What is Crisis Mapping?

Post by: Kim Stephens

I recently had a conversation with a colleague, who is very well versed in social media and emergency management, asking me to explain crisis mapping.  I am not an expert in that topic, but Jen Ziemke, the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers, now assistant professor at John Carroll University, and fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, certainly is. Her presentation at Notre Dame University on the use of crowdsourcing and digital mapping for humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was recorded and I have embedded that presentation below. As described on CrisisMappers.net:

She also covered how crisis mapping is being used in a wide variety of contexts, including for election monitoring and tracking of pro-democracy initiatives. This event was co-sponsored by University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science & Applications (iCeNSA), and the Master of Science in Global Health Program of the Eck Institute for Global Health.

Her presentation describes very clearly the concept and its application during disasters and humanitarian crises in first 8 minutes, however, I do recommend viewing it in its entirety.

See also: What Role Does a Crisis Mapper Play? 

Related articles

• Disaster Mapper – An interactive resource for schools (lovetoreadlovetolearn.wordpress.com)
• How Crowdsourcing Can Provide Renewable Electricity to People in Need (ecowatch.org)
• Google Launches Crisis Map to Fight This Particularly Vicious Wildfire Season (webpronews.com)
• Crowdmapping Arab Spring: Next Social Media Breakthrough? (waronterrornews.typepad.com)
• Launching a Library of Crisis Hashtags on Twitter (irevolution.net)

What happens when people make insensitive comments on your Facebook page?

Post by: Kim Stephens

Having the ability for people to post comments to your Facebook page can be an invaluable opportunity to get direct feedback from the community. In the past, people were really only able to talk openly about  your response effort by sending a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. Now, they can tell you exactly how they feel on your Facebook page. This ability, however, has a lot of folks in the emergency response business a little nervous. What if we get people commenting who say foul things about our organization or how we are handling the incident? How do you respond to irrational comments, untruthful information about what your organization is doing or hurtful remarks? One lesson that we in the social media and emergency management realm have always preached…don’t worry–other, rational citizens will respond for you.

The Facebook page for the Barry Point OR Fire can serve as a case in point. A seemingly innocuous post simply providing a picture with a caption “New Incident Commander..talks to crews…” elicited this comment:

The adminstrators of the page, however, didn’t have to argue with this woman or even acknowledge her terribly insensitive, irrational comment. Why? Citizens responded for them with statements such as:

• Seriously, I cannot belive you had the nerve to post that.
  A few days ago a young girl lost her life protecting your towns, your forests from complete destruction. I know crews who have been on this fire from the flare up working 16 hour days in the heat lugging 50 pound packs and chainsaws trying to keep it from destroying everything in its path. They are getting 4 hour rest periods to sleep.
• Shame on you. And to all of the hard working men and women who are putting your own safety and well-being on the line for the communities, thank you, thank you, thank you. Be safe!
• ..not only is what you said disrespectful, untruthful and condescending, but I can’t even take it seriously as your post is riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors.
• AMAZING! Our children, my child, is out there everyday protecting the homes, families and land in that area and you have the nerve to post something like that. They work theirs tails off! If they play a little hacky sac they probably deserve a break! You have balls lady.

It goes on and on. The naysayer tried to argue back, but her voice was drowned out. The only response required from the page administrators was this acknowledgement and reminder of their comment policy:

The reminder of the comment policy is important. People might wonder why the administrators didn’t simply delete her comment. Deleting it, however, would be completely counterproductive. She would most likely start a rant on her own Facebook page or even go so far as to produce a blog that was solely designed to rant about the response. Although she still might do those things, by leaving the comment for all to see, as well as the responses from the community, her stature  is diminished and she is not able to elevate herself to a martyr status, e.g. “I am the one whose voice was stifled!”

If you have an example of this happening to you, I’d love to hear about it. And good luck to all the firefighters out there this summer. You all are in our thoughts.

QPS Media Story Never Gets Old!

Post by: Kim Stephens

Special Emergency Response Team (Queensland) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

July 12, 2012 ZDNET posted a story recounting the amazing experience of Queensland Police Service and their use of social media during the January 2011 floods in Australia. Reading it reminded me of why I find the cause of social media and emergency/crisis communications so compelling. There are numerous quotes from Kym Charlton- executive director of the Queensland Police Service’s (QPS) media and public affairs branch, that could headline a social media and emergency management conference. Each of her statements seem to address the question “Why should I use social media to communicate with the public during a crisis?”

