The Homeland Security Blog

A Story of Community Resilience, the Potential of Social Media, and the Power of Good Choreography

You probably wouldn’t think twice about helping a community in need after they’ve been struck by disaster. Why not spend just as much effort to help prevent one? Please click here and take a few minutes to watch the video, Dancing for Donations (third link at the top of the page). It’s worth it, trust me. I’ll wait…

You probably chuckled a bit when you saw Hamburg residents discoing in the street. So did I while thinking to myself, “This is America at its best.” Citizens of Hamburg are proactively banding together for a common cause—protection of their community and everyone in it. This, to me and everyone who has seen the video, is an example of America at its most resilient, even if their battle is not yet finished.

Hamburg’s Story
Hamburg, Iowa is an agricultural community located near the Missouri River. Nestled in Fremont County, its closest major city is Council Bluffs, IA which is almost 50 miles away. Its 1,200 residents, many of whom are farmers, farm product wholesalers, and factory workers are faced with the potential destruction of a good part of their town, but they are committed to not letting that occur. Past experience has rendered Hamburg a community that is unified, aware, and driven to ensure it moves forward as opposed to reliving the past.

June 2011, the Missouri River floods hit the central U.S. and threatened to overrun the town of Hamburg with a wall of water over 17 feet high. The 11-foot levee that was built on the outskirts of Hamburg was designed to protect the town from flooding from Water Ditch #6, not from flooding from the Missouri River.  As a result, the town of Hamburg, in concert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent six days and nights adding 8 feet of dirt taken from farm lands in the community to the existing levee.  The next month, the Corps handed control of the levee to Hamburg who continued to keep the Missouri River water out of the town through September 2011 when the water finally subsided. Efforts were not wasted—the area surrounding Hamburg received the most damage from the flood—however; Hamburg businesses and residents were economically strapped.

The Challenge…or Opportunity!
Due to Federal regulations, Hamburg is required by law to remove the 8 feet of dirt they added to the levee by no later than March 2013 at a cost of $1.3 Million. However, removing the 8 feet would put the community at great risk (the businesses and townspeople likely to be most affected by another flood have already made it clear that they will not stay if the 19’ levee doesn’t stay in place.

Or, Hamburg can make their current 19-foot makeshift levee permanent at a cost of $5.6 Million.  Unfortunately, these costs will not be supplemented by the Federal government—it turns out that once the government finishes a project like this, it cannot provide additional funding once the project is completed.

An Inconvenient Decision
$5.6 Million!? It sounds like a lot of money, but there are a slew of federal regulations that must be met to make sure that the permanent levee is built to the right specifications and codes.  So let’s recap the options: Hamburg can remove the 8 feet OR Hamburg can rally and try to achieve what appears to be nearly impossible. What would you do? Many communities would undoubtedly pick the easiest option—short-term gain despite long-term pain. It’s not hard to justify such a choice…when resources are not available, it’s understandable to punt and hope history decides not to repeat itself. Not Hamburg. Hamburg is going the distance. The Missouri River isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the residents of Hamburg. As they said on their web site, “Not again, let’s just fix it.” $5.6 Million dollars it is.

A Resilient Community in Action…
Tossing despair aside and refusing to waste time whining about the government, the town banded together and devised an innovative, unique approach—reach out to their fellow Americans to ask for help in saving their town. Disaster relief through prevention.

To get the word out, residents decided to use the principles of social media: develop a YouTube video and a dedicated web site to carry their message and bolster their fundraising effort. The key components:

1. Nothing is Impossible
   Hamburg residents developed a campaign that wages psychological war against the overwhelming target of $5.6 Million by appealing to what most American’s love and aren’t reluctant to throw a few dollars towards—a single cup of coffee. As described on its web site, “If 1.5 million people give $3…for less than a latte, you can save a town.”
2. A Community is About Its People
   Instead of portraying themselves as victims, residents young and old chose to reveal to us their true spirit. The community got together and produced the video, Dancing for Donations, which shows the entire town flash-mobbing to Save Us from the River to the tune of Tina Turner’s version of Proud Mary. (According to Hamburg Mayor, Cathy Crain, there was a wonderful debate over whose version to use: Tina’s or Creedence Clearwater Revival’s.) Regardless of the version, we are able to peer through the window and witness the beauty of Hamburg and its most striking quality—despite their somewhat desperate situation, Hamburg residents have maintained their sense of hope and humor. At the end of the day, this is what drives a resilient community—keeping their wits about them, coming together as a community, working out a plan, and moving forward creatively with a can-do spirit and a feeling of gratitude to those who are responding to them.

The entire community is 100% committed to this effort.  When you talk to people in Hamburg, from the mayor, to the city clerk, to the top banker you can see that they have thrown their bodies and souls towards saving their community—and beyond that to keep it safe. I had the honor of talking with Mayor Crain about Hamburg’s situation. Although there is no question about the community’s resolve, I wanted to know why and how they achieved this state of being. “Why are we resilient?” the Mayor asked, “This town is over 150 years old. Many of our residents descend from the town’s founders and were raised with their agricultural values…work hard, rely on yourself, help your neighbors, protect what’s yours. This is our town. We believe in our heritage and our future. On a daily basis these people do quiet, random acts of kindness for each other. It is no surprise we joined together during a crisis.” The Mayor went on to emphasize that during the 120 days of levee building, her cries for help were always answered with, “Yes. We’ll be right there.” Let’s be right there, too. How?

