Crisis Information Management: A Primer
Sanjana Hattotuwa
TED FellowSenior Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation
sri lanka: complex political emergencypost-war, not post-conflict
sri lanka: sudden onset emergency
30,000+ dead in a couple of minutes
haiti: sudden onset emergency
points to ponder
• Are new technologies and ICTs more helpful in dealing with sudden-onset natural disasters / acts of God as opposed to acts of men & women?
• Why are you here? Is technology a standalone panacea or an enabler to thought-leaders?
• In 1981, John Postel he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”
• Is this a mantra for organisational change? Technology design? Technical architecture? Process?
social media
what is social media?
• Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many).
• It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. (Wikipedia)
what is new media?
• New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies.
• New media is not television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications. (Wikipedia)
• But increasingly, old media is leveraging the web, Internet and mobiles in generating and disseminating news and information.
disaster is a growth industry
social media landscape in 2011
social media landscape today
+
plus.google.com
Social Media IM foundations
• Blogs
• Social networks (Twitter, Facebook)
• Mobiles: SMS to social networking sites, mobile photography and video
• Wired (ADSL) and wireless broadband (3G etc)
• Greater access, also in vernacular
• Lower transactional cost (cost per SMS, subscription for ADSL, cost per dongle, data subscriptions)
what’s new
• Ubiquity of two way communications
• Addressable peoples, even those who IDPs or refugees
• Both news generation and dissemination leverages new media
• Disintermediated models vs. traditional media model
• Citizens as producers
• Low resolution content broadcast on high definition media
new media based content generation
• Glocal information – what is local anymore?
• Information agents are rapid moving, transnational
• A person in Boston can report on activities in Port au Prince who sources his information from someone in Les Cayes via SMS, who goes on to plot it on a map that helps someone from New York to deploy aid via a request made over the web to someone in Rome
• Models of news gathering and trust are changing
old information model
Event / Issue / Victim
Journalist
Consumer Mainstream
media
Policy making
new information models
Event / Issue / Victim
Journalist
Consumer Citizen media
Mainstream media
Consumer
Policy making
the revolution
First responders/ UN Victim
First responders/ UN
Victim / Witness
Open systems
Closed systems No agency
Enhanced agency
the revolution
Media Consumer
MediaConsumer / Witness / Producer
Information as a conversationKnowledge through curation
Information as a package
Passive
Active / Reactive
power of sms
• “My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilogrammes of food. You must help.”
• Humble SMS text messages from refugees could become an effective SOS for millions whose voices are so rarely heard.
power of sms: post tsunami
• The web is littered with examples on how SMS helped in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
• “I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers tossed onto the road. Scary shit.”
• “Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive.”
• “Made contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying people all day.”
• “Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands.”
what is out there?
Leverage crowd mapsBounded, geo-fenced models help contextualise unbounded, larger inputs
crisis in darfur: using google earthhttp://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur
mainstream media: all use crowdsourced media
bombings in london
• 7 July 2005
• Within 24 hours, the BBC had received 1,000 stills and videos, 3,000 texts and 20,000 e-mails.
“saffron revolution” in myanmar, 2007
• 100,000 people joined a Facebook group supporting the monks
• No international TV crews allowed in the country
• Mobile phone cameras were the first footage of the monks protest
• Blogs from Rangoon were the only sources of information
• The junta shut down all Internet and mobile communications
burma vj: reporting from a closed country
the ‘green revolution’: post-election Iran, 2009
the ‘green revolution’: post-election Iran, 2009
• Social media played three very important roles in the Iran situation:
1.It helped Iranians communicate with each other.
2.It helped Iranians communicate with the outside world.
3.It helped the rest of the world communicate with both Iranians and others who sympathize with the protesters.
• YouTube and Flickr brought multimedia out of the distressed country. Twitter and Facebook updates have spread videos virally. Blogs, Wikipedia, and citizen journalism have helped disseminate and filter this information. Most of all though, these tools have helped people take action.
reliefwebhttp://www.reliefweb.int
irinhttp://www.irinnews.org
OCHA COD / FOD repositoryhttp://www.irinnews.org
humanitarian early warning servicehttp://www.hewsweb.org/home_page/default.asp
prevention webhttp://www.preventionweb.net/english
reuters alertnethttp://www.trust.org/alertnet
crisis information management wikishttp://wiki.ict4peace.org/Pakistan-Floods
mental health and psychosocial supporthttp://mhpss.net
haiti earthquake, january 2010http://haiti.ushahidi.com
local effortshttp://www.local.com.pk
google resource finderhttp://pakistan.resource-finder.appspot.com/?&lang=ur
google maps
google news
google reader: a web based RSS reader
getting updates: google crisis responsehttp://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html
social networking: facebook600 million+ users
case study: mumbai bomb blastsNovember 2008
Flickr: first images of the attackshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/vinu/sets72157610144709049
Wikipedia: first narratives of the attackshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks
Wikipedia: first narratives of the attackshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks
400+ edits / updates
100+ authors
Less than 24 hours after first attack
Getting updates: twittering the attackshttp://spy.appspot.com
curating content
curated content
curated content akin to selecting the best produce
curating crowdsourced information
• Buying fruits of vegetables
• Check price
• Weigh it in one’s hands
• Look at it from all angles
• Look at it in context
• Look at a few, not just one
• Discard if old
• Be suspicious if it looks too good
• Ascertain location where it was produced
• Curating crowdsourced information
• Check authorship
• Check for veracity, quality
• Is it accurate, fair, topical?
