Today techies across the U.S. and in the U.K. are joined together in a collaborative effort to develop tools and technologies that will be of use to responders and victims of the Haiti earthquake disaster. Volunteers with tech skills ranging from programming, natural language processing, and mapping (among just a few) are working on various projects that have the potential to connect people to vital information resources and speed rescue and recovery efforts.

Teams are gathered in London, Washington D.C., Brooklyn, Denver, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles.

Representing the "non-techie side," I'm observing the bustling activities of the two teams working here in Denver. One group is collaborating on a project called "Tweak the Tweets," a project identified during the Random Hacks of Kindness and driven by researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder . A second is considering tasks of translating tags being used to filter information on flickr, delicious, and blogs in English into French Creole. A host of projects are being developed in the other five sites.

You can follow the activities of the Crisis Camps on Twitter @crisiscamp, or by observing twitter hashtags #cchaiti, #ccla, and #ccden.

This emergent network of disaster hackers comes on the heels of several crisiscamps launched in the past year. Led from within, no organization is leading and yet this self-organized group of creative and concerned global citizens is reaching out to assist in a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is yet another example of an emergent group that has identified a set of unmet needs and altruistically gather together to address them using their various skill-sets.

The earthquake in Haiti is one of this hemisphere's worst disasters in history. With nearly one third of the Haitian population directly affected, every person in the country is reeling in the aftermath of incredible destruction. Vast attention is being directed from around the world as the international community observes and struggles to comprehend the magnitude of devastation wrought on this impoverished country.

In the aftermath of destruction, communication tools are an information lifeline. This has been facilitated by new media that in less than a decade has revolutionized our ability to observe and connect to each other.

Networked communications have made it possible to post pictures and videos increasing the speed of information flow. Social networking services have enabled the sharing of condolences and sympathy as well as the rapid flow of donations for relief efforts. Online registries of missing and surviving persons make it possible for families to gain information from afar.

With the devastation, traditional communications infrastructure collapsed, but the Internet and short messaging systems remain viable mechanisms for emergency information and situational updates. This networked communications infrastructure has proven to be resilient in the face of disaster and has enabled information sharing in ways previously impossible. People are communicating via text messaging, Twitter, and Skype to friends and family around the world.

Just six short years ago, the world's attention was turned to the tsunami in South East Asia. While new media were available for information sharing at the time, limited use was observed. Flickr, however, became a key resource and mechanism for sharing images from the disaster as well as pictures of the missing. This is in contrast with what was observed following the World Trade Center disaster on September 11, 2001. Following 9/11, images were shared not via networked technologies, but through posters and picture placards posted at makeshift memorials throughout the city. In contrast with photocopied posters, networked communications have the potential to reach thousands of observers in a very short period of time.

Only six months ago, when Hurricane Odnoy drenched the Phillipines, worldwide observers watched the devastation unfold through citizen-generated images and texts through social networking services such as Twitter. Similar to the current situation in Haiti today, information was shared through resilient infrastructure when landlines and cellular communications were compromised as a result of the disaster damage. Citizen journalism via new media has become a common feature of information gathering and sharing in our everyday lives. During a disaster, it is a lifeline and a source of virtual capital connecting the worldwide community of onlookers to those most directly affected.

This week, the UN Foundation released a new report called "New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks," commissioned by the United Nations Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership. The report, written by Diana Coyle (an economist at the University of Manchester) and Patrick Meier (co-director of the Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative), looks at innovation in the use of technology along the timeline of crisis response, from emergency preparedness and alerts to response and rebuilding. It profiles organizations whose work is advancing the frontlines of innovation, offers an overview of international efforts to increase sophistication in the use of IT and social networks in emergencies, and provides recommendations for how governments, aid groups and international organizations can leverage this innovation to improve community resilience.

Importantly, this report is written for the practitioner audience. It is heavy on case studies and examples from recent efforts at technology innovation and implementation, making it an interesting and valuable read for those who are searching for a broad, informative perspective on international measures to integrate technology into areas affected by crisis, disaster, and conflict. However, it draws very lightly from existing theoretical and academic research. As an empiricist, I find this to be its downfall. For instance, there is a significant lack of reference to the existing body of knowledge on alerts and warnings in disaster. This body of research spans more than 50 years of empirical research and is the basis for many warning programs and systems in the U.S. Acknowledgement or even attention to key studies would help to shed some light on human behaviors leading to evidence based practices for public alerts and warnings. This is evident in the section on Public Education and the Role of Media, where one interviewee suggests that formal public education campaigns are not very effective in changing preparedness behavior. Perhaps some attention to existing research would have explained what educational campaigns are successful and why.