Today, it’s Hamburg…Tomorrow, it Could be Your Community!
In addition to giving a small (or large) donation, the best way to help is to get their story out as widely as possible so others can join in this important effort. Social media is a key tool to accomplish that. Most people reading this are themselves social media practitioners or work with or know people who are. Let’s use every social media tool possible to get the word out on Hamburg. G&H has, and will continue, to tweet about it. Retweet us @GHIServices. Tweet about them on your own. Hamburg has a Facebook page (Hamburg Levee). Like it. Post about it. Volunteer your time. How? Get creative…offer to help research and coordinate appropriate crowdfunding mechanisms or create one dedicated to fundraising in relation to emergency preparedness; go visit Hamburg and produce a short documentary; pick up the phone or send an e-mail to ask how you can best be of service, leverage whatever you have access to in any way you can…use your imagination!

Hamburg has until December 2012 to raise the money. The State of Iowa will be kicking in $1 Million, which leaves $4.6 Million. We will use our blog site and Twitter to feature progress. In the meantime go to Hamburg’s site (www.hamburglevee.com) and get to know the people. And again, let’s think about relief efforts from a preventative angle. There’s preparedness, which we all understand, but prevention takes things a step further. Prevention is how we think about our physical health, our mental and emotional health, our personal safety…it’s why we bother to change the oil in our cars. We buy our lattes to prevent ourselves from falling asleep at our desks. While we’re on the subject…buy one less latte for just one day. You won’t miss it. Promise.

www.hamburglevee.com

Contact Hamburg: 712-382-1313; cityofhamburg106@gmail.com

This blog is a repost from Social CRM: The Conversation and was written by Bob Greenberg, President of GH International, a noted expert on emergency response management and particularly the way that we can use contemporary means to get citizens engaged and organized in intelligence and rescue efforts.

For the last several years there has been a lot of discussion about the use of web based social media for the engagement of citizens. Nowhere has this discussion been more active and persistent, nor more important, than in what I will call broadly the emergency preparedness and response (EPR) community.

The reason can be summed up in the words of FEMA’s Administrator Craig Fugate who has repeated stated that effective emergency preparedness and response has to take a “whole of community” approach where participation in community discussions and establishing mechanisms for online engagement are critical. Not only is it often the case that the “first responder” in an emergency is your neighbor, but everyone affected by a crisis is involved in one way or another. The following graphic provides an understanding of why this is the case.

One of the most important elements of that discussion has been trying to figure out how to “cut through the noise” and sift through volumes of information now available via social media channels before, during and after a crisis. With the widespread use of social media there is a virtual “fire hose” of information coming at people from all directions at once. (John Battelle raised this in a more general way on his blog, “Twitter and the Ultimate Algorithm: Signal over Noise (With Major Business Model Implications).”

The majority of organizations simply don’t have the means to process such large amounts of data, not to mention analyze it. The problem becomes even more difficult in a crisis when emergency preparedness and response (EPR) organizations are relying on this same information to make life saving decisions. How do you decide what data is even trustworthy, not to mention important for making informed decisions quickly?

While the discussion on the best means to do this existed prior to the February 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the response to that event by hundreds, if not thousands of technology savvy volunteers and the widespread use of mobile technologies by Haitian citizens and responders on the ground kicked the issue into high gear. A summary of these efforts was included in a report issued by the United Nation’s Office of Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) with support from the United Nations and Vodafone Foundation was released early this year titled “Disaster Relief 2.0.: the Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies“.

There are numerous issues yet to be addressed (as identified in Disaster Relief Report) but one thing that has become crystal clear is that the use of social media is a critical part of improving citizen engagement before, during, and after a crisis. For example, government agencies (at all levels) have started to recognize the importance of communicating to the public through social media; many states now have Twitter and/or Facebook profiles in addition to the thousands of sites set up by local government. On the federal level, Craig Fugate, the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is actively involved in discussions on the usefulness of social media for disaster response, and uses Twitter and Facebook regularly as part of his information toolkit.

Now to Irene

The use of social media in preparation for and during the response to Hurricane Irene gives us the first glimpse of the direction this is taking as well as the challenges that are still remaining as it gave us three “firsts.”

