With all the opportunities that we enjoy from the use of the Internet in terms of connecting people, how can we streamline the open source information to build an effective early warning system to counteract disasters, such as flood, around the world?
Hi, we have worked on this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233731492_SANF_National_warning_system_for_rainfall-induced_landslides_in_Italy
exploiting autoritative data coming from the national civil protection department. However I know that in italy and in other part of the word there are voluntary networks of people that measure rainfal and other meteo data that can be used to buld a similar system using this sort of "open data" (an example from italy: http://retemeteo.lineameteo.it/index.php )
Conference Paper SANF: National warning system for rainfall-induced landslides in Italy
Thank you very much Ivan. I will review the link and get back to you. Thank you very much.
Social media has become ubiquitous in our society and its use is capable of generating significant amounts of data during disasters and mass disruption events. Some social media platforms like Twitter have increasingly become an important tool for people affected by these types of events to share or try to report on what has occurred, is occurring or to seek help or assistance from others. Public safety officials have recognised that this type of information and interaction on social media could potentially enhance their level of situational awareness and support their decision making process. Despite this recognition, public safety officials are still struggling to develop a broadly accepted methodology for capturing critical information from social media and then integrate that information into public safety communications and incident management systems. To date the impact analysis of social media during a disaster has had a limited discussion on how this capability can be integrated into the public safety communications and operational environment.
During a disaster social media use can grow rapidly and has the potential to overwhelm officials in a similar fashion to the sudden surge of calls to public safety answering points. A failure to filter effectively will significantly limit the success and potentially lead to the failure of a social media initiative. For example during the 2012 floods in Queensland the Queensland Police Service Facebook likes grew from 17,000 to 100,000 in the peak 24 hour period and it generated 39 million post impressions which equates to 450 post views per second. One day after the 2011 great earthquake in Japan over half a million new Twitter accounts were created and over 177 million tweets were sent at a rate of 1,200 tweets per minute. Similarly, during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand there were approximately 7,500 tweets per hour.
There is also the challenge of developing approaches that are suitable for local, national and international systems. Similarly there is a high level of variability in the penetration of mobile devices and digital literacy between the developing world and the developed world.
Advances in smartphone technology and novel apps for example weather sensors show a lot of promise for supplementing authoritative data sources and I believe that role of apps has to be part of the conversation when discussing social media.
We are also seeing the rise of digital volunteerism be that in the development of crisis maps and virtual operational support teams. These types of initiatives have a lot of potential to help support, public safety officials during all phases of emergency management; however, there are still a number of organisational cultural boundaries that need to be addressed.
We are doing a lot of research in relation to the use of social media disasters here at the University of Melbourne at the Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety see. www.cdmps.org.au Please let me know if you are interested in any collaborative projects on this topic.
You might be interested in having a look at some of the papers that Sarah Vieweg has written or look at the work of Patrick Meier form UN OCHA.
Regards
Ged Griffin
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