Crisis Information Management: A Primer, presentation by Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation. Prepared for ISCRAM Summer School 2011 - http://www.iscram.org/live/summerschool2011.

1. Crisis Information Management:
A Primer
Sanjana Hattotuwa
TED Fellow
Senior Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation

2. sri lanka: complex political emergency
post-war, not post-conflict

3. sri lanka: sudden onset emergency
30,000+ dead in a couple
of minutes

4. haiti: sudden onset emergency

5. 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?

6. social media

7. 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)

8. 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.

9. disaster is a growth industry

10. social media landscape in 2011

11. social media landscape today
+
plus.google.com

12. 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)

13. 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

15. 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

16. old information model
Event / Issue / Victim
Policy making
Journalist
Mainstream
media Consumer

17. new information models
Event / Issue
Consumer Citizen media
/ Victim
Journalist Mainstream Consumer
media
Policy making

18. the revolution
First
responders/ UN
Victim
Closed systems No agency
First Victim /
responders/ UN Witness
Open systems Enhanced agency

19. the revolution
Passive
Media Consumer
Information as a package
Active / Reactive
Consumer /
Media Witness /
Producer
Information as a conversation
Knowledge through curation

20. 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.

21. 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.”

22. what is out there?

23. Leverage crowd maps
Bounded, geo-fenced models help contextualise unbounded, larger inputs

24. crisis in darfur: using google earth
http://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur

25. mainstream media: all use crowdsourced media

26. 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.

27. “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

28. burma vj: reporting from a closed country

29. the ‘green revolution’: post-election Iran, 2009

30. 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.

31. reliefweb
http://www.reliefweb.int

32. irin
http://www.irinnews.org

33. OCHA COD / FOD repository
http://www.irinnews.org

34. humanitarian early warning service
http://www.hewsweb.org/home_page/default.asp

35. prevention web
http://www.preventionweb.net/english

36. reuters alertnet
http://www.trust.org/alertnet

37. crisis information management wikis
http://wiki.ict4peace.org/Pakistan-Floods

38. mental health and psychosocial support
http://mhpss.net

39. haiti earthquake, january 2010
http://haiti.ushahidi.com

40. local efforts
http://www.local.com.pk

41. google resource finder
http://pakistan.resource-finder.appspot.com/?&lang=ur

42. google maps

43. google news

44. google reader: a web based RSS reader

45. getting updates: google crisis response
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

46. social networking: facebook
600 million+ users

47. case study: mumbai bomb blasts
November 2008

48. Flickr: first images of the attacks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinu/sets72157610144709049

49. Wikipedia: first narratives of the attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks

50. Wikipedia: first narratives of the attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks
400+ edits / updates
100+ authors
Less than 24 hours after first
attack

51. Getting updates: twittering the attacks
http://spy.appspot.com

52. curating content

53. curated content

54. curated content akin to selecting the best produce

55. curating crowdsourced information
• Buying fruits of vegetables • Curating crowdsourced information
• Check price • Check authorship
• Weigh it in one’s hands • Check for veracity, quality
• Is it accurate, fair, topical?
• Look at it from all angles
• What is the bias? Is it progressive?
• Look at it in context
• Select a few from many sources
• Look at a few, not just one
• Discard if out-dated information is
• Discard if old presented
• Be suspicious if it looks too good • Be cautious of unverified information
and breaking news
• Ascertain location where it was
produced • Is the producer local or foreign?

56. UN and crisismapping

57. awareness never 100% accurate, or complete
Trust&
Satis&icing*
situational&
awareness&
Veri*iable&

58. 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.

59. situational awareness today
Traditional media
Citizen journalism / Digital, web based
media / Crowdsourced information
Trusted intelligence from UN system
Situational Awareness / Response

60. some key differences between crisismapping and
UN platforms
UN Crisismapping
Agency focused Crowd sourced information
Inward looking Outward looking
Generally verified Verifiability an option, not default
UN Agency produced or trusted Designed for scalability
source Open source / Open data standards
Information products range from Information products generally external,
internal & confidential to external declassified
Proprietary data formats and systems Potential of interoperability high
Little systemic interoperability Easier to learn
Hard to learn Wider ownership

61. crisismapping and UN: conflict or collaboration?
UN IASC Common Operational Datasets
Humanitarian)profile)
Popula0on)sta0s0cs)
Administra0ve)boundaries)
Populated)places)
Transporta0on)network)
Hydrology)
Hypsography)

62. crisismapping and UN: conflict or collaboration?
Strengthening Common Operational Datasets
• CODs&
Response& • Community&owned&and&driven&
• Crowdsourced&informa3on&at& recovery&plaAorms&
community&level&(in&vernacular)& • Oneresponse&et#al&and&updated& • UN&systems&(e.g.&UNDP&
• Remote&sensing&data& CODs& plaAorms)&
• Crowdsourced&ground&truths& • Systems&established&by&
via&crisismapping&plaAorms& government&
• Feedback&to&vic3ms&(e.g.&
Clusters) Project&4636&and&CDAC&in&Hai3)&
Preven3on&&&
Recovery&
Risk&Reduc3on&
APIs)
Crisis)
Crisismapping)
Popula'on)of) APIs) pla5orms)and)
UN)CODs) crowdsourced)
data)
Disaster)

63. Libya Crisis Map: Model for progress?

64. Some enduring challenges
Tweets from ICCM 2010

65. 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?

66. 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.

67. 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

68. enduring challenges with crisismapping and
crowdsourcing
• 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

69. how and who do we trust?
abduction of a gay girl of damascus. or so we thought.
http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com Jelena Lecic, of London
Tom MacMaster, 40 year old American

70. A lesbian in Damascus
And other tall tales
Disinformation
Misinformation
Partial accounts
Gaming the system
Gender imbalance (e.g. rape reports in DRC)
Lack of access leads to challenges in verification
Multiple retweets mistaken for authenticity
Anonymity online (esp. post-Norwegian terrorist attack)
Machine translation / Lack of translation
Little or no direct access
Trauma
Anxiety
Fear
Persecution
Network infiltration and disruption
Trust perceptions and authority markers
Bias in mainstream media
Bias in citizen media

71. 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.

72. two key effects of information overload

73. two key effects of information overload

74. The new violence
Data loss is lives lost

75. organisational hr & financial costs
Skilled / Free Skilled / Paid
IBM ManyEyes Ustream Flash based infoviz
Google Moderator Timetoast
Open Data statistics Wordpress VIP
Bundlr Storify
Curated Twitter Wordpress Wordle
Google Maps
Facebook Facebook Ads Flickr Pro
Vimeo
Google News
Google Reader Flickr YouTube
Easy / Free Easy / Paid

76. thank you
sanjanahattotuwa@ict4peace.org