1. Irene demonstrated the first widespread use of social media during an emergency in the United States by the public and by official response agencies. To paraphrase my colleague Jonathan Fisk – social media became part of the permanent infrastructure for use in EMR activities. This is not surprising as a recent survey by the American Red Cross titled, “More Americans Using Social Media and Technology in Emergencies” found, for example, that “followed by television and local radio, the Internet is the third most popular way people get emergency information.” This was demonstrated during Irene in spades which saw over 3,000 tweets per second being generated.
2. Irene was the first event where use of social media was used by a large number of government agencies in preparation for and during the actual event. FEMA, for example, explicitly directed people in the path of Irene to authoritative websites, social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and mobile apps and streamed messages through various social media sites and Twitter hashtags including #FEMA and #CraigatFEMA. New York City, led by the City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, did the same directing people to either www.NYC.gov or, when that went down, instructed the public to follow the hashtag, #NYCMayorsOffice (an interesting commentary on this can be found at http://codeforamerica.org/2011/08/29/technology-in-a-hurricane/ ). In an interview on CNN, FEMA Administrator Fugate identified that the use of social media, along with television and radio, may be more useful than cell phones at times, as cellular communication infrastructure is often overloaded and unreliable during a crisis. My colleagues who were working with various agencies in preparation for the storm were able to identify over 250 official government Twitter feeds that were regularly used to send information to the general public (@saraestescohen/east-coast-response-orgs). We were also able to identify another 100 feeds being used by Not for Profits (NFP) and the media.
3. Finally, it was the first time that the broader response community – that is non- government (which could include not for profits and the private sector) were able to have their social media efforts begin to be integrated into the official preparedness and response efforts. The Red Cross for example had trained digital volunteers monitoring and providing updates on Irene via a variety of social media channels. And, according to an article in New Public Health titled, “Red Cross Gets Twitter Badges for Hurricane Irene“ , these volunteers were given digital verification badges from Twitter “to help reassure the public that these updates were coming from a reliable source.”

Filtering the Noise: The Emergency Management Twitter Map

While these developments are important and encouraging, the issue of “cutting through the noise” stands out as one that has to be urgently tackled.

My company, GH International, working with the Department of Homeland Security’s First Responder Technologies Program and Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, took an initial step toward addressing how to better organize social media (within an existing operational context) in preparation for Irene.

As mentioned above, the G&H team identified over 350 Twitter feeds from government, NFPs, and the local media that provided an enormous amount of timely information about Irene. We manually vetted each source to verify that it was from an official response organization, a recognized NFP, or a media outlet (by looking at the profile and contact information, followers, and previous tweets). At the request of the government officials we were working with, we did not include information from non- authenticated public sources. The challenge was that it was difficult to filter the feeds without monitoring hashtags. Even using aggregation sites like Tweetdeck didn’t help because there were simply too many feeds to follow.

The solution we developed (in partnership with the Florida Division of Emergency Management) was to create an Irene Twitter web service that aggregated the official local, state, federal, NGO and private sector Twitter accounts into a dynamic data layer that enabled officials from every state on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. to view, sort, search and analyze the information from within their native geospatial mapping environment (i.e. Google Earth, ESRI’s ArcGIS, etc).

FDEM published the Irene Twitter web service we created on GATOR, a state geospatial platform that was developed for use during emergency response and that was tracking developments relating to Irene. We alerted over 6,000 officials to its existence and from there it was picked up by many more.

Because FDEM had this information published on their website, any interested parties (public or official) were be able to access those geographically referenced Twitter feeds that were relevant to them with other information displayed in a relational context. So, for example an official – or citizen- in the Outer Banks in North Carolina who wanted to see what was going on with the storm’s predicted path, storm surge zones, evacuation routes, traffic flow, and shelter status in contiguous communities could also simply search and discover relevant Twitter feeds on GATOR. This would help them cut through the noise of all the other feeds and get them only that information that was relevant to them at that time, significantly improving their situational awareness.

While there are many other excellent examples of the use of social media during Irene, the differentiator was that the Irene Twitter web service we deployed enabled people/operators/responders to integrate the official Twitter feeds as a data layer into their native operational environment. They did not have view these feeds using a separate website, another map, or to use an unfamiliar tool. The task that remains are to assess just how effective and useful these tools were and what could be done to improve them. We are already working on various ways to improve the filtering capability of the EM Twitter Map web service and I’m certain others are working on improvements as well.

Another innovative social media effort organized by the mapping software and data company, Esri focused on developing a map that aggregated feeds from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. To view the latest hurricane news on this map, it is available on their website.

There is a virtual “industry” that has emerged that is discussing and beginning to identify best practices of the use of social media for citizen engagement with government during a crisis – and by extension in day-to-day activities. Organizations and discussion groups such as the Red Cross , the #SMEM community (#SMEM and #SMEMCHAT on twitter) , the Department of Homeland Security’s Virtual Social Media Working Group , the International Network of Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons, Ushahidi, and others are addressing these issues on a daily basis and have held a number of meetings to address these issues including one held by the Red Cross in August 2010 (http://bit.ly/aQEtmG and a meeting sponsored by #SMEM at the National Emergency Managers Association in March 2011 (http://crisiscommons.org/2011/09/03/smempape). And they are interacting with federal, state and local government officials to look for the best ways to integrate their efforts most effectively.

This is just the beginning. As I write this numerous people are working on improving these capabilities with an eye to further empowering and engaging citizens and creating a deeper level of collaboration with government. Moreover working these issues in the emergency management domain is really a “use case” for all of government. It’s just a matter of applying the same approaches to other issues. That is something I think we can all look forward to.

