Social media is evolving the role of emergency management by increasing situational awareness, crowdsourcing information from citizens, and creating smarter governments. It allows emergency managers to understand events through time and space by monitoring tools that aggregate public posts. Crowdsourcing leverages the public to accomplish tasks once limited to specialists, as seen in OpenStreetMap's mapping of Haiti. While social media creates opportunities, it also poses challenges for emergency management around meeting public expectations, analyzing information, and validating data.
1. THE EVOLVING ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
EMERGENCY
PREPAREDNESS
CONFERENCE
VANCOUVER, 2011
KRISTOPHER HAYNE
BUSINESS AREA EXPERT
EMBC
2. AGENDA
Situational
Awareness
Social Media CrowdSourcing
Smarter
Governments
9. SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES ARE BEING INTEGRATED
Creating New Sources of Information
Validated Information
Open Data
CrowdSourcing
Mobile
Community
Awareness
Social
Situation
Awareness
Enriching GIS Systems with
• Open Data Diverse Observations,
• Mobile Tech Perceptions and Opinions
Analysis
• Geo-Location
. . . Creating Opportunities and Challenges for EM
10. Social Technologies are about
understanding the world faster
1. Meeting and managing citizen expectations
2. Increasing situational awareness
3. Crowdsourcing and leveraging citizens as force
multipliers
22. SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
“THE SOONER WE ARE ABLE
TO COMPREHEND THE FULL
SCOPE OF THE DISASTER,
THE BETTER ABLE WE ARE TO
SUPPORT OUR CITIZENS AND
FIRST RESPONDERS. FOR
THAT REASON, WE MUST
SEEK OUT AND INCORPORATE
INFORMATION PROVIDED BY
THE PUBLIC.”
Senate Homeland Security Hearing on Social Media as Disaster
Communications Tool – May 5, 2011
23. SA is about understanding the world
through
1. Time
2. Space
24. CROWDSOURCING
“Crowdsourcing is how the power of the many can
be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once
the responsibility of a specialized few” Jeff Howe.,
2008.
44. SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES ARE BEING INTEGRATED
Creating New Sources of Information
Validated Information
Open Data
CrowdSourcing
Mobile
Community
Awareness
Social
Situation
Awareness
Enriching GIS Systems with
• Open Data Diverse Observations,
• Mobile Tech Perceptions and Opinions
Analysis
• Geo-Location
Creating Smarter Governments…
45. SOCIAL MEDIA IN CRISIS
THINGS TO CONSIDER…
1. Start with
Authoritative Data
2. Don't create a citizen
data silo
3. Let citizens know
what your monitoring
4. Respond to Feedback
The objectives of the presentation is to demonstrate and showcase how applications and tools can be utilized to improve the quality, timeliness, and completeness of data collection and integration, and to improve response towards emergencies through better situational awareness and smarter governments. I will be demonstrating how key technologies can help to decipher social authority, trends, social identification, and analysis of the data by utilizing tools that are currently used today from across the globe
Social media are technologies that enable mass collaboration and can be used to monitor, disseminate, andexchange information in ways that are both accessible and permanent a community.Not only does the enablement of mass collaboration imply a certain set of attributes associated with the technology, but also a subset of functional capabilities is inherent in these technologies. The functional capabilities essentially has four stages of progression in the use of social media tools in the EM realm:
Use as an awareness or listening tool (e.g., monitoring various sites and pulling in relevant information and data)Talk about example sites that can be used in this context: Trendsmap, Global Incidents Map, Health Map, Stormpulse, Google Flue Trends, MASAS, BCEMAP
2. Use as a one-way communications tool (e.g., pushing out content to individuals)I.E Twitter, Flicker, Youtube, Soundcloud, SMS Alerts & warnings
3. Use as a two-way communications tool to engage with the community, creating a dialogue by both sending and receiving information i.eFacebook, yammer, blogs, wiki’sQueenslandPolice: Come back this Thursday at 4:00pm for a live chat about Schoolies safety with our officers. If you'd like to ask a question now, please submit it below and we'll try to answer it on Thursday.This 360 degree camera gives you an unbelievably real close up of what it was like to actually be in the Vancouver riot...incredible, thank you Andrew for sharing. Just click and drag to look around on this 360 video. By: 360 immersive media
4. Use as a tool to leverage the community as a resource in response efforts (e.g., mobilizing and achieving communal goals.The first three stages build toward the fourth, which is effectively mass collaboration. Exactly how emergency management agencies could progress along these stages has been identified as common issue throughout the SMEM community and will need to understand the challenges and risks in moving forward.Challenges and Risks:1. Resources2. Laws, policy, and guidance3. Engagement and community-building4. Buy-in and adoption through demonstrated value to others;5. Reliability and verification6. Structure and integration
Understanding the interactions between new technologies, open data, and the evolving participatory response community is at the center of the work and meaning of social media in emergency management.Many individuals within the emergency response arena feel that we are in the midst of a transformative period because of the perceived value created through these interactions.
