Resilient design for the disruptions of tomorrow.
LAST UPDATED: Tuesday, October 30, 12:14pm I have received several requests for information about how to volunteer. I have started this list:
The next phase of the emergency management technology revolution!
Check out this amazing list of Twitter handles for Hurricane Sandy....http://blog.twitter.com/2012/10/hurricane-sandy-resources-on-twitter.html
LAST UPDATED: Tuesday, October 30, 11:40 am Eastern Daylight Time. Here is some helpful information that I will be updating through out Hurricane #Sandy...
Highlights.
A couple notes:
Volunteering:
Social Media. Here are some helpful social media accounts to follow during the storm:
Hashtags
Local Social Media
Flooding. Following the storm, flooding will likely be pervasive. Do walk or drive into ANY area in which you can not see the surface! Flash floods may also occur.
Shelters. 76 shelters are available all over the city and can be found using the evacuation zone finder. They are wheelchair accessible and are pet-friendly.
Subway, Rail, and Bus Closures. Restoration may take at least 3 days. Buses may begin operating sooner. For updates visit:http://www.mta.info.
NYC Schools. Closed for Monday, October 29, Tuesday, October 30 and Wednesday, October 31.
Parking and Meters. NYC Department of Transportation has suspended Alternate Side Parking Regulations and payment at meters citywide for Monday, October 29 and Tuesday, October 30..
Tunnels and Bridges. Nearly all bridges and tunnels are closed due to wind and water conditions as of 7pm on Monday, October 29. Lincoln and Midtown Tunnels may be open. All bridges, except for those in the Rockaways, will be open by Tuesday, October 30 at 12pm.
Parks and NYC Facilities. The following are closed as of 5 p.m. Sunday, October 28.
Evacuation. By order of Mayor Bloomberg, NYC has issued an evacuation order for all people in "Zone A." To find out if you are in Zone A, please go here and input your address. For your friends that are furry, all NYC shelters are pet-friendly! PLEASE follow this order if you are in Zone A. Ordered about 12pm on Sunday, October 28.
Tracking the Storm. To track the storm, keep checking here and here. The"eye" of the storm is not always most powerful, so expect severe weather regardless, including high winds and significant rain during the event along with flooding during and after the event.
Staying Prepared. You should have the following at your home:
Life-Threatening Emergency? Call 911. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please let me know via email, text or phone and I will help as best as possible.
NYU is closed for Monday, October 29 and Tuesday, October 30.
Geofeedia is releasing a number of regional maps that aggregate geotagged social media such as photos and videos on a map. I highly recommend checking this out for real time visual information. Here is the message from Geofeedia...
Since the storm is expected to hit a large geographic area, we have created several regional Geofeeds which should help you to hone in on your particular areas of interest.
Here are a couple of other hints and suggestions as you cover the storm:
1. Draw your own smaller, more-targeted Geofeeds. These will leverage the data Geofeedia is already discovering in the background.
2. Want to see more photos? Turn off Twitter under the settings menu. There are A LOT of photos, but the significant volume of tweets can sometimes push them down in the queue.
Westchester and Fairfield Counties, New York
Philadelphia and Atlantic City
Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA
To all of our customers and friends on the East Coast, good luck and stay safe.
Best regards,
The Geofeedia Team
Google has some great resources! Thanks Regina!
This was my comment regarding Patrice's article about Too much info during incidents: time for a new command position?. I agree to an extent that a new position is needed. In fact, I think it is an interim solution; one in which the "officer" is not only an operational position, but a preparedness position teaching others how to best utilize the vast array of information that we have access to. In the future, though, I would argue that what is really needed is a shift from the traditional "command and control" model that is highly vertical.
The role of the "intelligence" officer will become a role for all personnel as technology, especially social technology, will help get the right information to the right people at the right time in the right way. The future of emergency management is a "networked" model that is more social and horizontal than vertical. NIMS/ICS will become incapable of the scale needed to succeed in the next 5-10 years. A new model entirely, based on emerging applied technologies, will be needed.
Look forward to more discussion on this. What do you think?