• What is the bias? Is it progressive?
• Select a few from many sources
• Discard if out-dated information is presented
• Be cautious of unverified information and breaking news
• Is the producer local or foreign?
UN and crisismapping
awareness never 100% accurate, or complete
Trust&
Veri*iable&
Satis&icing*situational&awareness&
what’s satisficing?
• Satisficing, (satisfy with suffice), is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution.
• A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.
• The word satisfice was coined by American political scientist Herbert Simon in 1956.
situational awareness today
Situational Awareness / Response
Traditional media
Citizen journalism / Digital, web based media / Crowdsourced information
Trusted intelligence from UN system
some key differences between crisismapping and UN platforms
UNAgency focusedInward lookingGenerally verified UN Agency produced or trusted sourceInformation products range from internal & confidential to externalProprietary data formats and systemsLittle systemic interoperabilityHard to learn
CrisismappingCrowd sourced informationOutward lookingVerifiability an option, not defaultDesigned for scalabilityOpen source / Open data standardsInformation products generally external, declassifiedPotential of interoperability highEasier to learnWider ownership
crisismapping and UN: conflict or collaboration?UN IASC Common Operational Datasets
Humanitarian)profile)
Popula0on)sta0s0cs)
Administra0ve)boundaries)
Populated)places)
Transporta0on)network)
Hydrology)
Hypsography)
crisismapping and UN: conflict or collaboration?Strengthening Common Operational Datasets
Popula'on)of)UN)CODs)
Crisismapping)pla5orms)and)crowdsourced)data)
APIs)
APIs)
Clusters)
Crisis)
Disaster)
• CODs&• Crowdsourced&informa3on&at&community&level&(in&vernacular)&
• Remote&sensing&data&
Preven3on&&&Risk&Reduc3on&
• Oneresponse&et#al&and&updated&CODs&
• Crowdsourced&ground&truths&via&crisismapping&plaAorms&
• Feedback&to&vic3ms&(e.g.&Project&4636&and&CDAC&in&Hai3)&
Response&• Community&owned&and&driven&recovery&plaAorms&
• UN&systems&(e.g.&UNDP&plaAorms)&
• Systems&established&by&government&
Recovery&
Libya Crisis Map: Model for progress?
Some enduring challengesTweets from ICCM 2010
challenges
• Concept of failing forward missing. Everyone parading what worked, but more imp to know - what failed, why?
• Heard first cursory mention of ethics amidst overwhelmingly technocratic perspectives. Good. Need to flesh out.
• No recognition of (geo) politics and US strategic interests in use & availability of tech. Compare Haiti, Pakistan & Myanmar in '08
• A bigger disaster than Haiti, Pakistan had comparably little of this tech, volunteerism and focus. Why?
challenges
• Surprisingly everyone seems to believe crowdsourcing is good, and is only used for good. Context, content, creator, consumer absent
• At risk of sounding Rumsfeldian, why don't we know what we should know? Core datasets vital for community resilience and response
• Trust is mutable, relative, contextual, locally defined, gendered, framed by identity, inter alia.
• Conflict is seen as negative. Conflict can also be progressive, creative, life giving process.
challenges
• Impartial, accurate coverage still vital, increasingly hard to ascertain
• Torrent of information. Trickle of knowledge.
• Veracity hard to determine
• Pace of technology development hard to keep pace with
• Nature of violence, partisan bias, citizenship, governance structures, public institutions heavily influence crowdsourcing.
• Crowdsourced HR or election violations mapping with volunteers from perpetrator party/tribe/ethnicity? Proceed with caution
• Volunteerism undergirding stand-by crowdsourcing good, but what about CPE's, where personal bias can deeply influence curation?
• Related to last tweet, volunteerism works better for sudden onset natural disasters, which are also mediagenic
enduring challenges with crisismapping and crowdsourcing
how and who do we trust?abduction of a gay girl of damascus. or so we thought.
Tom MacMaster, 40 year old American
http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com Jelena Lecic, of London
A lesbian in DamascusAnd other tall tales
DisinformationMisinformationPartial accountsGaming the systemGender imbalance (e.g. rape reports in DRC)Lack of access leads to challenges in verificationMultiple retweets mistaken for authenticityAnonymity online (esp. post-Norwegian terrorist attack)Machine translation / Lack of translationLittle or no direct access TraumaAnxietyFearPersecutionNetwork infiltration and disruptionTrust perceptions and authority markersBias in mainstream mediaBias in citizen media
two key effects of information overload
• Continuous partial attention, Linda Stone, Microsoft, 1997. With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.
• The immediate altruistic response rapidly diminishes over time (Melissa Brown, associate director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2010) Our brains release congratulatory hits of dopamine when we engage in selfless behaviour — which we’re moved to do the instant we witness something awful.
two key effects of information overload
two key effects of information overload
The new violenceData loss is lives lost
organisational hr & financial costs
Skilled / Paid
Easy / Free
Skilled / Free
Google Maps
Google Moderator
Curated Twitter
Google Reader
Google News
Wordpress
IBM ManyEyes Ustream
Flickr
Open Data statistics
Timetoast
Wordle
Flash based infoviz
Easy / Paid
Wordpress VIP
Facebook Ads Flickr Pro
Vimeo
YouTube
Bundlr Storify
thank [email protected]