Despite my critique about the lack of research supporting the claims made in this report, it is a very important document that delivers a summary of international efforts on the uses of new technologies for disasters and crisis response. By linking information access to community resiliency and then showing how new technology channels facilitate communication, the authors make a solid point that new information and communication technologies play a very important role in emergency management and disaster response and are a necessary ingredient for all effective communication strategies.

The UN Foundation invites people to submit questions to the author's of the report and other subject matter experts via Twitter (using the hashtag #tech4dev) or the UN Foundation's Facebook page.

This Saturday, December 5, DARPA (a federal agency charged with the development of new technologies) will place 10 large red balloons in various locations across the country and they want you to help find them. Of course their whereabouts are already known by a select few, but the goal of this prize competition is to examine the speed and accuracy of nationally networked individuals who will identify and map each of the locations using social media. The first team to send in an accurate list of balloon locations will win $40,000.

More than 2,500 persons have registered to take part in this "Network Challenge." One emergency management organization in Johnson County, Kansas which values the importance of social media and wide-area collaboration, is enlisting the help of other offices across the country. (Johnson County, Kansas is also holding a daylong conference this January on new media in crisis.) If you happen to find a balloon, you can post the information to the Johnson County Facebook site that has been set up just for this event.

Recent examples of crowdsourced information and networked technologies have shown that distributed networks coupled with local boots on the ground all using social media have the potential to carry information at phenomenal speed with excellent accuracy. But, participants should beware … DARPA has warned that some information available online may be intentionally misleading and inaccurate. The balloons will only be visible on Saturday, December 5 during daylight hours. Once they have been taken down, balloon-spotters will be required to use their networked connections to find the locations of any balloons they did not already locate. It will be up to competitors to assess the validity of information and verify each identified location in a wiki-like fashion.

This event will unfold online as participants share information through open and closed networks. The submission deadline is listed on the DARPA website as December 14. I'll be very curious to see how volunteer balloon-spotters emerge and converge into an organized network of information points. Shall we place wagers on how long it actually takes to complete the task?

The digital divide often refers to those who lack access to computing hardware or software, those who do not have the technological skills (or digital literacy) to use information or communication technologies. These include rural and remote populations without high speed internet access, and demographic segments such as those who are older, of lower socio-economic status, or the infirm. But I raise the question of whether the digital divide might also include those on the opposite end of the spectrum; those who are so 'plugged in' to new media and new communication channels, those who are so intimately connected to their handheld devices and networked technologies, that they miss information that might be shared with the masses through traditional media channels.

Many emergency managers and public officials consider this one of their key issues as they develop means and mechanisms to reach a broader population at risk to hazardous conditions. Indeed, this is one of the reasons cited for establishing Twitter or Facebook profiles and creating aggressive Twitter campaigns. This weekend, however, I read about one of the most creative strategies yet, designed not to reach the Twitter crowd, or the Facebook crowd, but the gaming crowd.

As part of their Empire 2.0 initiative, New York State announced their plans to send alerts issued by the Emergency Management Office over video game networks. For those who spend their time on television plugged in to video games, the Emergency Alert style system will get their attention by tapping into networks such as Xbox LIVE, the PlayStation Network, and the Nintendo WiFi Connection . While few details are available, New York State Deputy CIO Rico Singleton has announced that the plan is in its testing phase.

While we don't yet know how these alerts will be received or acted upon by the New York State youth that are its target, one can be assured that such creative outreach ideas will spur innovation across the United States. This is the beauty of social media; we are no longer limited to traditional dissemination channels or to our own limited capacities to design and innovate for the future. Crowd-sourced information will spur creative solutions and increase the reach of communications across distributed networks.

Friday the 13th, commonly associated with Freddie Kreuger and the horror flick movie genre, is not so scary this year. Indeed, even as I write this short blog post, some amazing things are taking place that have the potential to significantly alter the means and mechanisms for information sharing in disaster.