I was recently inspired after reading a tweet posted by Hal Grieb, who shared a link to an article on how to communicate a snow event.  To ensure the tweet was seen by all potentially interested parties, he included 12 distinct hashtags (#smem, #sm4r, #sm4em, #hsem, #gov20, #egov, #gov2, #crisis, #disaster, #pio, #nws, and then #fatigue).  Joking about the number of hashtags he had to include, he then went on to tweet about how the volume of related hashtags now required to identify a tweet might lead to “cylinders of excellence,” (should someone forget to include all of the appropriate tags, thus sending the tweet into unidentified Twitter space), and that a Twitter hashtag user manual or standard operating procedure (SOP) might now be needed to explain how to correctly use hashtags, which ones to choose, and when to include certain ones.

I started thinking – how does someone keep up with so many hashtags, especially as so many are created on the fly?  Furthermore, how do we ensure information is discoverable from those who know nothing about hashtags and do not include them in their tweets?  Public safety agencies have been dealing with this dilemma for some time – no matter how much work is done prior to a disaster to educate the public about hashtags to use for a certain type of event that might identify their tweets to the corresponding agencies, hashtags always take on a mind of their own – misspellings, random words and phrases, and so many related words leave the “Twitterverse” in a constant state of confusion.  Furthermore, with characters and space being so precious within a 140 character limit, hashtags are starting to creep into the messaging of a tweet and making it harder to decipher the meaning of a tweet filled with random tags.

So, how does one make sense of the ever-growing universe of possible hashtags?  How does an agency choose which hashtags to monitor for information about their jurisdiction?  How does an agency work with its audience to ensure they use the right tags during an event?  The uber hashtag – one tag that equals several tags, (related tags to be set up prior to an event by an agency depending on their demographic, hazards, locality, etc.), could be entered into some sort of widget to scan Twitter for one word, and ultimately, all related words.  For example, the uber hashtag could be #smem, and the user could then set parameters like #smem=#em, #hsem, #disaster, #crisisdata, #crisis, #disaster, etc…  If the uber hashtag is set up prior to an event, an agency can publicize its use within its community – the agency can then add related words or spellings to ensure they are capturing a larger percentage of tweets.  During an event, the agency can then add additional tags as they appear, and potentially, the widget could scan for related tags and ask the user if the tag does in fact equal the uber hashtag, for inclusion in future analysis.

The implications of the uber hashtag are huge.  First, it helps to solve the problem of shrinking space within a 140 character tweet.  Second, it helps to solve the problem of confusion and inability to predict hashtags used during an event.  Third, it enables public safety agencies to begin pulling information from Twitter in a standardized way – agencies could share uber hashtags across jurisdictions, but change the related hashtags to account for differences in locality.  The uber hashtag serves as a sort of metadata for an ever increasing universe of random tags, and begins to develop a much needed taxonomy of sorts to help clear through the confusion.

To make the uber hashtag a reality, I believe the following must occur:

- Development of a governance framework between entities to assist in standardization of uber hashtags and related hashtags for specific use (e.g., specific disasters, events, use cases, etc.);

- Development of requirements for a widget to enable agencies to set their own parameters when creating or utilizing an uber hashtag;

- Development of data standards, data/relationship model, or taxonomy (e.g., x=y, and identifying potential related hashtags to include within the uber hashtag net); and

- Research into the inclusion and integration of geospatial data so that the uber hashtags can be used for visualization of aggregated data for better decision-making.

Please feel free to comment – what are your thoughts on the concept of a uber hashtag?  What is needed for successful deployment?  What types of concerns may arise?

Co-authored with Bill Hyjek

A recent story published on Wired.com discussed the findings of group of researchers at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing who developed a method for predicting changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average through the analysis of Twitter updates. The research team leveraged open-source mood-tracking tools like OpenFinder to sort Tweets into positive and negative bins based off of emotionally charged words, the research team was able to predict the ups and downs of the stock market at closing bell three days later to within 86.7% accuracy.

Now consider leveraging data collected in this manner via Twitter and other social media tools for other types of predictions. The implications of this type of data collection for early warning and/or confirmation of information – social media as a sensor – are significant if applied to the field of public safety.

Earlier this year, Federal Computer Week highlighted a group of Namibian officials who, with assistance from an international team of experts including representatives from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), developed a geospatial application tapping and combining satellite imagery and river-height sensors to get an early read on possible flooding in Namibia. Leveraging sensory data, officials are now able to predict, prepare for, and respond to events much sooner than previously possible. Furthermore, aggregating and geospatially depicting data provides contextual understanding of a large volume of information very quickly.

By combining social media data with geospatial analysis, officials may be able to prepare for and respond to a disaster faster than ever before. Sensory data like that collected via river-height gauges and seismic monitors, when combined with social media data and/or sentiment analysis, provides both the “what,” or that an event has just occurred or is about to occur, and the “who,” the “why,” and the “how” – or the context of an event, including the public’s level of understanding, its reaction to and knowledge of factual information, may even assist in predicting second and third-level events that might arise as a result of the original disaster.

Emergency response officials already monitor seismic data provided by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for early detection of earthquakes. Why not combine seismic data with key word searches for “earthquake,” “shaking,” etc. within specific geographical locations? Going further, why not overlay both seismic data and geospatially mapped data from Twitter with historical event data, critical infrastructure data, hazard and mitigation data, etc.? The resulting mash-up could provide an unprecedented level of contextual understanding to response agencies experiencing resource cutbacks and struggling to keep up with the volume of information available on the internet.

