Comments on: How Geeks Can Help In Disasters (San Diego Fire 2007)

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:03:34 +0000

Great work, Nate.

I have a batch of friends in New Orleans and have watched some of the very slow rebuilding post-disaster – the neighborhoods being coordinated by email and blog and wiki and a huge dose of old-fashioned walking around.

My next suggestion for twitter based communications in a disaster is to take advantage of some level of more permanent storage and generate the twitter stream as a series of updates from that. As an example, I hooked up a feed from Arborwiki (http://arborwiki.org) into Twitter (http://twitter.com/arborwiki) via Twitterfeed. Every 30 minutes it reports the recent changes and the wiki summaries of what you posted out. Ideally you’d make this run in real time, but as a proof of concept it works great: the twitter gets the pithy version, and the wiki accumulates the long one.

By: nate

nate — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 05:13:23 +0000

Edmund, I appreciate the point you’re trying to make. Although, the only thing I would like to see an aggregate citizen news network make is news, not commentary or opinion. The reason it worked so well on my twitter feed is because I had no opinion (other than calling looters idiots, which is pretty much a fact anyway).

I would rather we create something that puts out helpful facts than any kind of commentary at all, if that’s possible. Twitter is wonderful in that regard because you have 140 characters to get to the point, not tell a story or hypothesize reasons. It just is. And, personally, I like the utilitarian function of a service like that. When it’s necessary, it’s used. When it’s opinion, you can call your neighbor. Let’s make something useful.

Cheers!

By: Edmund Wilfong

Edmund Wilfong — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 03:53:54 +0000

I’m going to use this as a bully-pulpet forum for a moment, because I can and this is relevant to the discussion in a rather round-about way. I would also say that I’m not yelling at anybody here – I’m yelling at the mainstreamers.

I’m sick and tired of the comparisons between the ’07 wildfire and the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. Everybody’s so bloody proud of how a state full of people able to afford million-dollar closet-space is able to pull through a disaster better than a state on the low-end of the income bracket that consistently fails to convince Congress that it needs some of the money Congress is so jolly to throw around.

Black people can pull through disasters, by the way. They did pretty freaking well on their lonesomes in New Orleans, and they were alone. FEMA only said it was going to help, it never actually got around to helping (unless you count it’s own ingenous solution to the overpopulation problem – killing off the old and infirm).

If you’re going to say that Louisiana didn’t rise to the challenge, you’d be absolutely right. If you then bothered to mention that it was because there hasn’t been ten minutes in the state’s life that it’s ever been able to afford the infrastructure required to rise to that challenge, then you’d be more correct than the classist swine on the news media.

If there is aggregate citizen journalism, the “Geek’s County News Network”, then it should exist for this reason – all people have biases. In the mainstream news media, you have to change the channel to even have a hope of somebody mentioning the biases you just heard. In aggregate news, you will get point and counterpoint – there are too many people involved not to.

By: Alan Gray

Alan Gray — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 19:22:08 +0000

Nate, glad you are OK.
We had a writer down there, but she got caught up just saving herself, her home and friends, so we got very little out.

You guys did an amazing job.
What can we do to help and contribute?

Alan.

By: Zena Weist

Zena Weist — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 02:54:00 +0000

Nate,
Glad you are save, thanks for the updates via twitter. For me, with friends close by, your updates were extremely important.

Thanks for finding my post and your comments.

The aggregator needs to happen, citizen journalism is where people are getting their information – it’s sans the sensationalism, it’s authentic, it’s NOW and just…well, frankly – better. I agree with John Frost on the Ning approach and I think non-profit is a good idea (to keep it for crisis communications/emergencies – where those that need the info can go w/o ads, sensationalism, etc.)

Thanks again!

By: Edmund Wilfong

Edmund Wilfong — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:02:35 +0000

My take on the issue is this – there’s going to be this or something very similar happening. Somebody has to do it. My thought is this – there’s no particular reason for you not to be the one to have done it.

Frankly, I’m glad to have been a part of its foundation. Rather proud, in fact.

By: atonymous

atonymous — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:34:39 +0000

Have you learned how they handle an amber alert. Could you use some of that knowledge too? And recovery of hostages or military personnel in hostile situations. Certainly some of what you want to do is already in that template.

By: nate

nate — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:39:54 +0000

Oh, and Aaron, we’re looking over the Deki Wiki by MindTouch and it may be a good first rev type of software to use. I’m not sure yet if it will have the flexibility we’ll want in the end, but it may be a very nice first shot at doing something quickly and have enough of a feature set to accomplish the goals.

Thanks for offering that.

By: nate

nate — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:38:21 +0000

Tola, those are some outstanding comments and thoughts. I’m still digesting them, but overall I love how you’ve thought this through. Let’s be sure we get a quick revision out there and then iterate as necessary to hit the points you’re making.

Regarding the “myriad of sources”, that was one of the problems I’d like to solve. There always seem to be a myriad of sources and it would be best if the duplicate data was “de-duped” and then sent through a crucible to end up with refined, no-fluff information output to and by the general public.

Bring it on Tola. I love your thought process.

By: Tola

Tola — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:57:38 +0000

I wanted to throw in a couple more thoughts and then I’ll move over to the wiki. I think that there are two parts to this to consider – publishing and aggregating. “Standard” processes could be developed for publishing, including recommendations on where to publish, how to properly tag content, and suggestions for simple publishing tools (this includes possibly building one from scratch). I’m thinking that one of the keys to getting content to the right places in a crisis is to communicate where and how to publish information before a crisis. This is where folks at Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter could probably help out in some way.

On the other side is the aggregation piece. We all know that there are lots of ways to aggregate content. There is no single right way to do it – but there could be a standard for defining what content should be presented in case of a crisis. If this is defined, the myriad of sources that pop-up in times like these might be more likely to provide the same information. I know I’m making a bunch of assumptions here, but it’s a rough cut.

I’ll throw this out there too – all of this makes me think about some sort of a “hydra strategy” for crisis communications. If one part fails, the system still works.