Our first task was purely technical. From this I mean, we knew they had imagery they wanted evaluated based on what they believed to be the most promising search locations. Our task was to get the imagery from DigitalGlobe servers, process it and put it on our servers. This took a lot of work and we had other delays like server issues on both sides.

Color me naive, but if a search team comes to me and says they have imagery that they need evaluated, I am going to assume they were careful enough to have collected imagery based on their best information. Why would they want to waste their time and ours on imagery that had no chance of containing what it is we are looking for. I simply saw at the time (and still see) no need for me or anyone else to second guess their judgment. Thus we did not bother to pursue that line of questioning. I'm actually stunned at how hostile some people have become over this issue and think it is completely uncalled for.

Since, however, there are concerns about whether or not the imagery provided to us is based on good information and since we are fortunate enough to have someone who has volunteered to help us with this matter, we are working on getting the answers people are now wanting. The clock on these questions started ticking on Dec 26th, which was Boxing Day in Canada (anyone care to explain what this is?), NOT on Dec 5th. Being that this is a major holiday and the key contacts are out for the holiday we need time to ask the right questions to the right people via our liaison who knows how to talk in their lingo.

Now I will agree that as we grow we need to develop the the ability to help SAR teams choose imagery priorities, but we do not have that ability at this time. InternetSAR.org is after all only about one month old. In time we will recruit our own SAR professionals who will help choose imagery priorities and we will have SAR professionals who will act as liaisons for us with SAR teams and will be able to ask the right questions and provide members with the right answers.

For today, however, we are learning as we go and must work within our limitations. This means we MUST put faith in the SAR teams we work for that they have sound reasoning for picking the imagery they have asked us to review. If individual members go out on their own and try to interrogate SAR teams on their own for the questions they think they are owed answers to, then those members run the risk of torpedoing all of our hard efforts.

We must prove that we can do what we promise to do, which is evaluate imagery and manage reports, before we can gain the credibility we need to have earned a seat at the decision making table.

We can not bring professionals into our ranks unless we can ourselves act like professionals.