Today, at the "Hacker Dojo" in Silicon Valley, dozens of programmers and subject matter experts have gathered together to develop applications and solutions to disaster problems at the first "Random Hacks of Kindness" event. This morning, they heard from FEMA administrator, Craig Fugate, about the importance of technology in disaster. @NoelDickover tweeted the following messages during Fugate's presentation:

NoelDickover: Craig Fugate, FEMA - Govt needs to leverage citizens as sensors in crisis situations. How can they use citizen data? #RHoK #CrisisCamp

NoelDickover: RT @geoTCInteroperability isn't a technology issue, it's a social one. need talk to each other before an event. #RHoK http://myloc.me/1ubnA

NoelDickover: Craig Fugate, FEMA - "Crisis Apps shouldn't be to create good theater, they need to change outcomes. What is the goal?" #RHoK #CrisisCamp

NoelDickover: Craig Fugate, FEMA - "Once you meet your basic survival needs, communication is the priority." #RHoK #CrisisCamp

[For readers unfamiliar with reading Tweets, the Tweet author above is NoelDickover; RT means "retweet," or re-post a Tweet posted by another Twitterer; and the organizing keywords follow hashtags (#)#RHoK (short for Random Hacks of Kindness) and #CrisisCamp; the second Tweet above includes a link to a map on 'Uber-Twitter' that shows the location from which the original Tweet (by @geoTC) was posted]

While the event is hosted by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and the World Bank, FEMA has now thrown its hat into the ring. During his keynote, Fugate offered "to the application developers who create the best crisis response application, invitational travel to attend a national Conference in Washington for all state representatives."

You can follow the ongoing Twitter conversation at Random Hacks of Kindness by searching Twitter for #RHoK.

Here's a bit of information about the event (as explained by Brady Forest at O'Reilly Radar)

What is Random Hacks of Kindness? It is an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief, and developing solutions to these critical issues. This Codejam is the first of a series of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) events that will bring the best and brightest together for a "give camp" to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.

Objectives: This event is the first step in building a global community dedicated to solving disaster relief challenges through technology. At the RHoK Codejam, programmers will partner with subject matter experts to tackle "real world "problems. These challenges have begun to be defined (see preparation), and will continue to be refined during the event. The software created at this first event will continue to be developed at subsequent RHoK events, and openly shared with the international community. Our hope is that this software will address some of the serious challenges facing the disaster response community, and evolve in response to their needs.

Background: In May 2009, the first ever Crisis Camp barcamp was held in Washington, DC. During one of the opening sessions an industry panel including representatives from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! agreed that some matters supersede competitive concerns. We agreed to cooperate to mobilize our developer communities to create interoperable solutions/code that will have real impact in the field. We have partnered with NASA and The World Bank to make this happen.

Organizers: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and The World Bank are founding sponsors NASA-Ames is a co-sponsor
　

As Hurricane Ida rolls in to the Gulf Coast, we social media observers are watching convergence activity take place online in real time. Two groups have already emerged to serve as information collection points to address what might be a potential absence of information should Ida make landfall: The Hurricane Information Center and Emicus.com.

The Hurricane Information Center was established during the heydays of the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. As the Convention was winding down, a Ning network was established to facilitate a distributed network of volunteers who could bring together disparate sources of information into a single online platform of technology mashups. More than 500 people participated in this effort. They identified relevant Twitter feeds; annotated maps with evacuation routes, shelters, and available resources; linked to updated news stories; and edited a hurricane Wiki in real time. In true crowdsourced fashion, this network organized itself, invited newcomers with various levels of expertise to participate, and requested assistance with identified tasks.

The value of the information available through the Hurricane Information Center existed in its resources available to those looking for real-time information. The wisdom of the crowd, its collective intelligence, and self-monitoring behavior led to an example of a real-time, online, collective action taking that rivals examples of on the ground convergence routinely seen in disasters and crisis events.

Now, as Ida ramps up, the Hurricane Information Center has re-activated itself. Today, network founder Andy Carvin of NPR, sent out a call for help through an email blast which was repeated across various network participants' personal blogs and through Twitter networks. It's as if the horn has been sounded for the cavalry to assemble and they are preparing to mount their horses for the long ride into a potential disaster.

The second group to sound the alarm is Emicus.com. This website, launched by a Seattle start-up company, brings together newsfeeds from government, news, and the public and adds a number of sign-on features such as the "I'm OK" notification system. Here users can use the Emicus website to send text messages to their predetermined network, relaying the message that they are OK.

This hurricane season may be the first proving ground for Emicus, which was developed in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma (2005), and Gustav and Ike (2008). The Emicus professional staff, which works out of offices in Florida, Seattle, and San Francisco, will serve as the dedicated team to monitor and relay information posted on the website.