These interactions move towards the movement of capturing real-time information which allows emergency managers to understand the world faster and become more effective in saving lives.Toward this goal, there are three predominant reasons that emergency managers might want engage with social media:1. Meeting and managing citizen expectations2. Increasing situational awareness3. Crowdsourcing and leveraging citizens as force multipliers
Situation awareness, situational awareness, or SA, is the perception of environmental elements with respect to time and/or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable has changed, such as time. It is also a field of study concerned with perception of the environment critical to decision-makers in complex, dynamic areas from aviation, air traffic control, power plant operations, military command and control, and emergency services such as fire fighting and policing; to more ordinary but nevertheless complex tasks such as driving an automobile or bicycle.Situation awareness involves being aware of what is happening in the vicinity to understand how information, events, and one's own actions will impact goals and objectives, both immediately and in the near future. Lacking SA or having inadequate SA has been identified as one of the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error.[1] Thus, SA is especially important in work domains where the information flow can be quite high and poor decisions may lead to serious consequences (e.g., piloting an airplane, functioning as a soldier, or treating critically ill or injured patients).Having complete, accurate and up-to-the-minute SA is essential where technological and situational complexity on the human decision-maker are a concern. SA has been recognized as a critical, yet often elusive, foundation for successful decision-making across a broad range of complex and dynamic systems, including aviation and air traffic control,[2] emergency response and military command and control operations,[3] and offshore oil and nuclear power plant management.[4]
From an emergency management perspective, situational awareness within the first 72 hours of an event is critical to the success of response operations. Moreover, experiences such as the 2007 San Diego County Fires have shown that disaster- relevant information will be posted by the community at large to provide SA for the public and for others to use. This information provides tremendous value in providing decision-makers with real-time situational awareness and was essentially one of the first cases using the web and geographic information to provide context around a crisis situation.In Oct 2007, KBPS, a local San Diego radio station used Google maps to report the real-time spread of fires and the status of evacuation centresThey captured details around Wildfire parameters Fire linesEvacuation Centers / sheltersRoad ClosuresEvacuation ordersInformation was captured from counties, fire response, Transportation and other key agencies who were responding to the fires and in a few days the information had over 1.1 million hits
This particular map is looking at all cholera outbreaks since Jan 01 2010 it allows the user to ad additional layers such as Cholera treatment faciltities, water points, emergency shelters, and even allows the user to add additional outbreaks HealthMap, a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Children's Hospital Boston founded in 2006, is an established global leader in utilizing online informal sources for disease outbreak monitoring and real-time surveillance of emerging public health threats. The freely available Web site 'healthmap.org' and mobile app 'Outbreaks Near Me' deliver real-time intelligence on a broad range of emerging infectious diseases for a diverse audience including libraries, local health departments, governments, and international travelers. HealthMap brings together disparate data sources, including online news aggregators, eyewitness reports, expert-curated discussions and validated official reports, to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. Through an automated process, updating 24/7/365, the system monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, visualizes and disseminates online information about emerging diseases in nine languages, facilitating early detection of global public health threats.
Trendsmap, Global Incidents Map, Health Map, Stormpulse, Google Flue Trends, MASAS
Heat Map of Sanfran depicting Male / Female tweets from geo-coded tweet data.This is typically done using the GPS in many of today’s smart phones running twitter clients.
