Emergency Social Data Summit

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.