Thought Experiment: Tsunami

5/12/2005
Another thought experiment:

You have been given the task of creating a training program to educate some villages located on the Indian Ocean about the warning signs of a tsunami and to set up a grassroots alert system. Currently, there are several ambitious projects in the works but it is likely these will be abandoned over the years due to scarce resources or civil unrest. This is especially true as the memory of the tragedy fades and officials start assessing the small probability that a tsunami will occur again in the Indian Ocean.

You would like to create a training program that is not dependent on outside resources, but is something that villagers will adopt on their own to train upcoming generations.

There is a reasonable amount of time and resources available to complete the program.

What would you do?

6/14/2005
In my scenario, I had a couple thoughts:

• It unlikely that another tsunami will happen sooner than a decade, so it would be easy for any knowledge to become rusty with disuse.
• The enterprise needs to be bottom-up and self-sustaining.

This means that the training should become an important cultural element of the villages. Thus, much of my analysis would be focused on the learner and his/her society. I would try to discover in my analysis:

What sorts of oral teaching traditions the culture has already? Perhaps the story of the tsunami, already of high emotional value, could be part of the village's saga and could include the warning signs of the tsunami with the correct actions.

What type of person is most likely to spend their day on or near the beach? Watching for the warning signs of a tsunami could become an official or an informal component of this role.