Heat map of Sydney Australia
During major events, people use Twitter to share news and thoughts with friends, family and followers around the world. Messages originating in one place are quickly spread across the globe through Retweets, @replies and Direct Messages. We see this behavior during everything from sporting events like the Stanley Cup Playoffs, to widely-televised news events like the royal wedding, and also in the face of major disasters like the March 11 earthquake in Japan, where the volume of Tweets sent per second spiked to more than 5,000 TPS five separate times after the quake and ensuing tsunami. The following video illustrates what this global flow of information looks like.Personal messagesTwitter, saw a 500 percent increase in Tweets from Japan as people reached out to friends, family and loved ones in the moments after the earthquake. The video shows the volume of @replies traveling into and out of Japan in a one-hour period just before and then after the earthquake. In addition, not only can these tools be used for the benefit of emergency managers, but also they are useful in providing instructions and situational awareness to individuals in a disaster environment.
Replies directed to users in Japan are shown in pink; messages directed at others from Japan are shown in yellow.Response effectiveness stems from the quality of information available about the consequences of an event and the speed at which that information becomes available. Therefore, the ability to use social media tools to gather essential elements of information quickly and to develop a common operating picture with that information is a compelling case for adoption in a profession in which success is often tied to timeliness.
BCeMAP is a Multi- Agency Situational Awareness tool that provides a framework for geospatial intelligence, data fusion and visualization. In conjunction with Emergency Management British Columbia, GeoBC and multiple stakeholders it is used to gain a timely accurate understanding of emergency management operations and the events that impact them.The BC Emergency Event Map system (BCeMap) is intended to:Provide real-time dissemination of a province-wide emergency event map to trusted partners in British Columbia, including local, regional, provincial and national emergency management organisations, other public safety agencies and critical infrastructure operators. Provide a Common Operating Picture that integrates incident, geographic, infrastructure, threat and hazard information to provide common situational awareness to multiple agencies while planning for and responding to emergency events of all types. Provide the ability to access and disseminate geospatial incident information to other trusted federal and provincial partners. This may include dissemination of information to other geospatially enabled systems
The Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS) initiative makes it possible to share location-based situational awareness information and alerts, between first response and emergency management agencies, using open standards and an open architecture.
Gather, visualize and share data online with your staff and other response organizations and constituents. Use Google Fusion Tables to:Visualize your data from shelter lists to power outages instantly as a map or a chart.Identify data patterns to aid in crisis decision makingShow the world your work in real time by embedding your map or chart in a web pageCollaborate with other responders by merging your data, allowing you to see all important related information in one place
Both are pretty strong statements in support of using SM…
Crowd sourcing and leveraging citizens as force multipliersSocial media tools, if used properly, provide the opportunity to turn individuals whom emergency managers and first responders previously perceived as liabilities in response into critical assets. The ability to crowdsource and leverage both affected and unaffected persons as force multipliers in response—be it as information providers or aggregators—is what separates new media from old, and this is where the new value is created.
BACKGROUNDOn June 22 of 2011 EMBC, City of Vancouver, City of Richmond, NRCAN, DRDC, DHS, Washington State, ESRI Canada, GeoBC, EMERGEO, PlanetWorks and SFU had just finished the first cross boarder technology experiment simulating a catastrophic event using a number of different technologies: ETeam, BCeMAP, MASAS, MASAS Simulator, Emergeo, HAZUS-MH, SFU’s Emergency communications vehicle, Ushahadi, MyStateUSA, and IPAWS. This was the first experiment in Canada’s Interoperability Action Plan sponsored by DRDC, Centre of Security Sciences and the Department of Homeland Security. CAUSE The CAUSE experiment showcased how technology can play a role in catastrophic events, this was an experiment jointly managed through centre of security sciences defence research and development Canada, and department of homeland security. Since the experiment has finished an associated video was produced for the emergency management community to view and identify how technology played a role in this particular vignette I am showcasing an example of Volunteering Geographic Information from an open source crowdsourcing application that has been used in mutliple emergency events, humanitatian events and others acrosss the goble, this is application is known as USHAHIDI which means “WITNESS” in Swahili. CAUSE Goals:Adoption of technology Resiliency of technology Cross boarder collaboration Future R&D Interoperability of existing tools
A visualisation of the response to the earthquake by the OpenStreetMap community. Within 12 hours the white flashes indicate edits to the map (generally by tracing satellite/aerial photography).Over the following days a large number of additions to the map are made with many roads (green primary, red secondary) added. Also many other features were added such as the blue glowing refugee camps that emerge.A lot of these edits were made possible by a number of satellite and aerial imagery passes in the days after the quake, that were release to the public for tracing and analysis.