Here’s what they learned:

• Bypass the Media as the message filter and provide hyper-local information:

“We were able to pump out a whole lot of information that we knew wouldn’t make the mainstream media; they just wouldn’t have picked up that volume of information. It was quite low level, but it was really important if it was about your area,” she said.

• Get information out in a timely fashion:

“Rather than me sitting in a disaster-management meeting, listening to the premier being briefed, taking notes, going out and giving it to someone to write a media release, then spending the rest of the day chasing around incredibly busy people to clear the information, I started to post status updates as I heard the premier being briefed,” she said.

• Expect to work long days:

“For example, the day that the Lockyer Valley flooded was the same day that Brisbane and Ipswich realised there was going to be a major flood. All of a sudden, you had the entire population of both cities desperately trying to work out if their houses were going to flood. A lot of people weren’t here in 1974; also, there are way more houses [now] than there used to be. We saw a huge jump of people coming to the page to find that information.” On that particular day, 10 January, Charlton sent her first and last tweets at 4.45am and 11.45pm, respectively.

• Expect a huge increase in the amount of people accessing your social pages. 

“The numbers surrounding 10 January are astonishing. The QPS Facebook page received 39 million individual story views — the equivalent of 450 page impressions per second — while being updated by staff every 10 minutes or so. (“That amount of traffic would have crashed both our public website and our operational website,” Charlton noted.)

Their Facebook audience grew from 16,500 on 9 January to 165,000 within a fortnight; many of those joined the page during the 24-hour period following the Lockyer Valley torrent. Overnight, the QPS social-media accounts had become a lifejacket to which many Queenslanders clung.

• Establish your social presence before an event occurs.

“We were in that wonderful position where we knew enough to be able to use it [during the floods],” she said. “It wasn’t a decision where anyone said, OK, we’re going to focus on social media’. We just started doing it because it worked.”

• Don’t advertise the goods, just deliver them.

“…QPS is just one shining star within a tight-knit constellation of Australian police departments that live and breathe social media each day. None of them have spent a single cent on advertising or promoting these channels; fittingly, they’ve all developed organically through networked word of mouth.”

End result: “…connect humans with one another, and to share meaningful information immediately.”

Thank you QPS Media and ZDNet for reminding us all of this amazing story and example to live up to!

Related articles

• The digital beat: policing social media – ZDNet (zdnet.com)
• Police and the place of social media (blogs.abc.net.au)

Social Media: A tool to reach the Access and Functional Needs Community

Post by: Kim Stephens

As a part of a current project I have found some great content that references the use of social media as a tool to reach vulnerable populations.  There are four reports I’d like to highlight that address this concept–some from the point of view of the citizen, others from the point of view of the first responder. All of the reports remind us that a one-size-fits-all approach for communicating is not a successful strategy in this day and age where people get to pick how they find information. If you are reluctant to use social media because (as I’ve heard stated) you don’t think your community uses the tools–think again!

1. Social Media: A Tool For Inclusion was written by Anne Taylor with funding from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, Horizontal Policy Integration Division (HPID). The report focuses on how people with access and functional needs can use social networking to overcome social isolation. This has  implications for emergency managers in the sense that the tools can also be used as a way to not only find vulnerable populations in your community, but also to develop relationships. She states:

Informants (study participants) indicate that Web 2.0 applications offer enormous possibilities for the disabled who may be marginalized by lack of mobility, vision, hearing or other disability that makes it difficult for them to participate in the civic, social, cultural or work‐related activities of mainstream society. The evidence is strong that the internet and social media, with the aid of assistive technologies, are improving the ability of many disabled people to participate more fully in their society. Members of the deaf community, for example, are said to be huge users of social media and video blogging. The Deaf Canada Conference that took place in June 2010 was supported by a lively 636‐member Facebook page. There is even a Canadian Deaf Native Facebook page. A 2009 Canada‐wide survey of over 700 self‐described disabled students with a mean age of 18 revealed that they engage in social media 12 hours a week for non‐school related activities and six hours a week for school‐related activities using, on average, between one and two types of specialized software. The most popular sites are Facebook, YouTube, MSN/Windows Live Messenger and Skype.

2. A report entitled Emergency Notification Strategies for the Deaf/Hard of Hearing Planning Project, developed for the Western Massachusetts Homeland Security Advisory Council, also lists social media as an option for communicating, specifically with the deaf population during emergencies.