How NOT to Use Hashtags & RTs in a Crisis via Glen Gilmore & Social Media: How NOT to Use Hashtags & RTs in a Crisis.
Kim provides some great and practical uses for social media using Hurricane Sandy as a use case...highly recommend checking this out!
There is no doubt in my mind that Ushahidi and Crowdmap are successes in their own right. The platforms fills huge information gap in crisis operations and people know it. But with any success comes the expectation that you continue to evolve the solution to meet the growing demands of the user base. Ushahidi is at this precipice, the one in which users are realizing just how much more powerful the platform can be, and are demanding this. As one of the leading emergency management agencies in the U.S. (if not the world), the New York City Office of Emergency Management (NYC OEM) has already realized some of the limitations of Ushahidi. In September 2011, NYC OEM successfully deployed Crowdmap for Hurricane Irene, but realized that they wanted more ways to work with the data collected, not just be able to visualize it on a map.
The use of data remains a big question in the near term. Innovation is no longer about the greatest "whiz bang" technology; it is about how existing technology and capabilities can be applied in the best way. In Ushahidi's case, it is how organizations and communities can effectively utilize this data to serve their needs.
This is also the crux of human-centered design as well as design thinking. What do you we need it for? What are the use cases? Where are the points of frustration and failure? What is needed now as well as in 2, 3, or 5 years? Priority must be given to these questions in order to maintain the viability of Ushahidi. Otherwise, private sector will innovate beyond, leaving the platform a notable solution of a forgotten era.
As I mentioned earlier, Ushahidi is successful and adoption rates are growing. The question is where to focus development efforts?
What do you think? What should Ushahidi's priorities be? Where should resources be committed? Who should be involved?
Developing a social strategy is never as easy as it seems. And sure, you can take the trial and error approach to social media. However, at some point, you will want to develop a holistic strategy to maximize your effectiveness. After all, outreach is very important to preparedness and response efforts. The more your stakeholders are prepared and know what to do, the better.
To maximize your effectiveness, you should develop a social strategy based on four key steps:
1. Define your People
The people are the most important aspects of this strategy. They represent the whole reason for developing a social strategy in the first place. Essentially, you want to provide real value for them. As such, it is important to define and truly understand who they are.
Here are some helpful considerations:
It is very helpful to develop a full profile for each audience to better understand who you will be trying to connect with. This is much a business plan as you try to better understand your target audiences by describing them.
2. Evaluate Your Objectives
Objectives represent what YOUR organizations want to achieve. Of course, there will be consideration for what people need as well, but these should inherently be aligned!
Here are some helpful considerations:
Developing objectives are not an exact science. In fact, they can and probably will evolve over time. Start to define some and be sure to get feedback from others, including audiences. Where possible, add objectives that you can measure. Ultimately, you will want to evaluate for effectiveness of what you have planned to do.
3. Create Your Strategy
Strategy brings together the different characteristics of the audiences you defined along with your objectives. Strategy represents the intersection of people and objectives. Think through this carefully and be sure to get feedback along the process.
Your strategy will be the most evolutionary as your social/online program grows. It may be helpful to develop multiple strategies and select the best one. You may return to the others at a later time. Your strategy will likely be highly interdependent and connected, so you should take the time to develop this.
4. Decide on Your Technology
Noticeably last is the technology that you will use to accomplish your objectives and strategy. While technology is important, it is more important to first define your intentions regardless of technological capabilities. This ensures that you efforts will be maximized for what you are trying to accomplish rather than being distracted by the wiz-bang features offered.
Here are some helpful considerations:
The technology you choose to employ is critical. You may be using it for a long time. However, understanding your priorities will help determine where technology is needed the most and if it might be better to go without a particular solution for a while. Give this some good thought and identify your most critical technological needs.
NOTE: Solutions are increasingly offered as "hosted" solutions meaning that no installation is required on your systems and you can access everything from the Internet. The security concerns around this have largely been addressed and many organizations find this perfectly acceptable in addition to being the most economical.
Final Thoughts
For many, trial and error is an adequate solution initially. However, as you grow and get more effective, you will want to outline the most effective way to accomplish your objectives. The consistency you achieve with your audiences will be much appreciated and pay off dividends.
