Crisis Information Management: A Primer

Sanjana Hattotuwa

TED FellowSenior Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation

sri lanka: complex political emergencypost-war, not post-conflict

sri lanka: sudden onset emergency

30,000+ dead in a couple of minutes

haiti: sudden onset emergency

points to ponder

• Are new technologies and ICTs more helpful in dealing with sudden-onset natural disasters / acts of God as opposed to acts of men & women?

• Why are you here? Is technology a standalone panacea or an enabler to thought-leaders?

• In 1981, John Postel he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”

• Is this a mantra for organisational change? Technology design? Technical architecture? Process?

social media

what is social media?

• Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many).

• It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. (Wikipedia)

what is new media?

• New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies.

• New media is not television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications. (Wikipedia)

• But increasingly, old media is leveraging the web, Internet and mobiles in generating and disseminating news and information.

disaster is a growth industry

social media landscape in 2011

social media landscape today

+

plus.google.com

Social Media IM foundations

• Blogs

• Social networks (Twitter, Facebook)

• Mobiles: SMS to social networking sites, mobile photography and video

• Wired (ADSL) and wireless broadband (3G etc)

• Greater access, also in vernacular

• Lower transactional cost (cost per SMS, subscription for ADSL, cost per dongle, data subscriptions)

what’s new

• Ubiquity of two way communications

• Addressable peoples, even those who IDPs or refugees

• Both news generation and dissemination leverages new media

• Disintermediated models vs. traditional media model

• Citizens as producers

• Low resolution content broadcast on high definition media

new media based content generation

• Glocal information – what is local anymore?

• Information agents are rapid moving, transnational

• A person in Boston can report on activities in Port au Prince who sources his information from someone in Les Cayes via SMS, who goes on to plot it on a map that helps someone from New York to deploy aid via a request made over the web to someone in Rome

• Models of news gathering and trust are changing

old information model

Event / Issue / Victim

Journalist

Consumer Mainstream

media

Policy making

new information models

Event / Issue / Victim

Journalist

Consumer Citizen media

Mainstream media

Consumer

Policy making

the revolution

First responders/ UN Victim

First responders/ UN

Victim / Witness

Open systems

Closed systems No agency

Enhanced agency

the revolution

Media Consumer

MediaConsumer / Witness / Producer

Information as a conversationKnowledge through curation

Information as a package

Passive

Active / Reactive

power of sms

• “My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilogrammes of food. You must help.”

• Humble SMS text messages from refugees could become an effective SOS for millions whose voices are so rarely heard.

power of sms: post tsunami

• The web is littered with examples on how SMS helped in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

• “I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers tossed onto the road. Scary shit.”

• “Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive.”

• “Made contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying people all day.”

• “Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands.”

what is out there?

Leverage crowd mapsBounded, geo-fenced models help contextualise unbounded, larger inputs

crisis in darfur: using google earthhttp://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur

mainstream media: all use crowdsourced media

bombings in london

• 7 July 2005

• Within 24 hours, the BBC had received 1,000 stills and videos, 3,000 texts and 20,000 e-mails.

“saffron revolution” in myanmar, 2007

• 100,000 people joined a Facebook group supporting the monks

• No international TV crews allowed in the country

• Mobile phone cameras were the first footage of the monks protest

• Blogs from Rangoon were the only sources of information

• The junta shut down all Internet and mobile communications

burma vj: reporting from a closed country

the ‘green revolution’: post-election Iran, 2009

the ‘green revolution’: post-election Iran, 2009

• Social media played three very important roles in the Iran situation:

1.It helped Iranians communicate with each other.

2.It helped Iranians communicate with the outside world.

3.It helped the rest of the world communicate with both Iranians and others who sympathize with the protesters.

• YouTube and Flickr brought multimedia out of the distressed country. Twitter and Facebook updates have spread videos virally. Blogs, Wikipedia, and citizen journalism have helped disseminate and filter this information. Most of all though, these tools have helped people take action.

reliefwebhttp://www.reliefweb.int

irinhttp://www.irinnews.org

OCHA COD / FOD repositoryhttp://www.irinnews.org

humanitarian early warning servicehttp://www.hewsweb.org/home_page/default.asp

prevention webhttp://www.preventionweb.net/english

reuters alertnethttp://www.trust.org/alertnet

crisis information management wikishttp://wiki.ict4peace.org/Pakistan-Floods

mental health and psychosocial supporthttp://mhpss.net

haiti earthquake, january 2010http://haiti.ushahidi.com

local effortshttp://www.local.com.pk

google resource finderhttp://pakistan.resource-finder.appspot.com/?&lang=ur

google maps

google news

google reader: a web based RSS reader

getting updates: google crisis responsehttp://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

social networking: facebook600 million+ users

case study: mumbai bomb blastsNovember 2008

Flickr: first images of the attackshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/vinu/sets72157610144709049

Wikipedia: first narratives of the attackshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks

Wikipedia: first narratives of the attackshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks

400+ edits / updates

100+ authors

Less than 24 hours after first attack

Getting updates: twittering the attackshttp://spy.appspot.com

curating content

curated content

curated content akin to selecting the best produce

curating crowdsourced information

• Buying fruits of vegetables

• Check price

• Weigh it in one’s hands

• Look at it from all angles

• Look at it in context

• Look at a few, not just one

• Discard if old

• Be suspicious if it looks too good

• Ascertain location where it was produced

• Curating crowdsourced information

• Check authorship

• Check for veracity, quality

• Is it accurate, fair, topical?

