Emergency Social Data Summit

Photo Credit: Check out more amazing photos from the Summit by Timothy Wood

The Emergency Social Data Summit participants worked in roundtables to discuss a list of questions to start exploring how to triage and act on emergency social data. You can see what the other roundtables came up with on the main page of the Emergency Social Data Summit wiki, you will see the roundtable pages to the left.

Concurrently, there was a Twitter chat roundtable (#crisisdata) held to discuss the seven questions below. Here is the aggregate of the suggestions and thoughts around these topics. To see the Twitter transcript, visit the Twitter Chat Roundtable Suggestions wiki page.

Question 1: How should emergency social data be aggregated and triaged?

• There needs to be some direction from responders to the crowd, perhaps the use of a hashtag, but people need to know how to act
• Responders need to be familiar with the tools and use them
• Some discussion about using existing aggregation tools (open APIs), don’t reinvent the wheel
• Communicate what you would like them to use but be flexible enough to process what they give you, because they will make it up

Question 2: Once aggregated how, whom and where should emergency social data be reported?

• Control of where this site will go to whomever builds and funds it, seems to be the overall feeling, but there were ethical concerns:
• How public should the data be if you aggregate it somewhere, could it further injure people
• What about people who don’t have access to technology? 
• It’s not just about where data is coming in but where it isn’t coming in? Someone needs to look at both what is and isn’t coming in (Geotagging)
• Data vizualization is very important to making sense of what is coming in
• There is a lot of different data out there in different silos, texting, SM platforms, emergency reports, etc 
• Data should be public to be most effective, its time sensitive and may save lives (data could expire)

Question 3: Who is the first responder to emergency social data? Who should act on emergency social data?

• Use of volunteers is helpful to triage info
• There was a concern about legal responsibility, acts of omission and missed tweets
• Collaboration is essential between organizations and agencies
• Not a culture of sharing between agencies and orgs, which is the real problem

Question 4: Should aggregated emergency social data be open for all to see, and if so, how do you safeguard sensitive information?

• Aggregated data should be open to get the power of the crowds and eliminate silos
• The overall feeling is that if tradeoff is saving lives it should be open and that waiting for "permission" to share renders the information useless
• There is some interest in some sort of clearinghouse

Question 5: What about authentication of data, how do you determine if what you see is real?

• Videos and pictures carry more validity, location based reports can be triangulated with multiple reports and filtering (including crowd sourced filtering)
• In other words, trust but verify with GPS triangulation, multiple reports, and visualization tools

Question 6: What about interoperability? How does the chain between emergency report, aggregation and response work? 

• Coming up with data standards. People need to agree to share the data. It’s about people
• Standards need to be developed for exchanging data. For now we can create tagging standards and special metadata fields 

Question 7: How can we move away from a proprietary view of social data toward a more open-source solution that can evolve with the needs? 

• Some feel there will need to be a major failure before this can evolve.
• Most felt that data sho9uld be open, but that there would have to be some incentive, like only funding projects that create open data 
• We should think of scalable solutions that span multiple platforms and data centers to ensure reliability

This is the first part of our white paper on crisis response with social media. The second part will be completed after the summit, when we have analyzed all of the community's input and data.

White Paper: The Case for Integrating Crisis Response With Social Media

Please feel free to join us online for our Emergency Social Data Summit on Thursday, August 12, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM (ET). There are two ways to do this:

1) First is via U-Stream, which will be hosted on the NextGenWeb site (http://nextgenweb.org).  This U-Stream will be archived via The Emergency Social Data blog

2) Via Twitter and #crisisdata hashtag.  There will be a formal Twitter chat at 1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT featuring questions from @ntenhross and @ikepigott.  This is a great way for your voice to be heard and added to the Crisis Data wiki (http://crisisdata.wikispaces.com)

The American Red Cross is hosting the Emergency Social Data Summit to bring together government agencies, emergency management professionals, disaster response organizations, tech companies and concerned citizens to address how to reply to these digital requests for help more effectively. That means what you bring to this discussion is really important. So we've created a variety of ways we can all interact:

In addition to the above, in person attendees will update their observations and impressions via the Whrrl Emergency Social Data Society.  Feel free to join!

You can also add or comment on the Summit’s aggregated information via the Emergency Social Data Wiki

The Hall of Service at 1730 E Street at the American Red Cross National Headquarters is where our Emergency Social Data Summit will be held tomorrow. Part of a historic campus, the room has an elegant light to it. It seems like a place where great things can happen.

