From the Disaster 2.0 Blog by Adam Crowe

Emergency managers across all disciplines are struggling with how to implement social media in an effective way that protects their organization from liability and supports their mission of saving lives and preserving property.

The problem is that this challenge forces practitioners to ask two things — forgiveness and permission.

Because social media is relatively new, poorly understood throughout the industry, and changing constantly, there WILL be times where we have to ask forgiveness for activities, actions, and exchanges that have occured that may or may not reflect well (in a traditional sense) on the organization.

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From Kim Stephens @ idisaster 2.0

Gloria Mark and Bryan Semaan in their 2008 study “Resilience in Collaboration: Technology as a Resource for New Patterns of Action”  found that in communities that have been disrupted (they focused on war zones) “technology played a major role in providing people with alternate resources to reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns of action for work and socializing.”  Prophetically, they stated in their conclusion that they envision a system where people could simply give status updates regarding their well-being after a crisis.  Furthermore, they predicted crisismapping: “our data also point to the potential of utilizing collective intelligence in providing online information about the disrupted area. For example, people could collectively update a satellite map online with up-to-the minute information on local disruptions in their area.”

As Mark and Semaan indicated, resilience is defined as the ability to cope with an unexpected situation and “bounce back.” But… ”new ways of using resources to be resilient [has] led to the emergence of new structures with consequences for work and social lives.” They provide several examples, for instance, in Iraq a University student video taped classes for friends who could not travel to campus after curfew: that practice became adopted and formalized by the institution.

Read more @ idisaster 2.0

Do emergency managers care about alerting the deaf?  Well, an activist/researcher/teacher with deep expertise in communicating with the deaf says, “Deaf people think emergency management doesn’t care about them.”  Stephanie Jo Kent says “the American Deaf community remains essentially neglected despite generations of struggle and decades-old accessibility rights legislation”.   She’s not just complaining, though; she’s trying to do something about it.

She and some colleagues saw an opportunity through November’s national test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS).   They were concerned that the test didn’t seem to address the needs of hearing people.  So, they conducted an experiment.  They spread the word that a Twitter hashtag #DEMX was created to represent an emergency of some type (D=Deaf, E=Emergency, X=uncertain variable of which kind of crisis).  They wanted to see how the hashtag would spread among both deaf and hearing people near the time of the test.

Read more @ emergencymgmt.com

From Kim Stephens @ idisaster 2.0

The other day in a SMEMchat we debated (briefly) the pros and cons of cross-posting to Twitter and Facebook, particularly the practice of posting to Twitter from Facebook–not necessarily dual  posting from a third party application such as Hootesuite or Tweetdeck. I recalled reading that this was problematic in a scholarly article by  Axel Bruns, et al (see page 12). They were writing about QPS Media (yes, I know everyone is a little tired of me bringing them up) during the flood event of January, 2011.

Read more @ idisaster 2.0

From Kim Stephens @ idisaster 2.0

It has been documented that government agencies often experience a 500% increase in the number of followers and “fans” to their social media sites during a disaster. Monitoring those sites and responding to requests for information can become overwhelming: at a minimum it is most certainly labor intensive. Emergency management organizations, both government and non-governmental alike, are starting to understand how enormous this task could be and are looking for innovative solutions to solve the problem.  Anaheim, California has turned to their CERT members.

This tweet by Craig Fugate is over a year old, suggesting that the concept of CERT members playing a role in monitoring social networks or even in reporting observations through those platforms, is not necessarily a new idea. The concept is built on the notion that these folks are “trusted agents,” already trained in basic emergency skills, and  known quantities by the response organization. However, I have yet to really see many CERTs move in this direction, making the Anaheim CERT a really interesting test case.  I interviewed the CERT coordinator in order to determine what was necessary in order to accomplish this goal. (I appreciate their candidness!) Below are the results from that interview.

Read more @ idisaster 2.0