Despite the benefits of collecting crowd-sourced data during an emergency, it has not yet been adopted by incident response agencies for a variety of reasons. Many in the incident response community are reticent to social media data a valid information source. In large part, this is due to the difficulty in vetting the potentially vast amounts of data during a major operation. The inability to process this information, in turn, raises other issues for decision-makers, including potential liability concerns. To a lesser degree, the incident response community is steeped in tradition, with a strong proclivity to favor only proven methods and tools for the conduct of their mission. Dramatically divergent concepts are likely to meet with some cultural resistance.

For agencies to begin using social media and other types of sensory data for early warning and response, several changes must occur. First, rather than constantly monitoring Tweetdeck or similar other tools and attempting to physically sift through the data that is rapidly coming in from social media, news wires, etc., imagine if a predetermined aggregation and filtering mechanism could automatically filter through the information and geographically map it so you could look at all the information in context to an event as it unfolds. Incoming Tweets and sensory data could then be visualized as points on a map, and additional tools could enable you to pull in relevant information from other sources including government agencies, public information offices, and non-governmental organizations. This information too could be automatically sorted and mapped for further analysis. Additional tools could then enable more rapid and accurate analysis of the information allowing for efficient and effective decision making. Virtual USA, the Department of Homeland Security’s flagship program, sponsored by the White House Open Government Initiative and DHS Secretary Napolitano, has already made these concepts a reality.

Second, although social media tools enable access to a great deal of information from multiple sources prior to and during an incident which can, in turn, greatly enhance decision making and situational awareness, the wide scale use of social media during an event can also present significant challenges in monitoring and sorting through large amounts of data in order to authenticate information for real time decision making.

To harness crowd-sourced and sensory data most effectively, agencies need the ability to successfully aggregate, filter, integrate, map, prioritize, assign, and follow up on data collected via these methods. Accomplishing this requires that:

- Data aggregation and analysis tools to be developed to assist organizations in decision making;
- Data should be geospatially enabled for additional context; and
- Applicable governance framework, policies and challenges (e.g., liability and privacy issues, etc.) must be identified and addressed.

Leveraging crowd-sourced and sensory data may prove useful for alert and early warning of several types of events, including:

- Shooting and other violent acts as they occur;
- Disease, outbreaks, symptom clusters;
- Bird and other animal deaths;
- Floods, tornados, wildfires, and other natural events; and
- Traffic.

I am interested in hearing what others have to say about the types of data that might serve to assist public safety organizations in responding to events within their jurisdictions. Often it is the real-world application and identification of an information gap that drives the development of new and innovative technologies and methodologies.

Disaster recovery requires speed and a great many hands working cooperatively. The sooner the first people arrive to help, and the more effective those people are, the better. In recognition of this, a regional charitable organization in Kentucky has developed its own rapid disaster response. The Christian Appalachian Project expanded its mission not long ago to include dispatching trained volunteers to help in the wake of disasters throughout Appalachia and beyond.

“Back in July, we received a phone call at midnight for emergency supplies in eastern Kentucky,” explained Assistant Director for CAP’s Disaster Relief Program Sherry Buresh. Pike County had been devastated by a flash flood that washed away two hundred homes and killed two people. Pike County is a three-hour drive from CAP’s headquarters. “We got supplies there by noon,” Ms. Buresh said. “We were the first ones on the ground.” The organization’s small size and proximity to such disasters makes its speed possible.

CAP began in 1964 to meet the urgent needs of people in Appalachia. Expanding into disaster relief had been considered for some time, given the frequency of natural disasters in the state and the large percentage of Kentucky counties that are rural with little resources of their own. The consideration became a reality when a five-county flash flood hit eastern Kentucky in May 2004. CAP already had a number of relief programs operating in those areas, and it made the decision to get its people to assist in disaster relief right away.

The organization has a database of volunteers it can call upon, one that has recently reached six hundred members. Using mass e-mails and phone trees, they can dispatch disaster relief crews throughout Kentucky, or points beyond. At disaster sites, CAP disaster relief teams take in unaffiliated volunteers, people who arrive on-site and want to help but don’t know what needs to be done. CAP provides those people with on-site training and coordination.

Ms. Balish noted that “One thing we’ve gotten really good at over the years is learning the importance of networking and training together and everyone working together. We’ve become involved in every kind of planning committee and disaster organization there is.” The CAP disaster relief program coordinates its efforts with voluntary organizations active in disaster (VOADs) for various states, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and local disaster coordinators. Ms. Buresh herself has become the chair of the Kentucky VOAD. Additionally, to speed its ability to act, CAP has signed memoranda of understanding with the American Red Cross, local emergency management agencies, health departments, and hospitals.

Kentucky has had six major disasters requiring response and six minor since January 2009. Ice storms, tornadoes, flooding, high winds, all have plagued the area. The Christian Appalachian Project has several advantages in responding to those disasters. The organization already has outreach programs throughout the state, and it can roll out very quickly. By linking together the emergency networks already available, moving quickly with knowledge of local conditions, and calling upon the desire of ordinary people to help, CAP has made a tremendous difference.

