If everything fails, here what to do – a co-created civic tech guide to a possible scenario
Authored by Dan Monafu, with contributions from the Ottawa Civic Tech Community
Download as .pdf // Last updated: May 2024
Why a digital emergency guide?
I wrote this guide because I couldn’t find anything like it online as a resource.
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My family had a prolongued power outage last summer following a storm – we were out of power for 5 days. Luckily it was late spring so it wasn’t freezing in our house, but since then I’ve been preoccupying myself with being better prepared. I have young kids, and 5 days without ways to warm up milk at night, run baths, or have warm meals was challenging.
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There are many guides that focus on preparing for an emergency in the physical realm (in the aftermath of an earthquake or storm) but I’ve found very little that gives any sort of meaningful attention to the digital sphere. It’s easy when searching for such resources online to fall into extremes, but there’s very little on what could be seen as the ‘reasonable middle’; my hope is that this guide strikes a good balance between being reasonably well prepared and not going full survival mode. If you’re wondering why I didn’t include things like having cans of beans and a fresh supply of water stored, it’s because many existing guides do cover these – the gap was on the digital side.
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I can imagine a scenario where networks do go down for a week to a month or couple of months, but where we as a society have the resources to restore these services rather than collapse into anarchy for generations. This guide is for that month-long time horizon.
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Full disclosure: even I haven’t done all the things I’ve included in this guide; some of the mitigations are tedious and I admit will take lots of effort to complete. My aim is not to overwhelm or guilt you that you’re not as prepared as you should be. In conversation with friends, I’ve joked that we should organize a ‘digital emergency prep party’, where we do the work of photocopying our important documents and this that and the other for a bunch of hours, but at least we’re together – like solidarity communal tax filing, but a little better? 🙂
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I hope you enjoy the guide, and please let me know if you end up using it in part or in full, or if you have anything to add that I’ve missed – it was written to be used, and continued improvement is welcome and appreciated.