• What is the bias? Is it progressive?

• Select a few from many sources

• Discard if out-dated information is presented

• Be cautious of unverified information and breaking news

• Is the producer local or foreign?

UN and crisismapping

awareness never 100% accurate, or complete

Trust&

Veri*iable&

Satis&icing*situational&awareness&

what’s satisficing?

• Satisficing, (satisfy with suffice), is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution.

• A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.

• The word satisfice was coined by American political scientist Herbert Simon in 1956.

situational awareness today

Situational Awareness / Response

Traditional media

Citizen journalism / Digital, web based media / Crowdsourced information

Trusted intelligence from UN system

some key differences between crisismapping and UN platforms

UNAgency focusedInward lookingGenerally verified UN Agency produced or trusted sourceInformation products range from internal & confidential to externalProprietary data formats and systemsLittle systemic interoperabilityHard to learn

CrisismappingCrowd sourced informationOutward lookingVerifiability an option, not defaultDesigned for scalabilityOpen source / Open data standardsInformation products generally external, declassifiedPotential of interoperability highEasier to learnWider ownership

crisismapping and UN: conflict or collaboration?UN IASC Common Operational Datasets

Humanitarian)profile)

Popula0on)sta0s0cs)

Administra0ve)boundaries)

Populated)places)

Transporta0on)network)

Hydrology)

Hypsography)

crisismapping and UN: conflict or collaboration?Strengthening Common Operational Datasets

Popula'on)of)UN)CODs)

Crisismapping)pla5orms)and)crowdsourced)data)

APIs)

APIs)

Clusters)

Crisis)

Disaster)

• CODs&• Crowdsourced&informa3on&at&community&level&(in&vernacular)&

• Remote&sensing&data&

Preven3on&&&Risk&Reduc3on&

• Oneresponse&et#al&and&updated&CODs&

• Crowdsourced&ground&truths&via&crisismapping&plaAorms&

• Feedback&to&vic3ms&(e.g.&Project&4636&and&CDAC&in&Hai3)&

Response&• Community&owned&and&driven&recovery&plaAorms&

• UN&systems&(e.g.&UNDP&plaAorms)&

• Systems&established&by&government&

Recovery&

Libya Crisis Map: Model for progress?

Some enduring challengesTweets from ICCM 2010

challenges

• Concept of failing forward missing. Everyone parading what worked, but more imp to know - what failed, why?

• Heard first cursory mention of ethics amidst overwhelmingly technocratic perspectives. Good. Need to flesh out.

• No recognition of (geo) politics and US strategic interests in use & availability of tech. Compare Haiti, Pakistan & Myanmar in '08

• A bigger disaster than Haiti, Pakistan had comparably little of this tech, volunteerism and focus. Why?

challenges

• Surprisingly everyone seems to believe crowdsourcing is good, and is only used for good. Context, content, creator, consumer absent

• At risk of sounding Rumsfeldian, why don't we know what we should know? Core datasets vital for community resilience and response

• Trust is mutable, relative, contextual, locally defined, gendered, framed by identity, inter alia.

• Conflict is seen as negative. Conflict can also be progressive, creative, life giving process.

challenges

• Impartial, accurate coverage still vital, increasingly hard to ascertain

• Torrent of information. Trickle of knowledge.

• Veracity hard to determine

• Pace of technology development hard to keep pace with

• Nature of violence, partisan bias, citizenship, governance structures, public institutions heavily influence crowdsourcing.

• Crowdsourced HR or election violations mapping with volunteers from perpetrator party/tribe/ethnicity? Proceed with caution

• Volunteerism undergirding stand-by crowdsourcing good, but what about CPE's, where personal bias can deeply influence curation?

• Related to last tweet, volunteerism works better for sudden onset natural disasters, which are also mediagenic

enduring challenges with crisismapping and crowdsourcing

how and who do we trust?abduction of a gay girl of damascus. or so we thought.

Tom MacMaster, 40 year old American

http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com Jelena Lecic, of London

A lesbian in DamascusAnd other tall tales

DisinformationMisinformationPartial accountsGaming the systemGender imbalance (e.g. rape reports in DRC)Lack of access leads to challenges in verificationMultiple retweets mistaken for authenticityAnonymity online (esp. post-Norwegian terrorist attack)Machine translation / Lack of translationLittle or no direct access TraumaAnxietyFearPersecutionNetwork infiltration and disruptionTrust perceptions and authority markersBias in mainstream mediaBias in citizen media

two key effects of information overload

• Continuous partial attention, Linda Stone, Microsoft, 1997. With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.

• The immediate altruistic response rapidly diminishes over time (Melissa Brown, associate director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2010) Our brains release congratulatory hits of dopamine when we engage in selfless behaviour — which we’re moved to do the instant we witness something awful.

two key effects of information overload

two key effects of information overload

The new violenceData loss is lives lost

organisational hr & financial costs

Skilled / Paid

Easy / Free

Skilled / Free

Google Maps

Google Moderator

Curated Twitter

Facebook

Google Reader

Google News

Wordpress

IBM ManyEyes Ustream

Flickr

Open Data statistics

Timetoast

Wordle

Flash based infoviz

Easy / Paid

Wordpress VIP

Facebook Ads Flickr Pro

Vimeo

YouTube

Bundlr Storify

thank yousanjanahattotuwa@ict4peace.org