Earlier this morning, before the Senate resumed, I participated in an ‘Emergency 2.0 Australia: Geospatial and social media making a difference’ Roundtable discussion organised by NGIS and Know And Then under the auspices of the Gov2.0 Taskforce project of the same name.
The discussion brought together stakeholders from government agencies, emergency services, elected representatives, the ABC, online businesses and members of the Gov2.0 Task force. It was a terrific way to gain an insight into the emerging and leading social media applications for emergency management around the world and then test their relevance by drawing on local experience to the Australian context. I know the slide presentation that served as our agenda will be posted online soon too (I will link it as soon as it is up).
The project web site gov2em.net.au is duly transparent and has applied principles of openess in their methodology, ideas and deliberations. This blog post by Maurits van der Vlugt from NGIS is a good summary explanation of the project.
The channels of communications between agencies and the community before, during and after emergencies have been the subject of intense community debate following the black Saturday tragedy, as well as a royal commission. Being an ACT Senator, the Canberra community had first hand experience of an emergency with the 2003 firestorm, for which there was a coronial inquiry. While the discussion today was not limited to bushfire-related emergencies, these insights informed the conversation.
There is no doubt that the prolific and growing use of social networking has changed forever how we respond as individuals and groups.
With these tools in the hands of citizens, the natural and established social networks that we all have as families, friends and (geographic) communities will be enhanced.
How can agencies support and leverage these intuitive and established social networks? What emergency information will help people who are part of these social networks make the right decisions in times of great stress and possibly even panic? What will constitute a trusted source of information in these circumstances and will people know how, and be able, to access it?
In addition, many citizens will have the ability to upload and share accurate, descriptive, truly local (geo-coded) information that can supplement the official sources. No one owns this crowd-sourced ‘information’. Real time input from citizens populating public spaces online often is better and available faster than official sources.
What kind of public spaces are needed online to provide structure and timely searchability/ discoverability to this shared ‘wisdom of the crowd’? And could this be compared in real time to ‘official’ information through geospatial mapping overlays?
Because not everyone is online (yes, the digital divide continues to exist) and, and people have differing preferences about the social networking tools they use, there will always a need to approach this challenge through a multitude of communication platforms.
It is my strong view for example that it is the familiarity of radio as a traditional communications medium in emergencies that will continue to play a pivotal role: a navigation point to localised online information from for example, the rural fire service, the twitter hashtag for that town or the website address for fire/floodline maps for that region etc. The strength of new and social media online is its complementarity with traditional media platforms AND established personal, family, friends and community social networks. The ABC understands this and their model of integrating their online presence with traditional media delivered regionally is a very strong and proven model. I am continually impressed with their capacity to innovate with social media and respond to citizens growing voice through social media.
Not surprisingly the gov2em project team are on to all these challenges in a thoughtful and thorough way. And it is a two-way street. They are keen to gather the views of anyone who has ideas or insights, to this end the project team have a fantastic page that you can submit your ideas directly to.
I commend the participants in this important poject and learnt alot as a result of my participation in the roundtable discussion – so thank you!
4 Comments
Reply | Subscribe
My company makes an emergency alerting/notification system called ALERTS. It is used by part of NSW RFS, Vic SES, the AFP and many others, but not the CFA or ACT Emergency Services although it was offered to them. I would like to have a chat to you about this area when convenient to you. PS. I am also sports mad – I sailed the modern 18 footers for 20 years and now sail a vintage 18 footer plus a 1938 wooden yacht.
Hi, what is the point of having an early warnign system that puts the fear of god in to the community only in the fire season and even if there is no danger at all due to sudden wind changes. We have developed a system that is built and used by the community as a whole where the people manage their business throughout the year build relationships with people in their towns strengthening communication links when they are needed. But i quote from Peter O’Brien , cheif of staff for the Vic Labour party, ” we cannot trust the public in their ability when using this sort of tool’
Hi Michael,
I understand your point, but surely more useful notification mechanisms that people can use according to their personal interests and needs (for instance, they might want to subscribe by mobile, email or Tweets) would I think help people be better informed, and thus better able to make decisions on courses of action. There will be as always when new information is made available more easily a transition period while people learn how to make the information useful to them personally, however ultimately more transparency and access to knowledge can only help people make better decisions for themselves.
Cheers,
Pia Waugh
Office of Senator Lundy
All very valid points Jeremy, Michael and Pia. With regard to services that allow citizens to subscribe (or ‘opt-in’) to alerts, there are some examples in this Blog post: http://gov2em.net.au/national-emergency-warning-system-still-has-some-way-to-go/