In This Issue
                                     Seeking the best presentations about resilience
                                     Good Conferences

                                     Disaster recovery on the moon
                                     Outsource your BCP Work in Asia

IAEM Asia & IAEM Oceania want to have the best presentations about corporate, community and personal resilience at their Asia-Oceania Resilience (AOR) conference, 5-6 October 2010. Submit a video clip of yourself making any presentation, or just suggest a topic. Presentation submissions are on the AOR YouTube® channel where visitors can vote on them, helping to shape the conference program.

AOR attendance is limited to 250 individuals in resilience professionals like security, emergency management, crisis management, business continuity management, risk management, human resources, public affairs and disaster relief. The two-day conference fee is SGD $495 for IAEM members, SGD $645 for non-members. (How much is that in your money?) Special room rates at the Parkroyal Hotel on Kitchener, the conference hotel, in Singapore’s Little India.

If you have a travel budget in 2010, we highly recommend the Continuity Insights (CI) conference, 12-14 April 2010 in New Orleans, USA. Recovery from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina still isn’t over, so you can stay an extra day after CI to volunteer to help. These are photos from Continuity Cares volunteer work in 2007 and 2008. New Orleans’ food and music are legendary, too.

We think the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM), 6-9 June 2010 in Toronto, Canada is the single best conference in the world bringing together emergency management and business continuity management. Here’s the 2010 conference program. Toronto is spectacular in June.

If travel to North American airports scares you off, The International Emergency Management Society (TIEMS) hosts its 17th annual conference 8 – 12 June, 2010 in Beijing, China.

You have to love a risk management standard called “fifty-fifty”. And all three (3) parts of Australia & New Zealand’s proposed AS/NZ 5050 standard for risk management and BCM are available free. Part 1 is the Specification (what to do, “shall” do this, “may” do that); Part 2 is the Practice (how to do it; “should” and why); Part 3 is called Assurance (controls & verification, and BCM audit guidance, which is a first for a BCM standard). The comment period ended last year; tune in to New Zealand or Australia for a final release.

The Sphere Handbook lists minimum standards for disaster response by NGO’s, governments and relief agencies.  400 organizations in 80 countries contributed in many languages to eight common standards (participation of the affected individuals in response planning, for example) and specific standards in water & sanitation, food, shelter and health services. The Sphere Project also published a Humanitarian Charter in 2004 that expresses the commitment of relief agencies to meet the Sphere minimum standards.

Not enough standards for you? The ISO 31000:2009 standard was released in November “to harmonize risk management processes in existing and future standards.” A standard for standards? That sounds like a tough sell. The Institute of Risk Management warned that ISO 31000 “is not intended as a standard against which an organisation can be certified.” So, maybe just wait until you hear ISO 31000 mentioned about 10 times, then you’ll know it’s important enough to buy it for USD 110.

Pecha kucha presentations
Have you ever suffered through a one-hour presentation that could have been delivered in a few minutes? Pecha kucha -pronounced “peh-chak-cha” - are presentations that last just 6 minutes, 20 seconds: 20 slides for 20 seconds each. They were started by designers, so the graphics are usually great: here’s a collection of them. Here’s one about guy who witnessed a disaster. There are pecha kucha sessions all over the world, including Singapore, Jakarta (Indonesia) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). See if there’s one in your city.

Did you see the disaster movie "2012"? I did, and reluctantly concluded I wouldn't be able to write off the cost of the ticket as a professional development expense.

Spoiler: In the movie, China saves the human race, and all the American political leaders are black people. Selected individuals from many nations climb into giant arks to float to safety when a deluge engulfs the earth. The sun comes out in the happily ever after. Who says the Bible doesn't have something to teach emergency managers?

Soon after, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that they'd found water on earth's moon -- far and away the most significant discovery in outer space in my lifetime-- and we appear to have been asleep in our seats. Have we become so myopic, or so jaded by advancements in technology (many of which resulted from America's exploration of space in the 1960's), that we have lost our sense of wonder?

If I were seriously considering the consequences of the entire planet being flooded, I'd definitely be looking for a recovery site. I wouldn't have considered the moon at any time in the last thousand years because it was purportedly unfit for human habitation. Discovery of water on the surface changes all that.