Google Earth Community: InternetSAR.org: Search for Ron Boychuk

This is the problem, people are ignoring what I have said. The single most important fact we have is that there are five locations of interest to the Ron Boychuk search team and that the imagery we are working on is the first location of interest to them. This is the most important fact and it comes to me directly from my contact with the team.

What everyone is doing here is using media reports to second guess what decisions the Ron Boychuk team has made. None of those media reports matter at all. They are rumors and second hand information at best.

We need to trust that when the Ron Boychuk search team requested DigitalGlobe to capture imagery for them that they selected what they believed to be the most promising search locations based on all of their analysis. I really don't see a need to second guess their decisions. They have told me that based on their analysis the imagery they asked us to review is of the greatest interest to them. This should be good enough for all of us.

All of the chatter in this thread about what is fact and what isn't is nothing more than second guessing. Even Blue Penguin, who is one of the leading contrarians in these threads, has come to the conclusion that indeed the imagery the Boychuk search team asked us to review is probably the most promising imagery.

What more do we really need to know? What could we actually do with different information? We can't do anything differently because the imagery we have is the imagery we have AND we can't get new imagery until spring when the snow melts in the spring.

Going to the search team and interrogating them for facts would waste their time because it won't change what we are doing because we can't do anything differently.

In the future we may have a seat at the table during the decision making process of where and how imagery will be captured, but even then it won't be an open free for all discussion. It will be a small team of SAR professionals who will help provide advice. In the end it will still be up to the SAR team we are working with to make the final determination of how and where imagery will be captured. We need to trust that search teams have every incentive to choose the best possible areas for imagery and that they know what they are doing. After all, in many cases like with the Ron Boychuk search the decisions are being made by SAR professionals.

Remember our mission is not to replace SAR teams. Our mission is to assist them. This means we need to trust the decisions they make and provide them with the assistance they ask for without second guessing them to death as is happening in this thread.

If you were in the position of Ron Boychuk's family, who would you want to make the decisions about where to search: the trained SAR team you are working with or a bunch of people on some forum you don't know?

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InternetSAR.org: Volunteers collaboratively analyzing aerial and satellite imagery to assist in search and rescue efforts.
DISCUSS ACTIVE SEARCHES: Ron Boychuk in British Columbia, Canada & Steve Fossett in Nevada, USA

My blog posts on my MTurk search experience:
Using the Internet to Revolutionize Search and Rescue
Internet search for Steve Fossett eight weeks later

Edited by KenBarbalace (12/28/07 02:44 PM)