Geo-location applications and technologies are quickly becoming the latest phenomenon in social media and information-sharing, due to the ease and speed with which individuals can locate friends and key resources (e.g., closest ATM, nearby restaurants, etc.) and exchange information with people in their networks. By simply typing a few comments about what you are doing or what is on your mind into a mobile phone app, geo-location tools detect the user’s location based on the GPS coordinates of the phone – and can graphically depict the user’s current location on a map when updated. This enables the user to provide updates to their friends of their movement around town, making it easier for friends and colleagues to sync up and meet while on the go. Additionally, children can use these tools to update parents of their location in real time.

I recently participated in experiment with Fox News and Corner Alliance testing the functionality and usefulness of geo-location social media applications and technologies. I was interested in the experiment because of how useful these tools have proved to be during (and after) recent disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti and the Gulf Oil Spill. During Haiti and the Gulf Coast oil spill these tools were used by organizations like Ushahidi, and Project Epic’s Oil Report at the University of Colorado, Boulder for to collect geo-tagged information to assist in locating individuals, locating instances of oil, keeping in contact with the responding organizations and citizens throughout the recovery efforts, for on the ground situational awareness, and general accountability for people throughout the course of the disaster. As a country we could realize significant benefits in applying these types of technologies in a systematic way to public safety and disaster response, but we need to use these tools safely.

I participated in this experiment to personally experience the implications of using these types of tools on a daily basis. And while these tools may be very useful in disasters, people should be aware of some of the potential privacy issues that they present – many times without our full understanding and awareness.

Over the course of the two week experiment, I used Foursquare and Facebook Places to share my daily activities, making it a point to post an update everywhere I went – from Starbucks, the bus, my office, lunch, gym, home, friends’ houses, and wherever I went at night and over the weekend. In addition to some of these updates, I included information such as who was with me, what we were doing, or where I was thinking of going afterwards. One of the things I found quite surprising is that throughout the course of the experiment, other participants were able to “spot” me based on my updates. On the final day, I was found by the news crew and reporter, who had been following me all along, filming me without my knowledge.

At the end of the experiment, I am much more aware of how the use of these tools can violate people’s privacy and security. Below are some safety tips and lessons learned that I took away from my participation in this experiment. I encourage others to add to this list or share best practices as appropriate as well!

- Familiarize yourself with the technology provider’s privacy policy and privacy settings. Every solution has different policies and settings that can change frequently (sometimes without good notice) so re-check often. In most cases, the privacy settings are defaulted to share as much private and personal information as possible to encourage maximum participation. This may not be an ideal setting for you depending on how you plan to use the technology.

- Be cognizant (and cautious) about what information you share. Constant updates to a profile enable others to decipher daily patterns. For example, if someone checks into a location every day around 9am, it is most likely their place of work. Similarly, if someone checks into the same location after work, it is most likely their home, their gym, their significant other’s house, etc. These patterns enable others to estimate your location, giving those with malicious intent the opportunity to find you, rob your home when they know you will not be there, or share information about you with others.

- Conversely, even if you are careful about what information you post or with whom you share, many tools now enable individuals to tag or include others in their updates; if you are tagged or included in an update, information is posted to your profile as well. Share with your friends that you wish not to be tagged or checked into locations from their profile. Additionally, you can change your privacy settings to disable others from tagging you or posting to your wall (See Facebook Privacy Settings).

- Remain vigilant in your awareness of information shared on your profile. Choose to receive notifications that others have tagged you in a status update or photo, and maintain general awareness of your persona on the internet – once information has leaked, it’s often too late to take back control.

- Do not inadvertently share your home address or non-commercial locations you frequent by “checking in” when you arrive there.

- Finally, unfriend those individuals you do not know personally or through friends and do not accept friend requests from profiles you are not sure about.

Recently, our staff at Findlay All Hazards has discovered a potential disconnect in the flow of information from some states to their local emergency responder organizations. This may be preventing many from receiving important training from the DHS, FEMA, and others.

A common obstacle to training is a lack of funding and manpower.  Even if emergency management training sessions are federally-sponsored or tuition-free, state and municipal agencies often do not take advantage of them. Many times, this is due to the cost of paying the staff person taking the training.  And there’s also the need to pay for a replacement to assume the duties of the trainee in their absence (known as ”backfill pay”).

What many agencies don’t realize is that, many times, federal and state funds are available to help cover the overhead costs of training.  By involving the relevant State Administrative Agency (SAA) in the scheduling process of DHS-provided courses, a local agency interested in training can possibly receive per diems for trainees as well as backfill pay.  A listing of the most current SAAs for each state can be found online.

Another good place to start learning the process is at the FEMA National Training and Education Division site, where a visitor can explore a catalog of training offerings as well as learn about financial support options.

The agencies and universities throughout the country that deliver DHS training courses must follow the disciplined curriculum development process prescribed by DHS to be approved to deliver courses.  This insures that only relevant training courses, strong in instructional design and content, are offered.  At Findlay, we concentrate on content related to school safety, maritime security, and rail car spill response for a primarily rural audience.  Other institutions serve the needs of more urban emergency responders and managers.