Remember that prioritizing this information is critical. Technology solutions will NEVER be 100% of what you are looking for. It may be wise to accept the 80% solution rather than pay enormous customization or purchase costs for the remaining 20% of features.
Lastly, this strategy should be considered a living document. Update and edit as frequently as needed. You may learn things that you never though of before mid-way through implementation. Keep an open mind and make change part of your everyday!
For more information on this subject, I highly recommend Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Social Technologies.
-----
What audiences and objectives do you have? What strategies have you developed or are looking to develop? What solutions have you found work best and why?
New Social Media class from FEMA's Emergency Management Institute, anyone take it yet? Thoughts? http://ow.ly/cMzja #SMEM
In case you don't know, my full-time job for the past number of years has been as a consultant putting on various types of large-scale disaster exercises across the country. I have designed and developed exercises for all levels of government and many different programs.
As emergency managers and public information officers struggle to incorporate social media planning into operations, some organizations have begun to incorporate social media into exercises as a way to better learn and adapt to its dynamic nature. Most recently, I helped incorporate social media into exercise play at the behest of one of my clients and learned a number of great lessons that I would like to share.
Prior planning is a core element of exercise design and development as you want to test and validate the capabilities for which you have planned, not the ones for which you are not ready. A good exercise also does not set up players for failure, they set up opportunities to learn. That is why prior planning is necessary.
But moving forward with an exercise without having trained on the plan or the subject matter is akin to throwing yourself into the deep end of pool without having learned to first tread water. Social media is also a soft skill that is dynamic in nature, meaning that it is very situation dependent and that just because you do X does not mean that Y will happen.
While your plans will contain guidance, sending some of your designated folks to social media training ahead of time will help them to grasp and employ the concepts laid out in your plan. They will also be able to help you capture better lessons learned and observations.
Objectives help drive exercise play to the appropriate level for which you have planned for and are capable of. Give some good thought to exactly what you would like to walk away from the exercise having learned and/or validated.
For example, if you are just starting out with social media, you may want to focus on public information dissemination through social media. If you are more advanced, you may want to focus on public interaction and rumor control through social media. Want a better challenge? Use your "dummy" Twitter accounts (see Point 4) with other jurisdictions' dummy accounts if they are participating in the exercise.
The truth is, there are just so many more social media channels that just Facebook and Twitter. There are also just so many tools just to manage the different channels. However, they tools and channels don't matter as much as the process by which you release, gather, and interact with information.
If you are able to effectively utilize and master a process, you can easily adapt to the available channels and tools. Focus on exercising workflow and how to handle certain types of information.
The use of social media largely external. So how do you exercise inherently public facing tools? Well, Twitter provides options to keep accounts and Tweets private and protected. Set up a separate test account that is similar to your public facing account, except make it protected.
Also establish about five "dummy" accounts that can be used to simulate citizens, businesses, or other individuals/organizations. Make sure these are also private. A good naming format is "Test_[Jurisdiction]_[Organization]_[User Type]".
Lastly, make sure you each account "follows" the other. Even if you mention an external account or hashtag, the tweets will still remain private. Afterwards, you can even print out a copy of the timeline to review for evaluation.
NOTE: If you are using an aggregation tool such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, make sure the player does not post to the real-world accounts.
Use a controller who has a good understanding of social media as well as exercise objectives to manage the five or so "dummy". While it is helpful to develop a general outline of social media comments, questions or injects ahead of time, the dynamic nature of social media is best suited for a controller who can react to the circumstances as a person in a real incident would, but also be mindful of the organization's current social media capabilities and the exercise's objectives.
Using an aggregation tool such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck is helpful. If that is not possible, you can still sign in to each account individually, but you may have to use different browsers, tabs, and windows to accomplish this.
Social is fairly new for emergency management and exercises incorporating social media are even newer. But taking some simple steps that compliment your exercise design and development process will help you to better identify your social media needs, gaps, and lessons learned. Additionally, your comfort level will grow.
How did you incorporate social media into your disaster exercises? What lessons did you learn?
Resilience // Information // Technology
Copyright © 2020, DisasterNet, Inc. All rights reserved.