Research and outreach for this project revealed that individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing may rely more on social media options than traditional media for information during an emergency. There may be several reasons for this including limited closed-captioning on television broadcasts, limited ASL translation, and lack of real-time information updates. As such, social media options are gaining popularity for obtaining information, not just throughout the disability community, but for the population-at-large.

3. Emergent Use of Social Media: A new age of opportunity for disaster resilience (2011). This is an article is by ME, Noji E for the National Center for Environmental Health Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, CDC. The article discusses how social media tools can be used to help people cope with disaster. They  use the term “vulnerable populations” very broadly: anyone suffering from stress after an event. However, the benefit of being connected would translate to the access and functional needs population as well.

“Social media may also offer potential psychological benefit for vulnerable populations gained through participation as stakeholders in the response. Disaster victims report a psychological need to contribute, and by doing so, they are better able to cope with their situation. Affected populations may gain resilience by replacing their helplessness with dignity, control, as well as personal and collective responsibility.”

4.Communicating with Vulnerable Populations: A Transportation and Emergency Management Toolkit. What I like most about this toolkit, even though the main focus is not social media, is that their suggestions emphasize relationship building–something that social media can help accomplish.  They state that local emergency managers should “Understand the local community sufficiently to decide what information is important and how best to communicate it in fully accessible formats so that people are informed, responsive, and motivated.”

I also like this sentiment, which I hear stated repeatedly by my colleagues who are seeped in  social media and emergency management:

“Encouraging individuals to act during emergencies requires communicating with them through multiple channels.

• These channels depend on trusted relationships built over time, so they are well established in times of crisis.
• A pre-crisis network of communication channels can carry messages across barriers and create a safety net that prevents especially vulnerable people from missing access to transportation assistance in emergencies.”

If you know of other research that mentions social media as a way to connect with  vulnerable populations before, during and after a crisis, please make note of it in the comments section.

Related articles

• Communication with Vulnerable Populations (preparednessforall.wordpress.com)
• Report: Sociability, Social Media for People with a Disability (preparednessforall.wordpress.com)

Is Your Social Network Ready for a Disaster?

Post by: Kim Stephens

The Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR)  recently sponsored a Facebook app contest with the goal of  getting people to designate friends or family to be their lifeline after a disaster.  The concept was born out the notion that people already turn to their social networks in a crisis for support,  so why not create a way for folks to think about this before an event. The winning application is called bReddi and it is quite innovative: the developers not only integrate the concept of lifelines into the product, but they also promote personal preparedness activities, coupled with information about specific geographic risks and hazards.

There are 3 things I think they executed really well.

1. Buttons and Badges

Most government emergency management  websites contain information about how to prepare for a disaster presented as a list of items the citizen should accomplish. These lists are often static without anyway for the person to either track their progress, enter the information, or be rewarded once completed. This app, however, not only provides the all-important to-do list, but allows the user to type their content directly into the app and see their progress via a status bar of percent complete. For anyone who attended grade school, seeing a 0% on what looks like a report card strikes up not only a little fear, but a desire to make it go away. Once completed, users are rewarded with a badge to be proudly displayed on their Facebook page. The badge serves two  purposes, it alerts the user’s Facebook friends to the app and provides another incentive to finish.

2. Risk and hazard information is prominently featured.

Often, information about hazards is  divorced from information  about preparedness.  The bReddi app, however, connects the user to the hazards they could experience based on their  location–which is obtained from the Facebook profile. The home “dashboard” not only lists these potential hazards, but the content is linked to a live FEMA newsfeed. (This is actually a little bit of a criticism for me–I think it would be a bit better if the content came from more local sources, however, I understand that there were probably development constraints. Maybe V2 will provide this feature.) The “history” tab also provides a visualization of regional historical-disaster data for 8 different hazards: flood, tornado, fire, earthquake, hurricane, pandemic, terrorism, and volcanoes.

Historical and real-time disaster data is displayed on the home tab as well, which not only gives the user a personal “threat summary” but also illustrates the threat summary for favorite friends and the national average. Seeing a national average is not necessarily useful information, since a threat of fire in California does not threaten me here in Maryland, however, seeing the threat scale for  friends might provoke me to invite others to the app. For example, Bill Boyd, a fellow blogger, has a bit of yellow on his scale where mine was all green, prompting me to want to encourage him to prepare. (As a side note, Bill is a firefighter and already well prepared, I’m sure!) This illustrates how the developers considered the concept of shared responsibility: I see my friends are in danger, I can help them prepare by sharing this app…brilliant.