Our staff has been preparing the room for a couple days now. Yesterday, American Red Cross Social Media Manager Wendy Harman did a walk through.

We look forward to seeing all of you who are attending in person tomorrow. Thank you for coming the Summit!

A new American Red Cross survey shows many web users would turn to social media to seek help for themselves or others during emergencies—and they expect first responders to be listening. The online survey asked 1,058 adults about their use of social media sites in emergency situations.

It found that if they needed help and couldn't reach 9-1-1, one in five would try to contact responders through a digital means such as e-mail, websites or social media. If web users knew of someone else who needed help, 44 percent would ask other people in their social network to contact authorities, 35 percent would post a request for help directly on a response agency's Facebook page and 28 percent would send a direct Twitter message to responders.

Web users also have clear expectations about how first responders should be answering their requests. The survey showed that 69 percent said that emergency responders should be monitoring social media sites in order to quickly send help—and nearly half believe a response agency is probably already responding to any urgent request they might see.

And the survey respondents expected quick response to an online appeal for help -- 74 percent expected help to come less than an hour after their tweet or Facebook post.

"The first and best choice for anyone in an emergency situation is to call 9-1-1," said Gail McGovern, American Red Cross president and CEO. "But when phone lines are down or the 9-1-1 system is overwhelmed, we know that people will be persistent in their quest for help and use social media for that purpose."

The Red Cross commissioned the survey in advance of an Emergency Social Data Summit set for Thursday, August 12, in Washington, D.C. The meeting, convened by the Red Cross, will bring together thought leaders and experts in the government, social media, emergency response and the non-profit sectors to discuss better ways to handle information that flows through the web during disasters.

"The social web is creating a fundamental shift in disaster response one that will ask emergency managers, government agencies and aid organizations to mix time-honored expertise with real-time input from the public," McGovern said. "We need to work together to better respond to that shift."

The Red Cross survey also found that among web users, social media sites are the fourth most popular source for emergency information, just behind television news, radio and online news sites. More web users say they get their emergency information from social media than from a NOAA weather radio, government website or emergency text message system. One in five social media users also report posting eyewitness accounts of emergency events to their accounts.

This is the third in a series of posts which will frame the agenda for discussing the future of social data response to disaster at a summit in Washington D.C, on August 12, 2010.

Concurrent to the rise of social media and its inclusion into the newsgathering function, media services, individuals and organizations were taking collaboration to a new level. These groups weren’t just donating food and clothing, or taking a shift to work in a shelter during hurricane season, they were using the power of the Internet and its vast search and connective capabilities to make sense of information overload during crises and develop technology-based solutions to respond.

Media services used crowdsourcing to gather and disseminate data. Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon with powerful implications for crisis response. Defined as offering an open call for solutions to a problem, the concept has been successfully used for design challenges, communication and technology. Depending on the project, the “crowd” may or may not be compensated for their ideas. It is beginning to be used for news reporting, too. Spot.Us is an open source project in which the public can commission and participate with journalists on topics selected by the group. iReport is an initiative by CNN to add the voices of citizen journalists to news events. First visitors to the site see this disclaimer:

Welcome to iReport, where people take part in the news with CNN. Your voice, together with other iReporters, helps shape how and what CNN covers everyday. So you know: iReport is the way people like you report the news. The stories in this section are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post. Only ones marked 'CNN iReport' have been vetted by CNN.

A recent addition to aggregating mobile, social and location is Ushahidi, a platform that unifies data gathered from multiple sources (SMS, email, web) and distributes it onto a visual map or timeline. This technology was used to track the “Snowmaggedon” storm in Washington D.C. last winter as well as tracking the progress of voting in India and the movement of swine flu across a map area. Most notably, this technology is being used for post-crisis information in Haiti. It is an open-source platform, which allows developers to see behind the technology and build additional features upon it. The site is rich in documentation to allow users to customize it for specific tasks.

Proponents of this technology visualize how it can be used for humanitarian purposes. Patrick Philippe Meier, a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a director at Ushahidi, recently speculated on future use of this technology:

“In a way, by crisis mapping actionable information in near real-time and in the public domain, we are in effect trying to crowdsource response. This, by nature, is a distributed and decentralized process, hence difficult to track. The tracking challenge is further magnified when the actors in question are relief and aid organizations responding to a large disaster. As anyone who has worked in disaster response knows, communicating who is doing what, where and when is not easy. Responders don’t have the bandwidth to document which reports they’ve responded to on Ushahidi,” said Meier.

