Social Media and Disaster Intelligence: An Introduction

I read a great interview last year on how the Red Cross and the LA Fire Department use twitter for gathering information about an emerging disaster situation. Take a visit to http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/social-media-red-cross-lafd.html and watch the short interviews. Brian Humphrey performs a much needed, but often un-staffed, role in disaster response that I call Disaster Intelligence. In our networked age, a tremendous amount of data floods in and can overwhelm the disaster response manager. It's the role of the Disaster Intelligence analyst to help capture that information, and present it in a way that helps decision-makers make quick and optimal decisions. A radio operator that shadows a manager, and focuses on not only on sending and receiving directed messages for the manager, but also keeps their ear open to everything else going on can sometimes fill that role to great effect, but they can only listen to one or two radios at a time. Consider the effect of one or two people monitoring radios, and online chats, and tweets, who collects the reports into a centralized system. Now you're able to leverage all of those information feeds, and enabling the decision makers to make more sense of it all.

There's also a lot of talk about Ushahidi (http://www.ushahidi.com/) and it's impact in disaster response. For a hopeful view take a look at this interview: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/esri-australia-ushahidi.html For a more sober look at the current situation this analysis: http://www.crowdsourcing.org/article/if-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-how-use...

My takeaways from all of this are:

• People are sensors-- more folks have smartphones, making reporting easy, and geotagged photos are now simple and cheap to collect
• Use social media to check other information sources. Are your assumptions or models fitting with public reports? Do you have gaps in your own damage assessment process?
• There are two different crowds to source in crowdsourcing: the people in the area affected by the disaster who can provide a sample of what is going on, and the crowd of people who aren't impacted and can lend assistance in monitoring the situation or helping to clean up incoming data.

I'm gong to take another look at using Ushahidi for helping collect and present disaster intelligence.