A lot of these edits were made possible by a number of satellite and aerial imagery passes in the days after the quake, that were release to the public for tracing and analysis.
But for public safety, the fusion is serious – as seen here through VGI SupportOver the 12 days and counting a massive amount of information was captured identifying Collapsed Buildings, Partially Collapsed buildings, obstacles, damaged infrastructure, landslides, refugee camps, and other information
AS GOVERNMENTS increasingly develop Gov 2.0 initiatives, they are better able to answer the call to do more with less and meet citizens’ desire to connect with government. Technology is evolving with this movement as it naturally facilitates communication about place-based issues. Acknowledging citizens as powerful sources of data, smart governments are providing ways for them to deliver real-time information. A smart gov might have weather systems, stream gauges, environmental sensors, smart infrastructure monitoring systems, cameras, real time transportation flow analysis and other data collection systems providing city leaders with vast amounts of data that allows them to make better decisions. New technologies, such as Ushahadi, crowdmap and social networks are enabling citizens to report concerns, opinions, and requests directly to the government. Citizens can quickly and easily send photos and other information from their smartphones or computers to government agencies, volunteers and others to report issues, and the data can be automatically tied in to existing systems. Therefore creating a smarter government.The next few slides will show case how crowdsourcing/ social media can be leverage to derive intelligence.
Property damage
Hazards radioactivity, earthquake, tsunami
Evacuations
Power Outages Filter by date… starting on March 12th (day of Earthquake and Tsunami)
March 13
March 14th
March 15th
March 16th
March 17th
March 18
Power Outages – all days
All categoriesAgain, using trend analysis, we were able to use social media content to visualize community reports related to specific events.
As citizen-generated data can become part of the government workflow, operations can move faster than ever. A citizen can instantly report damages, services needed, broken streetlights, or downed power lines, for example, from their smartphone right at the scene. That can automatically be integrated into exisiting workflow and business process, so a decision can be made quickly therefore improving citizen services, public safety and preparedness.Web and mobile apps help citizens report problems and save time and money for government to respond to those problems. The process is much more convenient for the public now. The rise of social media, crowdsourcing, open data, geo-location, mobile and Web applications is allowing government to go further in engaging citizens than with traditional means. Now citizens can simply click on a map, take a photo and enter the details of damages or service requests. Government wants citizens to be involved, and citizens can now participate more easily than ever with technology today. With constant improvements in the way data is analyzed and displayed, we can now gather tremendous insight to areas that require attention.
Start with authoritative data. Levergage the dependable, accurate data you already have and use it as a foundation for the applications you deliver to citizens. When citizens contribute information through applications and technology you can bring it directly into your existing systems.Don’t create a citizen data silo. Create applications that work seamlessly with your existing systems to ensure that the data you collect from the public will work with your back-end office systemsLet citizens know what your monitoring. For citizens to be effective sensors, they need to know about the applications you are creating/ using to gather inputRespond to feedback. When citizens alert you to an issue or concern, generate automatic responses that let them know you have received their input and keep them up to date on the issue as it progresses or is resolved.Challenges and Risks:1. Resources2. Laws, policy, and guidance3. Engagement and community-building4. Buy-in and adoption through demonstrated value to others;5. Reliability and verification6. Structure and integration
That is all the time I have..Leave you with the idea that – exploring social media, SA, and crowdsourcing can lead you to some insightful ideas in applying technology that could benefit the population and effectively transitioning to smarter governments