International Emergency Management Society 2009 Conference

The International Emergency Management Society 2009 Conference is being held in Istanbul, Turkey 9 to 11 June 2009. This is an appropriate location, given Turkey's experience in emergency management. Last year I visited the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, to talk about Wireless Internet for Emergencies for use in Tsunami warning. If visiting Istanbul, also take some time to see the city.

Unfortunately, the conference web site has not been optimised for fast download or easy viewing, the web designers need to apply the lessons of emergency web design to their own site. The web site has an animated flash header, which takes a long time to load and then distracts the viewer from the content. The main menu items scroll partly off the screen when selected.

The conference call for papers, at 3.8 Mbytes of PDF for a 2 page phamplet is excessively large. The document appears to have been provided as an image with no text, so that in addition to being a large file, taking a long time to download, it cannot be copied, indexed, searched or translated by web software. But then the call for papers is now closed.