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In this paper, we explore a new form of dissemination that arises in distributed, mission-critical applications called Flash Dissemination. This involves the rapid dissemination of rich information to a large number of recipients in a very short period of time. A key characteristic of Flash Dissemination is its unpredictability (e.g., natural hazards), but when invoked it must harness all possible resources to ensure timely delivery of information. Additionally, it must scale to a large number of recipients and perform efficiently in highly heterogeneous (data, network) and failure prone environments. We investigate a peer-based approach based on the simple principle of transferring dissemination load to information receivers using foundations from broadcast networks, gossip theory, and random networks. Gossip-based protocols are well known for being stateless, scalable, and fault-tolerant; however, their performance …