Individuals also launched collaboration efforts with great success. During Hurricane Katrina, Andy Carvin, who was mentioned earlier for citizen journalism, worked with a collaborative group of more than 3,000 volunteers to manually convert data that was being left on web sites about missing persons:

“People didn’t have the patience to wait to share that information and went to any web site to post comments. It was a mess when it came to structured data. A group of volunteers created an interchange format, similar to what the American Red Cross was using… and manually converted these to a data format and made it available,” said Carvin (July 22 interview).

Meanwhile, the “camp movement” began to emerge as a less structured and more open way to share information and learn about new technology. In the Washington D.C., area, numerous camps were started, each with a casual agenda, open speaker format and theme. Heather Blanchard, co-founder of Crisis Commons recalls a Transparency Camp, a Government 2.0 Camp, and finally, a Crisis Camp in September, 2009, which she organized with several others on the campus of George Washington University. It attracted 300 participants:

“As a result, the three search providers –Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were on a panel sponsored by The Sunlight Foundation. It was the first time they ever talked about what they were doing, as far as crisis response was concerned. Then they created Random Hacks of Kindness with World Bank,” said Blanchard (July 23 interview).

The “Random Hacks of Kindness” conference, held in November, 2009, in Mountain View, Calif., was a 48 hour event for software engineers who were ready to “hack for humanity” using their technical skills to devise community-based solutions. It was held concurrently in six countries; volunteers worked on coding solutions to problems and projects submitted to the group in advance. According to all reports, it was a huge success.

Blanchard, formerly with the Department of Homeland Security where she connected the department with new technology, was now part of a group called Crisis Commons, which had its genesis at the Crisis Camp event in 2009.

“A small band of idealists and innovators gathered to discuss the idea of a creating a common community through a mash-up of citizen volunteers, crisis response organizations, international humanitarian relief agencies, non-profits and the private sector. Within minutes, the Crisis Commons community was born and Crisis Camp events were created to unite communities, seek common ground and cultivate innovation in the use of technology for mobility and efficiency during crisis,” said Blanchard of the event.

Crisis Camps have evolved into both live and virtual events, which have spread to numerous cities throughout the world. The group organizes through a wiki, which has tools to report and participate in a crisis, as well as resources to start Crisis Camp in new communities.

The Haiti earthquake on January 12, 2010, put some of the collaborative efforts into high gear. This effort united developers, relief agencies and government departments to develop technologies to solve immediate needs. In this video, a participant talks about the day and the mass collaboration that occurred across six U.S. cities and eventually in the UK to help.

Eight working groups were formed to assist in different projects, including language translation, timelines, mobile applications, a crisis wiki, to name a few. Online media reported out on many facets of the effort, including a basic round up story; a feature on how the day was organized, a Twitter feed, and a piece focused on the resulting joint sessions with a London Crisis Camp group. This was a highly social group, who used the opportunity to communicate all facets of the day in diverse mediums. A working document and blog were also produced as well as a feature on the applications developed at the Crisis Camp Haiti event. During the Haiti Crisis Camp, one group developed a Creole dictionary and turned it into a mobile application, so any responder could use it from their mobile phone. Another group enabled standard street maps and overlaid information about current conditions; this also became a mobile application.

“Tweak the Tweet,” was developed for Haiti, too, using a new syntax developed with the hashtag indexing feature favored by Twitter users, but in a system making it easier for computers to read Tweets and extract data automatically based on the system.

Kate Starbird, a PhD student at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado had started to develop the idea of using syntax in social media during the “Random Hacks of Kindness” conference in 2009 and moved the idea into reality for use in Haiti.

We set up an account (on Twitter) and started tweeting the instructions. Then people (other Twitterers) volunteered to translate information into our format. We didn’t have back end of data collection down, but put our syntax out there in the hopes that it would help. The idea is to learn how to leverage all this information in the wake of an event and make sense of it. We are studying Natural Language Processing and talking about (social media) and we don’t yet have the computational solutions for the 140 character medium so “Tweak the Tweet” is sort of a patch. Meanwhile, if people can Tweet in this format, then computers can make sense of it,” said Starbird. (July 21 interview)

Another application that came out of Crisis Camp was We Have We Need which matches organizations with monetary donations through a simple web-based form using basic categories. Mass collaboration efforts continue through the Crisis Commons organization, which held the first International Crisis Congress in July, 2010, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the World Bank, indicating continued cooperation and maturation of the ideal of volunteerism in times of crisis. According to the Crisis Commons Web site:

This forum will explore lessons learned from CrisisCamp Haiti and CrisisCamp Chile and the opportunities and challenges of building a sustainable volunteer community whose mission is to use technology tools and expertise to aid communities in crisis.

