New workshops in Birmingham, Cardiff, Exeter and London now booking

Due to popular demand we’ve added some more workshops on social media for emergency planning and resilience.

They suit communications staff from Category One Responders with warning and informing responsibilities as well as emergency planning staff with an interest in warning and informing and other aspects of communication in emergencies.

These one-day sessions have proved really popular. We make them interactive and use a set of real world case studies. They are tailored to the needs of Category One responders

We can also organise training for LRFs or SCGs as well as individual responders.

We’ll be in Cardiff on 23rd April 2012, Exeter 24th April, London on 1st May and Birmingham on 2nd May.

For more information and to book click here

Southsidecops: a nice case study in local policing on twitter

Social media is beginning to prove its worth in community engagement roles across public services. Some police services have had locally-based accounts for some time (notably the Greater Manchester and West Midlands forces). West Mercia are just putting their toe in the water. Of course being late to the party means you can learn from those who went before. @southsidecops seems to being doing a decent job and they came in to their own at the end of January when a suspicious vehicle caused widespread disruption.

[UPDATE: 1400 13/02/2012 Those same @southsidecops have pointed me to this blog from a local reporter which also praises their work over this incident]

Here’s an edited version of their work around that incident (bear with it it’s an embed from Storify). Click here if it’s not working for you.

The power of the picture

I was chairing a conference the other day: EPIC Social Media South West. One of the speakers was the excellent Dan Slee. He mentioned many interesting and useful things including the reminder that images work much more effectively on twitter than text. I think he said a link to a picture was 4x more likely to be clicked on than a link to a press release.

Which is all very interesting.

In an emergency do we want to be sending images out? And what would we seek to achieve? Wouldn’t a link to a public information bulletin be much more useful?

Well London Fire Brigade have been tweeting pictures of live incidents for a while

It lets people know what the service is up to and, potentially, reduces the number of curious onlookers tempted to approach the scene and get in the way. Also it will reduce harmful speculation of the nature and scale of the incident.

Yesterday the Met Office tweeted a picture

This is subtly different to what they usually tweet (which is a link to the appropriate webpage upon which this picture appears) because an image is easier to manipulate on a mobile device, and on other clients.

It has reduced functionality in other ways. A web page gives you access to links and sources of other information which aren’t available here. It’s less instant though.

Like all things in communications it’s horses for courses but there are courses where an image would make an excellent horse. He said, mangling his metaphor.

Google starts making emergency alerts more useful

Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org has just launched a new service: Google Public Alerts

Essentially they’ve put public warning messages from a number of US Federal bodies on a map.

This is the start of something exciting.

Right now the fact that you can see warnings of dangerous blizzards in Alaska, while undoubtedly useful to Alaskans, is of passing relevance to UK citizens. This is, as the Google.Org blog makes clear, just a start.

Over time the company plans to allow more agencies, from more parts of the world, submit a feed of alerts (using the Common Alerting Protocol)  The alerts will start to show up in more areas of Google’s real estate. Searches on Google Maps or in the main search function might show you relevant alerts depending on the context of where you are and what you are searching from.

Right now the only data on the service comes from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey.

Google is inviting other agencies to express an interest essentially by setting up a CAP feed and sending it to the Alerts project.

This is worth paying attention to for a couple of reasons.

1. Google is big and well used so a good place to get your feeds displayed.
2. Burning a CAP feed opens a whole range of options. If every cat 1 responder had a CAP feed we could aggregate them, use them to provide timely strategic data and push them into other services to warn, inform and protect the public.

#ukgc12 session on Ushahidi and Crisis Mapping write-up

I pitched a session on Ushahidi and Crisis Mapping at UK Gov Camp last week. I’ve been playing around with Ushahidi for a little while and paying attention to how these communities are developing. I really think we are at the beginning of a profound humanitarian movement.

It’s not a well-understood platform in the UK and there aren’t many crisis mappers in the public sector. So it was intended as a sort of Ushahidi 101.

Also I’m no developer so I was only able to talk about the application of the application.

I’ve got to say, talking a room full of clever and engaged people through a topic is a fantastic way of improving your own understanding of it. Thanks to everyone who came, this is hopefully a more coherent introduction to the topic thanks to your help, comments and questions.