Any emergency agency, school system, law enforcement agency, fire department, or waterway and transportation administration can likely find important training they need through DHS offerings.  Many of the courses can be brought directly to the local jurisdiction minimizing the need for travel.  With the possibility of additional financial support for per diems and backfill pay already in place in many states, there should be few obstacles to prevent the appropriate people from getting the training needed.

In Part I of this blog, I talked about the incredibly valuable role that technology volunteers have played in responding to crises such as the Haiti Earthquake, the San Bruno Fires, and others. Along with the major contributions that these volunteers are making to help increase the capacity of the official response organizations, their active role is also surfacing significant, and in some cases, long-standing issues that need to be addressed to improve disaster preparedness and response overall. I’ve already covered one of the most important of these issues, the need to create a more structured and institutional relationship between the official response organizations and the volunteer communities, in the first blog. In this blog, I will look at other important issues that were raised by the participants in the International Conference of Crisis Mappers Conference (ICCM) earlier this month.

Preparedness and Planning

“Governments just don’t put money into planning.” This sentiment was expressed time and again by disaster response officials. Unfortunately it is more true than not. No matter how good the technology and no matter how good the tool, unless it is fully integrated and exercised as part of the policies and procedures in an agency’s concept of operations, it will be of minimal use in responding during an actual disaster. The reality is that during a disaster, responders use the tools that they use every day and are most familiar with. During a disaster they rarely have the time to use something new. They simply don’t have the time to learn how to use it. While many organizations and companies mean well by volunteering the use of a new technology or tool during a disaster, they can at times actually get in the way.

It is not just a matter of learning how to use a new tool. Employing a new tool also requires a support system to go along with it, which is not immediately available. Moreover, the use of a new tool can create heightened expectations from the public who will anticipate an immediate response from the responding organizations. It is telling that in a survey by the American Red Cross, 74% of the public stated that they would expect help to arrive within an hour if they posted a request for help on a social media web site.

Planning for Resilience

Another issue raised by the participants of the ICCM – and one that continues to vex response organizations – is maintaining vigilance and interest in pre-disaster situations. In order to be truly prepared, it is critical to engage both the official response organizations and the public they serve. While it is difficult to maintain support and resources for preparedness planning, it is equally as difficult to maintain the interest of the public at large. It is unfortunately the case that despite efforts by response organizations at every level to engage the public, few have been very successful at doing so. This is an issue that FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has raised time and again.

One approach that might have more success is to integrate preparedness planning into the broader efforts to build vibrant and resilient communities. If citizens are actively engaged in working together to strengthen their community economically, culturally, socially and politically – something important to their day-to-day lives – they can also improve their ability to respond in times of crisis. Why? Because the actual first responder in a time of crisis is most often not an official responder but a neighbor. If you have already built strong ties and relationships with your neighbors, that will go a long way towards improving preparedness. And it improves even more if official response organizations are part of the equation.

All of this points to the critical importance of focusing preparedness efforts on building resilient communities, something which will be addressed in subsequent blogs.

I’ve just returned from a three day conference sponsored by the International Network of Crisis Mappers “Haiti and Beyond.” If you don’t know them, the INCM is a network of technology volunteers who provide technology support, primarily in the form of using crowdsourcing techniques to help provide accurate maps and other situational awareness tools – to responders in a domestic or international event.

This relatively new phenomenon gained a lot of attention as volunteers mobilized by the hundreds, if not thousands, in response to the Haiti earthquake. John Crowley, from the Harvard Humanitarian Aid Initiative and Department of Defense’s Star-tides program, spoke at the Where 2.0 conference last spring, stating, “What we did in Haiti changed disaster response forever.” There are numerous reports on what this network did to help in Haiti, so I won’t repeat it here, but suffice to say, this network provided the official response community an incredible capability to dramatically improve situational awareness to assist in decision making, resulting in the saving of lives and reduction of human misery.

In a smaller fashion , a similar phenomenon occurred during the San Bruno, California explosion and fires. In that circumstance, the head of planning for the Incident Command reached out to a network of people that he had worked with during previous domestic emergencies to see if they could assist by providing mapping and other tools to help them improve situational awareness in the command center. As a result of knowing Luke Beckman, then of Instedd, geospatial technologists and graduate students worked together to assist within less than 24 hours after the incident.

Examples like these are now commonplace as organizations such as the INCM, Crisis Commons, and dozens of others mobilize to support responders during significant events. The INCM conference was called to look back at lessons learned from these deployments and see how they could better support these efforts so that their capabilities could be put to greater use. While the majority of participants in the conference were involved in responding to international disasters, the lessons and issues they raised were similar to those that were discussed during the Red Cross sponsored “Emergency Social Data Summit ” this past August. The following are some of the key lessons learned and issues to address if this incredibly powerful network is to be harnessed effectively.

This is the first in a series of blogs that will address this and issues related to establishing a more thought through disaster response management system.

