[REPORT] Assessing Your Organization's #SMEM Capabilities
/There have been a great number of reports released over the years related to Social Media in Emergency Management (#smem). In May of this year, the Defence Research and Development Canada, a agency of Canada's Department of National Defence, released a brand new report specifically addressing the assessment of SMEM capabilities for emergency management agencies.
Needless to say, this report is one you should take the time to read. It has a lot of great information and included input from notable names such as Patrice Cloutier and Pascal Schuback. Both of them have been talking about this subject for quite some time.
In the report, they proposed an SMEM maturity model and examined several case studies such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. For each case study, they looked at SMEM capabilities by people, governance, technology and implementation. I embedded the full report below. If you want a quick read, here is the report abstract:
“Emergency management and first responder organizations around the world are trying to exploit the use of social technologies to prepare for respond to and recover from crisis. Social media offer the opportunity to connect and cooperate with the networked public, take advantage of the capabilities and innovations of virtual volunteers, and to reach people quickly with alerts, warnings and preparedness messages. Canada’s emergency management community has not yet fully embraced social media. This report describes an effort to understand the state of maturity of the use of social media in emergency management as well as to create a “roadmap” for an effective use of this capability in Canada. The research involved conducting an environmental scan, consultations with experts and case study analysis. We found that there exists an awareness and expertise gap between the community of internationally experienced virtual volunteers and the emergency management organizations in Canada and that the potential of social media and online collaboration remains unfulfilled. One of the main challenges to implementing an effective capability is resolving how to bridge the command-and-control, hierarchical culture of emergency management organizations to the horizontal, networked culture of the digital domain. The report offers suggestions on how to improve and mature the implementation of social media in emergency management in Canada”
This report also reminds me of the recent report I helped contribute to related to SMEM. In this report, we tried to tackle issues beyond public engagement, such as how we can use social media for situational awareness and decision support. There is a lot of momentum building in this area and I am excited to see more and more information on how to implement SMEM in a practical and realistic way.
I highly recommend taking a look at these two reports. If you know of any others, please post below or send them my way!