3.  Design

The entire app has a pleasing user interface, easy to understand graphics, and easily executable tasks. The content can also be taken offline by printing out a wallet-sized emergency info card.

One tiny criticism, I do wish they would explain to the user what is involved in being someone’s “lifeline.” What does that mean for the designee? What responsibilities does that entail? Although I think this information is explained on the companies’ website, it should be spelled out in the app itself more prominently.

I am now curious how local governments might take advantage of this app. Will you direct your citizens to it? Let me know.

Data, data everywhere…Monitoring Social Media During a Crisis

Post by: Kim Stephens

Image via: http://www.onlinerepmanagement.com/2011/08/social-media-monitoring.html

When it comes to social media, monitoring these networks is the biggest concern of emergency management organizations, and for good reason: the stream of user-generated content becomes a torrent the second a crisis happens. I’ve blogged about this numerous times, but I’d like to mention a couple of resources and articles that have recently been brought to my attention.

1. Social Media Monitoring Tools Wiki  This wiki has an extensive list of over 100 free and for fee monitoring tools and services. Each item is hyperlinked, and you can sort each column, even by category. Although there isn’t an opportunity for users to rate the services or provide feedback, it is one of the few places I’ve seen such an exhaustive list.  (As an aside, I’ve toyed with the idea of a user-rated website for all tools used by emergency managers. The consumer would be asked to rate their experience with the tool and discuss what they liked and didn’t like about it, similar to ratings for merchandise on Amazon.com or restaurants on Yelp.)

Of note,  most of the tools on the wiki are designed for business clients or individuals and are probably sufficient for performing sentiment analysis. However,  these same tools have distinct limitations when they are used for the purposes of gaining situational awareness after a disaster. This brings me to#2 on my list.

2.  Mark Cameron, et. al, in the paper Emergency Situation Awareness from Twitter for Crisis Management break down social media monitoring needs of emergency managers and first responders into 5 distinct areas.

The need to:

• Detect unexpected or unusual incidents, possibly ahead of official communications;
•  Condense and summarise messages about an incident maintaining awareness of aggregated content without having to read individual messages;
• Classify and review high-value messages during an incident (e.g. messages describing infrastructure damage or cries for help); and understand the impact of an incident on people and infrastructure;
• Identify, track, and manage issues within an incident as they arise, develop, and conclude; pro-actively identify and manage issues that may last for hours, days or weeks;
• Perform forensic analysis of incidents by analysing social media content from before, during, and after an incident.

Their solution is the “Emergency Situation Awareness–Automated Web Text Mining” (ESA-AWTM) system. The paper and this power point describes the system’s functionality as well as the trial deployment with the Media and Crisis Communication team within the Strategic Communication Branch (SCB) of the Australian Government.  The ability to classify high value messages alone would be a significant improvement. Overall the system looks extremely promising, but unfortunately they do not indicate when it will be available for broader distribution.

3. Computer aided analytics is one solution, another is crowdsourcing. This paper, “Towards Real-time Emergency Response, Using Crowd Supported Analysis of Social Media”  was written by researchers at the University of Madeira in collaboration with the IBM T.J Watson Research Center. They propose an architecture for  how crowdsourcing can be incorporated as part of an emergency response system in order to “analyze and structure social media content posted by micro-bloggers and service users, including emergency response coordinators and victims.” The key to crowdsourcing, they state, is ensuring that the crowd is given appropriate tasks to accomplish, and ultimately, that their analysis is fed back into the response community’s knowledge base in a structured way. This diagram illustrates their concept:

This is just a short list, today, but there is a lot going on in this realm. If you know of other interesting studies please post them in the comments section and I’ll add them to the resource tab of the blog.

Related articles

• Social Media Monitoring Assignment (emilybaal.wordpress.com)
• Social Media Monitoring (mimizhou217.wordpress.com)
• Anaheim CERT to Monitor Social Media During a Disaster (idisaster.wordpress.com)
• Handle Your Next Crisis with Social Media Monitoring (radian6.com)
• Learning the basics of social media monitoring (smartblogs.com)
• Social media monitoring tool video: Why should I monitor social media? (sazbean.com)

Heritage Preservation After a Disaster…There’s An App For That!

Post by: Kim Stephens

Lori Foley of Heritage Preservation.org contacted me with information about a new “Emergency Response Salvage” App they developed for use by museums, libraries, archives and other cultural institutions on how to safeguard collections damaged by water–which could happen after a myriad of disasters including flood, fire, earthquakes, severe storms or even broken pipes.