Organization and Structure

One of the issues that has come up frequently is the lack of any kind of mechanism or structure that would provide a channel for this network to work with the official response organizations. This is not a new issue but was raised time and again during the conference, particularly by Dr. Choi Soon-hong, the Assistant Secretary General and Chief Information Technology Officer of the United Nations Secretariat who spent two full days at the conference. The lack of that structure inhibits the impact of these volunteer networks as well as non-governmental organizations and other not-for-profits for a number of reasons. Among these are:

1. There is an inability to provide these networks with requirements from official response organizations. One of the things that occurred during the response to Haiti and other disasters was that well meaning technology volunteers “mashed-up” tools that either weren’t required or used or, at times, duplicated existing tools which only served to confuse people. As result, a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into developing something that was simply not useful. I don’t want to sound too negative here, because there is no question that the contribution of these volunteer networks was incredibly useful and, as I said earlier, saved lives, but none the less, it is one of the problems that was cited by participants at the conference.

2. There are questions among official response organizations as to the trusted nature of the volunteers and the authenticity and accuracy of the data being provided. This was another problem that was frequently cited. While some of this lack of trust can also be attributed to the lack of familiarity with the “crowdsourcing approach,” such as that used by OpenStreetMap, there are also legitimate questions raised due to the lack of vetting of these networks. Official response organizations want to know, for example, whether the volunteers have any training in crisis response. Are they credentialed to do what they are doing, and so on? As result, the valuable information that is being gathered may not be used effectively in the response.

3. There are questions as to the redundancy and sustainability of the tools being provided. Since the tools often have no official sponsoring organization, there is no real funding stream to support the long term use of these tools. Moreover, there is concern that if an official organization becomes dependent upon their use and they go down due to lack of redundancy that could actually hurt the response.

4. There is a concern voiced from official response organizations that without an effective system to channel these efforts, they could easily get overwhelmed with well-meaning volunteers with no way to effectively handle them. And, once they are integrated into the response, the official organizations now have to assume responsibility for supporting and securing them.

5. Finally, there is a concern that the lack of organization and structure will mean that the official response organizations will simply not get the support they need. The example above of the San Bruno fires was a case in point in which the only reason they were able to get the support is because the head of planning happened to know Luke. Lacking that, they might not have been able to leverage the capabilities of Luke’s networks which made a real difference in enhancing situational awareness and decision making.

The issue of lack of organization and structure was, happily, one of the key issues discussed and debated during the conference and is being discussed among the broader volunteer community with the response organizations. More on this will be reported upon as developments take place.

Emergency managers and public safety practitioners across the globe are beginning to recognize the benefits of using social media to connect with citizens (and each other) to better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. The American Red Cross hosted the Emergency Social Data Summit in August 2010 to bring together government agencies, emergency management professionals, disaster response organizations, technology companies and concerned citizens to address how to leverage social media during emergencies.

The cluttered social media technology landscape combined with the complex emergency management ecosystem makes it challenging for people to know how to leverage these social tools before, during and after times of crisis. And there is no one-size-fits-all solution because every disaster is local, and every locality has a unique landscape with their own capabilities, needs, vulnerabilities and risks.

Unfortunately, a lot of issues still remain – and many of them need to be worked out at the local level – as every disaster is local. More education and training on social technologies should be pursued in order to understand the capabilities and functionalities of each technology and to work through implementation issues at a grassroots level so that the solution works for a particular community and within context of their local and regional emergency operational frameworks and incident management system.

In September 2010, the first ever hands-on training program developed by public safety practitioners and specifically geared towards the needs of local practitioners was held in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Social Media 4 Responders event featured instructors and panelists from a broad cross section of disciplines and provided practitioners with step-by-step training on how to use different social media technologies. Participants were able to work through challenges with peers and colleagues and exchange different perspectives and problem solve in a collaborative fashion.

A key point that the trainers stressed during the event was that social media is not about technology; it is about people. People use social media to meet, connect and stay in touch with one another and more and more (and whether we like it not) social media is becoming a key facet of our culture and the way we communicate and interact with one another – professionally, personally and during times of emergencies and disasters.

Not only is social media relatively inexpensive, but it is also enables virtually anyone to publish and access critical information at any time – before, during and after emergencies. It can take many different forms and can serve many different purposes including: blogging and microblogging to publish and share critical information as needed; social and professional networking to connect and find people/resources; location-based services for real-time situational awareness; collaboration, authority building and information aggregation through wikis; and sharing of rich multimedia including photography, video, and audio for advanced contextual information about a situation.

Other takeaways from the event included:

- More cross-discipline collaboration at the local level needs to happen to maximize the impact of and minimize confusion from the use of social media;

- A cross-disciplinary communication strategy for your community should be developed (before a social media strategy is pursued); and

- Social media education and training need to be planned for and required because there is no worse time to implement a social media strategy than during a crisis.

The reality is that the use of social media by the emergency management and public safety community is no longer just interesting or a nice-to-have, because the use of social media by the citizens is part of the very fabric of how they communicate. In order to effectively harness its power, the community needs to better understand the issues involved and become more adept at understanding how to use these tools effectively. Towards that end, I’m interested in hearing from people about what other issues are being looked at as well as the identification of best practices.