Communities have come together often throughout our history to solve problems; this is another example where organizations from the public, private and nonprofit sector have cooperated.

As mainstream news media have embraced social media tools and technology for news gathering, there is a growing perception and practice that first responders can and do use the data from Twitter, SMS text messages and other services for a targeted response in times of crisis.

Journalists and concerned citizens are compounding this expectation with their quick and unencumbered response to crisis events. For instance, NPR’s Carvin took what he learned from the Yahoo Group he created after the 9/11 tragedy and expanded on it when a tsunami hit south Asia in 2004.  Within hours, he launched a blog, a wiki, and used e-mail lists and the power of a blogging network called “Global Voices Online” to power an information network that was largely driven by private citizens around the world. 

He, and others, have worked passionately since then to leverage technology options for events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav. For instance, by the time Gustav came ashore at Cocodrie, Louisiana in 2008, Carvin had helped to put together an information network that was powered by more than 500 volunteers.  They integrated Google maps with weather technology, listed evacuation routes and gave shelter locations.

“Emergency management agencies are so balkanized by their jurisdiction.  Basically, what we were doing was an end run around these organizations. This data is available, let’s put it to use, using free resources. I had no budget for this and we managed to put together a whole range of projects,” Said Carvin in an interview on July 22, 2010.

By 2008, technology was better able to allow for more accurate and faster information gathering, with the unusual side effect that individuals using social media began to “scoop” mainstream news outlets when disasters occurred. 

When an earthquake hit China in May, 2008, Robert Scoble, noted tech expert and customer advocate for Rackspace Hosting, reported the event on Twitter before the U.S. Geological Survey had recorded it on their web site and a full hour before the news hit CNN.  How could news from 5,000 miles away travel so quickly?  Scoble, who has more than 125,000 followers on Twitter and monitors its stream round-the-clock, was watching posts from friends in China and published a blog post about it within hours. 

Later that year, Twitter was hailed as a reputable source for breaking the news on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which took the lives of more than 150.  ZDNet author Jennifer Leggio said of the phenomenon:  “This is where social media grows up.”  The tech world was awash in news of how social media was evolving in this tragedy.  Computerworld aggregated reports from all areas of technology reporting, including Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch:

“Forget CNN ... People are giving first hand reports of what they’re seeing directly on Twitter. Flickr is another important information resource…..Twitter isn’t the place for solid facts yet - the situation is way too disorganized. But it’s where the news is breaking.” Wrote Arrington.

Similarly, social media led the way in coverage of violence and rioting in the lead-up to the Iranian elections in 2009.  YouTube videos posted by eyewitnesses fueled a firestorm of outrage against human rights atrocities. Yet the authenticity of the video news reports could not be verified, which led to the inability to respond to potential injuries during the unrest. 

By the time Haiti was rocked by a 7.0 earthquake in January, 2010, many of those stranded turned to blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to report news and appeal for help.  These tweets were posted on the day of the earthquake:

–"the hospital in Jacmel also seriously damaged and turning people away" – Posted by Twitter user Melindayiti around 8 AM ET.

–"Phones are working somewhat in Haiti. Can't get a hold of my family though." –  Posted byTwitter user zabelbok around 8:30 AM ET.

–"We are mobilizing resources and preparing plans to bring medical assistance to areas that have been hardest hit." – Posted around 1:30 AM by Twitter user PIH_Org, Partners in Health, Boston.

Excerpts from The Christian Science Monitor

Individuals also turned their own blogs into media outlets, reporting the situation on the ground:

“Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people." ----Posted at the Troy Livesay blog, from Port-au-Prince.

Weather disasters are now routinely reported in social media. On the Twitter Journalism site, which was founded by Craig Kanalley, founder of Breaking Tweets  and the Traffic and Trends Editor for Huffington Post, adverse weather and its effect is reported regularly.  This sample shows how a social technology like Twitter assisted during the tornados which touched down in Mississippi, killing ten, in April, 2010.

by pixelbell (Mississippi) “Deadly tornado close to me today (Yazoo City, MS). Sad for the devastation. Very grateful for @EricLawWLBT being on Twitter with warnings.” 25 Apr

Underpinning the use of social media as a news gathering tool is a community mind-set in which the spirit of giving is highly important.  This giving, combined with the maturation of the open source technologies, upon which many of these media are founded, has spawned a collaboration movement in which volunteers with a wide range of talents are ready, willing, and able to respond. 