The description from the App store states:

ERS outlines critical stages of disaster response, such as stabilizing the environment and assessing damage. It will help users protect precious collections and significant records, access reliable information instantly, and save damaged objects.

Developed by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) and based on Heritage Preservation’s popular Emergency Response and Salvage Wheel, this app provides practical salvage tips for nine types of collections: photographs, books and documents, paintings, electronic records, textiles, furniture, ceramics/stone/metal, organic materials, and natural history specimens.

Be sure to pass this info along to organizations in your community!

The Accidental Volunteer and Donations Management Coordinators

Post by: Kim Stephens

Photo via masslive.com

Caitria O’Neill received a degree in European Studies from Harvard, studied in Paris and Moscow and is proficient in four languages. Her sister, Morgan O’Neill, is pursuing a doctorate at MIT in Atmospheric Physics, but is also an EMT-B and volunteers for a local ambulance service.  Neither of them has a background in emergency management, yet,  these woman became the defacto volunteer and donations management coordinators for Monson, Massachusetts in June 2011 after an F3 tornado struck their hometown and a string of communities in the south west of the state.

In the aftermath of the disaster, they found their way to a local Church that became the community relief center. Caitria told me that they learned early on about the challenges they would face.  It was June and hot, so any ice they had was melting. Her sister was  interviewed by a local reporter who asked what they needed and she blurted out “freezers!” About 20 donated freezers later, Caitria realized that when you ask for items after a disaster there is a strong likelihood that you will get them–in duplicate. They needed a way to match needs with people’s desire to give, as well as a way to let people know needs had been met, and they needed it immediately. As you might imagine these two young woman are quite resourceful, so with no prior knowledge of VOADs, ESFs or spontaneous volunteer management, they built a technical solution they now call recovers.org. Recovers has turned into a full-fledged business venture for these women along with an equally impressive group of MIT and Harvard grads rounding out their team.

Their solution

One of their goals is to provide software and support to recovering areas immediately after an event. Speed is an important element because they have found that donations for small local disasters, especially those that do not get national press attention, dry up after a very short period of time. For most of us in the emergency management community often our biggest concern is the thought of unsolicited donations or volunteers, but donations are vital to recovery. As an example of how interest declines,  Forney, Texas recently used this software after the April 3, 2012 tornado. The site was up and running immediately and received 19,000 page view in 4 days, with $30,000 in online donations. After day 4, however,  there was a precipitous decline in online searches for opportunities to donate and subsequently, in site visits. As an important side note: 100% of all resources collected on the site go to the community. 

One of the items that they felt important to include, based on their experience in Monson, was the ability for volunteers to log their service hours through the software portal, which can also be done on the mobile phone and tablet application. Other handy features:

• Volunteer remote sign-up
• Donation item remote sign-up
• Social media content aggregation
• Easily searchable resource databases
• Aid matching
• Detailed record keeping

I don’t often blog about specific products, even though I am asked to do that on a regular basis. This tool, however, struck me as something interesting since it also demonstrates the resilient nature of our communities as well as the profound brilliance and creativity of young people to solve thorny, complex problems….if we let them! I like this statement on their website:

“There are simple tech solutions to the problems common to every recovery effort. By addressing the systemic problems in current organization with smart technology solutions, we can achieve maximum impact at minimum cost.”

 Indeed we can.

Related articles

• Social Networks and Collaborative Resilience (idisaster.wordpress.com)
• Online Database Of Donors Helps Forney Tornado Victims (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• “Information Aid”: As important to disaster survivors as food (idisaster.wordpress.com)

Related articles

• Online Database Of Donors Helps Forney Tornado Victims (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• “Information Aid”: As important to disaster survivors as food (idisaster.wordpress.com)

Social Networks and Collaborative Resilience

Post by: Kim Stephens

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.

Fast forward four years and we clearly see the  major role technology plays in fostering collective resilience. These “new structures” regarding how people communicate and collaborate have penetrated society–war zone or not. After a disaster,  information communication technologies that require very little, if any, actual technical skill have leveled the playing field regarding who can provide “information aid,” and have also allowed people to organize themselves in ways previously unimagined.  I’m not quite sure we in the emergency management community have fully grasped this impact nor have we adapted or adjusted our systems to take this into account .

