The power of the map

September 29, 2011

Standby Taskforce is one year old this month. It may already be the most important humanitarian movement you’ve never heard of .

It’s a group of people around the world who volunteer to put data on a map in a crisis. They are available at short notice and, thanks to their global reach, can operate round the clock.

That may not sound very exciting. It really is.

The Christchurch Recovery Map helped collate and organise information about which services open and closed and other data useful to residents affected by the New Zealand earthquake. Volunteers around the world analysed and verified reports and, by mapping them publicly, made them directly useful.

The same process has been used to sift information and make it useful following the Alabama tornadoes and Hurricane Yasi in Australia.

Standby Taskforce volunteers were asked to monitor, analyse and map dataflows around the conflict in Libya. They have provided high quality information to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs and trained UN online volunteers to carry on the work /.

Experiments with analysing satellite imagery of Somalia and providing live data about the evolving situation in Syria should inspire awe.

The Stanby Taskforce community has evolved out of the Ushahidi community: an open source crisis mapping project.

This is both inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. We now have the tools to show what is happening in real time in humanitarian crises across the globe.

Could crisis mapping have changed the course of the Rwandan genocide or the Balkan conflict? Or would we just have been better informed impotent spectators?

In one year Standby Taskforce has transformed the access to information for responders and for citizens in complex, difficult, crisis situations.

Imagine what it can achieve in it’s second year.

Integrating social media into civil contingencies exercises

September 5, 2011

Emergency plans, should take into account social media aspects.

Exercises: now with added twitter

The staff identified in the plans should be appropriately trained so that they understand their roles and responsibilities, have the skills and experience necessary to make a real contribution and feel confident in playing their part during an incident. Then you will get the most value from an exercise because it will give people an opportunity to put their training into practice. You will also get useful information about how well your plans work in practice.

Running a live social media exercise

I’ve seen a number of approaches to this.

There have been examples of using public networks and just telling people it’s an exercise (which I think is a VERY bad idea).

Some agencies have developed their own websites designed to simulate some aspects of social media traffic but the examples I’ve seen have been rather clunky and don’t simulate the speed and scale of traffic. Some people have used private social networks like Huddle or Ning with some success.

I really like Helpful Technology’s Social Simulator. It provides a very convincing simulation including in terms of volume and speed of traffic. (Steph Gray from Helpful technology and I announced a few weeks ago that we would work together to help responders make better use of this platform).

Including social media in wider exercises

We need to consider social media in a couple of ways.

There is the communication aspect: responders need to be trained and resourced to use the networks in an emergency to communicate with individuals and to gain intelligence.

There is also the human behaviour aspect: people use social networks to work out what’s going on, what everyone else is doing and where the situation is moving. They then change their behaviour as a result. Whether this is to undertake violent disorder to get together to clear up shattered streets.

Both of these aspects need to be included in exercise design.

At one extreme for a very large exercise we might include a simulated social media environment. At the other extreme we might include a summary of social media traffic as an inject into incident management groups. Either way we need to take account of how people will behave as a result of social media as well as what they will say.

It is also good practice to use social media to tell people that you are running an exercise, in the same way as you would use social media to talk about your other services.

I can probably help you with this by the way.

Picture is Sentinel Shield Exercise Nov. 9, 2010 by USAG used under CC-BY-SA-2.0