For several years there has been talk of leveraging Twitter (and similar technologies) for use in crime fighting and disaster response. Even the MBTA Transit Police are getting in on the act. But a recent exercise--codenamed 'Exercise 24'--took this idea to a whole different level. Organizations and governments from 15 countries took part in the fake earthquake disaster exercise, whose purpose was to "test the speed and widen the scope of responses to a major disaster, focusing on how social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can be used."
This very well could be the face of disaster response in the future. As more people become connected and active on mobile social media platforms, resources like Facebook and Twitter increasingly contain relevant and accurate indicators of information. Twitter is increasingly being used to pull information, rather than to push information. With this in mind, what other ways could the public sector utilize such resources?
This strategy makes me wonder if companies like facebook or twitter could use the location information from individual users to create automatic messages for disaster alerts. I realize the use of the location could be abused and then glanced over if the alerts are not truly important, but if there is already location based advertising being done, why not use the data for a better cause like saving some lives. I would guess that the companies would need to put an 'opt-out' clause in the process, but I believe if the messages were sent from an authorized government agency, people would respect the effort of the companies to protect its users.
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ReplyDeleteCrowdsourcing, the internet, and mobile devices were used earlier this year in Haiti earthquake relief efforts. An emergency number was set up for people to text for help; however, most of the messages were in Creole. SamaSource and CrowdFlower, which are organizations which outsource work to people living in poverty, collected the feeds of emergency messages, sent them out, and had thousands of volunteers translate them. Technology allowed the coordination of this much work to be done this quickly. The article concludes with 2 main takeways: 1) Aggregating the individuals’ cries for help allowed rescue agencies to identify trends and this data was available to numerous groups. 2) Using the crowd to process (translate) this data was extremely helpful and more importantly, the cross-platform functionality of mobile phone to internet was key in transmitting the data between parties.
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