However, this rapid form of communication and its resulting motivated participants, while compelling, is unfocused and not directed to an entity that can actually make a useful response.

This is the first in a series of posts which will frame the agenda for discussing the future of a social data response to disaster at a summit in Washington D.C, on August 12, 2010.

Social media and social technologies have altered communication patterns, particularly in times of disaster. The public has begun to rely on social media to share information during emergencies with family, friends and increasingly, with government and aid organizations who maintain social networking profiles. This has created an unexpected side effect—in which responding authorities and aid organizations are expected to be aware of and respond to emergency requests for help coming from such sources as Facebook, Twitter, and text messages. Additionally, there is a growing network of independent citizens who want to assist in  times of emergency, and they are using social media tools to organize and deliver aid.

The social web is creating a fundamental shift in disaster response that is asking emergency managers, government agencies, and aid organizations to mix their time-honored expertise with real-time input from the public. As of today, most of us are not yet ready to collect, respond or react to this incoming social data in a timely manner. The use of publicly available data in times or places of crisis raises issues of authenticity, privacy, veracity and ownership.  Responding to this challenge requires the collective input of government agencies, first responders, technology companies, public safety officials and the general public. Creating a process and system of response for this data is crucial for one compelling reason: we are seeing more and more headlines in which people have turned to social media channels as their first choice of communication during a crisis and we, as a response and aid community, must get ahead of this trend to remain effective.

 Here are just a few examples of how this trend is playing out in the real world.

“Girls trapped in storm drain use Facebook to call for help…instead of calling emergency services.” This story from a 2009 UK newspaper, recounts the story of two Australian girls, aged 10 and 12, who updated their Facebook status as a cry for help when they found themselves in a precarious situation.  Luckily for them, a schoolmate saw the status update and summoned aid. 

Another example came when an Atlanta city councilman who encountered a woman in trouble on the street in 2009; because his cell phone battery was low, he turned to Twitter. “Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson St. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet.” His actions are believed to have saved her life.

The frequency of stories like this accelerated into a virtual downpour after a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti in January, 2010.  A Canadian woman trapped in rubble after the quake, was rescued after her text message for help reached Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department and was relayed back to Canadian authorities on the ground.  The Canadian Foreign Affairs minister in his daily briefings told reporters “we know where this woman is, exactly.”

 The challenge of a rescue effort in such a poor country, combined with its geographic challenges, unfolded in the media in dramatic stories of success and failure. Not all the cries for help from social media channels had happy endings. Regine Madhere, a 27-year-old Haitian woman who was trapped in the rubble of the Port au Prince supermarket in which she worked, sent a text message to her cousin in France because she believed she heard rescue workers leaving the area.  The cousin then sent a tweet to the Red Cross Twitter account asking for help.

News organizations reported that multiple rescue workers from several countries worked round-the-clock for days to free Madhere and others, whose families kept vigil near the site. While a number of people were rescued from under the supermarket rubble, Madhere died before she, and many others, could be found.  (Related story.)

These stories carry a common thread:  a person in trouble turns to what they believe is the quickest way to get help. In these cases, and many more, they turned to their preferred new media tool.

This same social media technology has spawned numerous volunteer efforts in times of emergency, many of which have been instrumental in adding vital -- and accurate – information used to positive effect by first responders and decision makers. Beginning as early as September, 2001, Andy Carvin, senior social strategist at National Public Radio (NPR), put together a Yahoo Group within hours after the September 11 tragedy called “SEPT11INFO” and used volunteers spread throughout the city to make sense of rapidly changing information on threats, road conditions and personal safety. (Interview, July 22, 2010)

Another effort involved a team at Google, who coded a solution now called “Google Person Finder” in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, which was quickly coded, launched and operational.  Today’s technology offers endless possibilities and opportunities to aggregate data never before envisioned by our society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how social data affects societal expectation of aid and its impact on emergency response, explore current technologies and individuals who have made successful inroads in recent disasters, develop a plan to address this across the emergency spectrum, and create awareness of the cultural shift that is influencing all areas of disaster response today.