Over the past few weeks I've been watching an amazing online social movement take place as 'Volunteer Technical Communities' (VTC) have created a virtual response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Several posts back, I wrote about a group of hackers who joined forces in the Silicon Valley for a daylong Random Hacks of Kindness event. Weeks later I wrote about Crisis Camps held simultaneously in Washington D.C., Denver, and New York City in response to the Haiti earthquake. Since that time, the Volunteer Technical Community has truly come to life in a worldwide and distributed fashion through the efforts of a small band of organizers in the U.S. called Crisis Commons. (The Crisis Commons website is worth a quick peek if you are interested in seeing how a bunch of volunteers generate and coordinate information using a wiki, Facebook, Twitter, and GoogleWave.) As of last week, Crisis Commons had hosted more than 45 Crisis Camps internationally in response to the recent earthquake events and more are planned for the future. You can follow Crisis Commons activities on Twitter using #CrisisCamp.
What does this volunteer technical community have to do with emergency management and disaster response and recovery? An article posted in the New York Times today provides an excellent summary and explanation of how crowd-sourced information via one socio-technology called Ushahidi (meaning "testimony" in Swahili) may become the true wave of the future for all sorts of crises. A few key points made by Giridharadas include:
The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they can get. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: the victims are re-imagined as agents who supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates the text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use this information to target the most pressing problems. In this instantaneous, virtualizing age, that kind of testimony [from the old paradigm] confronts a new variety: a testimony of aggregate, average, good-enough truths.
While many continue to ask about the value of crowd-generated information for disaster response, the recent efforts of the Volunteer Technical Community point to strategies for capturing information and making it useful to on the ground responders. This social system of emergent volunteers points to one potential solution for harnessing information and turning it into actionable intelligence.
Perhaps one future strategy at the local level will be to mimic the actions of the VTC by utilizing trained CERT members as human sensors who can track information online and direct it to the right channels. Does your community use this strategy? If so, we want to hear from you.
About the author: Jeannette Sutton is a disaster sociologist who specializes in public responses to alerts and warnings, with a focus on the uses of social media for communication in disaster.