Two dedicated groups - one comprised of volunteers across the country in a crowdsourced effort, the other developed on an enterprise model - are both preparing to deliver safety-critical information in this impending Hurricane. Observations of the efforts and output should not go un-noticed by those who are interested in learning more about the wisdom of the crowd and the uses of social media to prepare, respond, and manage disasters and crisis events.

Public officials, human resource managers, and policy makers debate the benefits and drawbacks of social media use for communications among government agencies, among distributed personnel, and to members of the public. However, time and again, reports of misuse lead to concerns that use of Web 2.0 poses a significant problem to be managed.

Recent news of a scorned lover who mistakenly posted content to the Twitter feed of the organization for which they worked is but one example of a potential mishap. Accounts of employees using work hours to chat with friends or build their networks have become prevalent, so much so that one blogger has suggested that in the future, cigarette breaks will be replaced by 'social media breaks'. These examples alone provide plenty of reasons for managers to question whether the cost to the tax payer and risk to the organization outweighs the benefits of engaging these tools.

In light of these concerns, it is important to also raise the following question: Is the consequence to your organization or affect on disaster response capabilities greater, if you choose NOT to use social media to connect with personnel, distributed organizations, or the public? Put another way, how risky is it to cut off a communications mechanism that has the potential to connect people in real time, facilitate the observation of online chatter, or serve as a secondary mechanism to communicate warning and risk messages? Can you afford NOT to do it?

There is, of course, a broad spectrum of ways to engage social media. An excellent overview on six potential designs was presented by Glen Woodbury at the recent NEMA conference. He suggests that an organization can choose to suppress (issuing policies or directorates that expressly forbid the use of a particular technology), defer (to ignore, abstain, or dismiss even though the use of technology is evident in their operating environment), adapt (reactive; observation of the use of tools leads an organization to enter that communications environment to create and share its own content), adopt (proactive; in advance of an event, an organization decides to use technologies that are in the public domain), influence (an organization deliberately influences how a technology or tools is used, maintained, or operated), or design (an organization determines requirements for new technologies and seeks to influence the design or production for those needs).

Examples can be cited for each of these designs above and it falls to the organization to determine the risk associated with using new media for their internal operations and external communications.

I'm very interested to learn about how emergency management and public safety organizations are entering the landscape of social media use for disaster preparedness and response. If you have a policy to share, or a story to tell about why your organization has chosen to suppress, defer, adapt, adopt, influence, or design, please share it with me. By learning from others, we are likely to conduct better practices in the future.

"When I was in high school, we had calculators and they wouldn't let us use them. When I got to college, they had mandatory courses on how to use a calculator. Now, I can turn on my computer but I don't have a clue where to go to get to that twitter that you were talking about."
Getting online, getting plugged in, and surfing the web. While these activities are second nature to those who have grown up with the Internet and instant messaging, it's not so simple for those who come from the "paper-and-pen generation." This is the generation that is now challenged to learn about new technologies and tools so that they can provide leadership and direction and yet they are reliant upon the net-gen to show them how to get there.
What is the solution? Some have proposed that emergency managers simply hire the net-gen to cruise around the Internet and report back to them. Others have proposed training seasoned field responders. Still others have suggested that the partnering of the two may have the most value. Emergency managers, it turns out, are not alone in this period of questioning.
In a recent story on social mentoring in the Chicago Tribune, the idea of 'reverse mentoring' was described. Reverse mentoring, or" Rotnem," occurs when a net-gen tutors a paper-and-pen gen employee in the uses of social media. Here, a 20-something sits down with an older colleague and walks them through the basic activities of online social media use.
The baby boomer executives who might have scolded these young people for that if they had been their parents are now turning to them for help. A survey for the Center for Work-Life Policy found that 40 percent of respondents had asked younger colleagues for help with text messaging, social networking and using iTunes. In formal programs or informal sit-downs, companies are assigning junior staff members to serve as social media guides for their senior ones. "It literally meant saying, 'Sit down next to me, open an account for me, make me start functionally understanding how to use the tool,'"
If your organization is trying to identify strategies to incorporate social media into their daily operations and crisis response, it may be time to ask members of the net-gen to show you the ropes. This doesn't mean that senior leaders need to become the next best Tweeter or the most active Facebook user of the group, but it could serve as a hands-on introduction showing the potential value of social media as a source of information for situational awareness and as a new channel to communicate with those at risk. --------------- Jeannette Sutton is the co-founder of the Center for New Media and Resiliency, a 501(c)3 dedicated to increasing the safety, security, and resiliency of citizens and communities through the understanding and use of new media and othe emerging communications technologies for public safety, emergency response, and homeland security.