Em2 0 Empa

Emergency 2.0 Australia

Geospatial and social media making a difference

An open initiative for the

in partnership with

Outline

• Background• Web 2.0• Examples of Emergency Management 2.0• Learnings and Recommendations

Background

• Sponsor: Government 2.0 Taskforce• Explore how Social Media / Web 2.0 are helping/can

help Emergency Management

• In collaboration with Know And Then

Buzzword Bingo!

Map Services

Satellite Hotspots

Field Reports

Command Centre - COP

Community:Tweets

Mash-upsBlogsMapsEtc.

Weather

FeedsWebsite

A2C· Additional Alert

Channels· Scalable

Infrastructure

C2ACrowdsourced

“Human Intelligence”

Leading and Emerging Practice

• Leading Practice: – (to some degree) established – documented benefits and success. – may be anywhere in the world.

• Emerging Practice – Australian initiatives. – recent ‘Green Shoots’– may not be showing their full benefit yet.

HealthMap: Global Disease Alerts• Aggregates multiple

sources (News, WHO, etc.)

• Collects eyewitness reports

• Integrates RSS, Twitter, Iphone app, Facebook

Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED)

• Filter Tweets for Earthquakes (place, time, keyword)

• <60 sec detection

• Contextual info (photos, narratives)

9

Australian Bushfires Map

• Multi Jurisdictional feed aggregations

• Many versions/mash-ups

• Mainly A2C, some C2A

11

Ushahidi• Engine for CrowdSourcing EM information

• Low-tech & Robust (SMS/Email/Web)

• Free/Open Source• Worldwide

Deployments– Kenya Riots– War on Gaza (Al

Jazeera) – Haiti & Chili

Earthquakes

Social Media in the Haiti Earthquake

• 21 January 2010, Magnitude 7.0; 100,000s killed• Fragile infrastructure, rendered inoperable• Only source of information: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr,

etc. (mobile devices)• Crowdsourcing of digital streetmaps: Open

StreetMap• Ushahidi incident tracker• ESRI GeoViewer monitoring Social Media

Learnings & Recommendations

• Widely recognised that ‘it’s happening anyway’

• A2C and C2A– A2C: relatively well

developed, many working examples & mash-ups

– C2A: More challenging, more angst, more potential

Map Services

Satellite Hotspots

Field Reports

Command Centre - COP

Community:Tweets

Mash-upsBlogsMapsEtc.

Weather

FeedsWebsite

A2C· Additional Alert

Channels· Scalable

Infrastructure

C2ACrowdsourced

“Human Intelligence”

Learnings & Recommendations

• Community Expectations– Trust– Transparency– Timeliness– Multi-channel (increasingly

Mobile)– Interactive & Responsive– Relevant to me

Learnings & Recommendations

• Agency Expectations– Quality vs. Timeliness– Control vs. (perceived) chaos– All Hazards– PPRR– Start with ‘low hanging fruit’ to

show what’s possible

18

Learnings & Recommendations

• Cross-jurisdictional efforts– Victorian EM social media group is

an important case study– Plenty of opportunities to share

policy AND solutions– Needs senior level recognition and

buy-in

Learnings & Recommendations

• Technology– Services and applications– Standards-based– 3rd party aggregation (niche

operators)– Low-tech & Robust

• If it works in Africa, it’ll work anywhere!

– Fast Evolving (e.g. Twitter Geo-API)

Issues, Gaps and Barriers

• Reluctance to adoption– what are the concerns?

• Crowdsourcing EM info– False positives?– Validation, confirmation, filtering

• Aggregation and Value adding of A2C streams– Leave it to 3rd parties?– Who’s accountable?

• Leadership & executive buy-in?

Summary• “We can no longer afford to work at the speed of

government... We have responsibilities to the public to move the information as quickly as possible ... so that they can make key decisions” (Los Angeles Fire Department)

• “The Genie is out of the bottle – Social Media in emergency management is here to stay, and Agencies cannot afford not to engage! “(Emergency 2.0 stakeholder meeting)

Thank You

Web: http://gov2em.net.au/Twitter: @em2auEmail: Maurits.vandervlugt@ngis.com.au

allison@civictec.net