Ushahidi
In early 2008 some Kenyan developers were concerned about the levels of violence following the disputed elections in their country. They wanted an independent source of reports of what was happening and where. They built a platform that allowed people to SMS reports which could then be placed on a map. They called it “Testimony” in Swahili (Ushahidi). The code was released as open-source and a developer community has been working on the platform ever since.

It can be downloaded and installed on your own server but, luckily for me, the community provides a simple cloud-based solution at crowdmap.com. Sign up and start your own Ushahidi instance.

I set up a simple instance for Gov Camp at ukgc12.crowdmap.com and asked people to submit simple reports: home base and favourite fruit. Thanks to everyone who did.

Reports can be submitted using a customisable form on the instance. This allows the user to plot their location on a map: Ushahidi uses external mapping services, I set mine up to use Google Maps but this is customisable.

The platform will also pull data from an IMAP or POP3 mailbox, through the twitter API and through RSS. It will also handle SMS from a gateway. I installed the SMSSync plugin which allows any android device to become a temporary SMS gateway.

Essentially what Ushahidi does is allow you to place “reports” onto a map. Reports contain text and links to other content. Human beings have to be involved and the platform provides some workflow.

Submissions made through the web form are already reports and so can be placed on the map by checking a box. They then become public (if it’s a public map) or available to restricted users. Reports will be placed into one or more categories and the map can quickly filter for reports matching only some categories.

There is a “verified” option. So you can place reports on the map but indicate that they are unverified. Admins can edit the reports at any time. The system maintains an audit trail of edits.

For other data (email, SMS etc), an admin must create a report to get the data onto the map. The platform is helpful and tracks what happens to individual items.

And you end up with something that looks like this (because Ushahidi uses are often transient you end up with a lot of screenshots rather than links).

Screenshot of the Christchurch Recovery Map

This is the recovery map for Christchurch, NZ post earthquake. Reports there included things like “working wifi” “working landerettes”.

So you can see that the platform has possibilities for a range of uses. It also requires a degree of skill and judgement to be applied in the processing of data into reports.

A practice of “Crisis Mapping” has evolved across the world.

Uses of Ushahidi (Crisis Mapping)
Not all uses of Ushahidi occur in a crisis. Not all crisis mapping occurs on Ushahidi but there is a close relationship between the platform and the practice.

There are a number of ways in which the platform is commonly used

Open crowdsourcing
The general public is invited to submit reports. One or more people process these reports and place them on a map. Usually public.
Nice example: Al-Jazeera English has been asking people in Somalia “How has the Somalia Conflict affected your life?” Responses come back by SMS. They are then translated by volunteers within the diaspora and placed on an Ushahidi map.
The real experience of humans in conflict while that conflict rages.

Bounded crowdsourcing
A closed group of trusted individuals monitor data feeds for particular types of information. They process reports and place them on an Ushahidi instance.
Nice example: The Standby Taskforce which is a global volunteer movement was asked to build a Libya Crisis Map for UN-OCHA during the Libyan conflict in 2011. In the end SBTF did this and then trained UN online volunteers who took over the map. There is a complex workflow required to assess the veracity of reports and create robust data. Much of this has to be handled off the Ushahidi platform.

The output was provided privately to UN-OCHA who then published a redacted version 24hrs later.
(disclosure: I’m a volunteer with SBTF though I was not active on the Libya deployment)

This blog post from a UN-OCHA employee is an interesting read.
Media monitoring
One person or a small group tracks RSS feeds for news and reports relating to a single issue.
This is a UK example with frustratingly little contextual information. Clearly it tracks reports of public sector cuts though

For more information try

• https://crowdmap.com
• http://ushahidi.com/
• crisismappers.net
• Or give me a shout @likeaword

[EDIT: Several minutes after posting]

And also I pulled together a few links onto a google  doc. Some of which are in the post above.

Photo credit:
Photo is by the genius-like #ashroplad pulled from the #ukgc12 flickr stream and used under CC

Screenshot is from the Christchurch recovery map and used under CC

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