaries of organizations, jurisdictions, and sectors continues to be a challenge -- whether of geospatial data, commercial and industrial information, technical and scientific data, and whether from public or private sources. When obstacles to information-sharing affect what leaders believe about the state of their world - when decision-makers with shared responsibility lack the same view of the facts of a disaster or a crisis - the consequences can be devastating.

Assuring the accuracy of situational awareness for decision-makers is therefore an essential task of leadership -- whether for public health officials tracking vectors of emerging infection, an environmental leader assessing prospects for air and water contamination from fire, flood or spill, or a mayor contemplating evacuation of her city ahead of a hurricane.

Our goal for the Executive Session is to collaborate as leading practitioners, industry executives, and researchers to investigate the unique requirements for situational awareness in several major policy domains; to identify critical gaps in information sharing that impact awareness, clarify the options to remedy them, and support cross-domain efforts to do so; and to understand the tasks of leadership to assure a sound, trusted foundation for decision-making in their respective arenas.

We look forward to documenting these efforts, disseminating them widely as findings, diagnostics, and methods, and sharing them in conference, Harvard teaching cases, and research reports. Our goal is to accelerate uptake and adoption of measures to assure progress in these matters, specific to individual policy domains and cutting across all.

LNW gratefully acknowledges the collaboration of the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University, and the support of these great firms for this meeting: BAE Systems, ERDA, Google, Intergraph Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and PCI Geomatics. For further information please contact LNW Executive Director Zachary Tumin (zachary_tumin@harvard.edu).