For me, FEMA‘s use of the tool “Aid Matrix” provides an example of the disconnect.   AidMatrix is designed to match volunteers and donations with organizations who distribute those items. This software solution seems to be designed for mostly large corporate contributions, although citizens can contribute monetary donations to the list of “leading organizations in humanitarian relief”.  Regarding non-monetary donations, they state:

Please keep in mind that leading relief organizations typically seek sizable, bulk donations only when they meet the service delivery needs of a particular relief operation.

AidMatrix also allows for volunteers to match their skills  to organizations working in the impacted area… in theory. The portal, however, isn’t spun up for every event and I have heard complaints that even when it is used, it isn’t stood up quickly enough. People state that they find out about the tool around the time the event is over, see pic of the tweets from two people from the #SMEM (social media and emergency management) twitter community. Other concerns focus on the low rate of adoption and use. To my knowledge the portal is rarely, if ever used during events that do not meet the threshold for a disaster declaration.

 The recent April 16th tornado in Oklahoma also provides an illustration: searching the portal by state, the potential donor or volunteer receives the following message: “The Volunteer Portal is not currently active for Oklahoma“.  In contrast, the  Woodward Tornado Info (WTI) Facebook page most certainly is active, with over 2000 fans. The page is administered by Amber Wolanski, who also stood up the Joplin Tornado Information page. WTI was ready to go within hours of the event, no MOU or paperwork required. The community has utilized the collaborative space to post about needs of those impacted and even to broadcast information about a missing teen (unrelated to the tornado).

This type of Facebook page should no longer be news: this is the new normal. When there is a crisis people will stand up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to help match those with the desire to help with those in need. In the words of the scholars mentioned above, people are adapting existing technology to meet the pressing needs of the event.  Those of us in emergency management should embrace this newfound resilience, but how?  There are admitted limitations to matching needs to resources through a Facebook page. As a follow-up post I’m going to discuss one community-based, bottom-up donations management solution that was also born out of a tornado event. Stay tuned.

Anaheim CERT to Monitor Social Media During a Disaster

Post by: Kim Stephens

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.

Anaheim

Roles and Responsibilities: CERT volunteers already serve in a community outreach capacity by supplementing staff in the “hotline room” by answer questions on the phone. The concept is to extend these responsibilities to social networks. The social media monitoring volunteers will be used primarily to keep track of comments and social data posted to the communities’ social platforms. They will also be allowed to retweet (repeat a message on twitter) anything that has already been put out by the Public Information Officer (PIO).  They currently have 3 laptops dedicated for volunteers, loaded with an enhanced excel capability called “Pivot Table”. Pivot table will allow the digital volunteers to record the event and do real-time data-mining, including listing frequently asked questions, etc.  CERT members will be required to monitor the social stream in the EOC hotline room.

Training: The CERT coordinator is planning to do training for social media monitoring and use of the “pivot table” tool (she is planning to share this training with regional partners). The training  will include: hot-line room standard operating procedures; reporting protocols; rules regarding what they can and cannot say; and, potentially, will require participation in a monthly twitter chat. Volunteers will also be taught “how” to monitor including which search terms to use etc., as well as which platforms to monitor. However, volunteers will be given some latitude to keep track of all the platforms they see fit.  The training currently does not include a module on how to verify information, however, that is a consideration for future efforts.

Linking to Operations: Specifically, regarding reporting protocols and procedures, pertinent information the monitoring team discovers will loop back into the EOC planning and operations section via the PIO. Any life threatening information will be sent directly to the dispatcher and non-life threatening info will get written down on paper or in an email and is sent to the PIO to review then decide which section it should go to. Currently, CERT “digital volunteers” do not have access to WebEOC, but they have discussed granting limited access so that they can input the information directly. (The CERT coordinator supplied the graphic below.) She states: “Depending upon the platform, some steps may require modification.  For example individual [citizens] may post to YouTube which may require a response post or a comment directing individuals to a website or blog with more information. “  She indicated that a determination would also be made whether or not the YouTube video provided helpful content that should be disseminated using other platforms.

What concerns people? The biggest concern of emergency management professionals in Anaheim regarding this new monitoring program is liability: “What if messages are not addressed and then the agency gets sued?”

Thank you @AnaheimCERT for the interview and great responses.

Are you looking to do anything similar with your CERT? Please let me know.

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[1] Stephens, Kim, “SMEM chat: Monitoring Social Networks—How do we Listen?”  March, 2011, http://idisaster.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/smem-chat-monitoring-social-networks-how-do-we-listen/.