Are Disaster Infographics Still Cool? Useful?
It seems like every week or month, I get "the latest" disaster infographic in my inbox. Inforgraphics have become popular in recent years to communicate complicated topics and data. There are infographics on social media, types of hazards, impact to businesses, emergency management careers, etc. I keep a Pinterest board for these types of graphics (see below).
Because I am largely a curator of this information, not a consumer, I am not clear how infographics have helped the industry. Are disaster infographics useful? How have they helped? Are they effective? Have you used any in your work? If so, how?
Check out of a few of the infographics below and let me know what you think.
Developing Accurate, Complete and Current Information is a BAD Idea
This quote comes from a seasoned emergency manager in a recent Emergency Management Magazine article. Simply said, I don't agree with this key point. This kind of thinking leads us down a very dangerous path as it builds up false expectations and breads unrealistic thinking.
"Accurate, complete, and current" information is a nice goal, but entirely impractical and unrealistic in reality. In a recent email listserv conversation, a number of very experienced information managers discussed the difficulty in simply keeping up with the flow of information during a disaster. Perhaps this can be better achieved
Curate Dashboards NOT Documents in Disasters
The goal of any information or intelligence unit in a disaster is to produce information useful for decision makers. Information managers, though, curate and analyze information into static and overly-standardized reports that are hard to interact with and update with new and different data and information.
Instead, information managers should focus on publishing information into dynamic dashboards that can be further manipulated by disaster decision makers at their convenience. This is because decision makers may want to quickly...