My part of this effort on the release of the report is to comment on the potential impact of social media on the Whole Community effort that is center stage in FEMA's desire to transform our disaster response from purely a governmental one to that which includes all sectors and contributors to society.
The progression I've seen so far in the use of social media is as follows. Governments, typically individuals, become members of the social media community and start following the discussions that go on there and begin to find them helpful. They in turn have convinced their organizations to start contributing themselves. Social media sites are established and these organizations "push" information out via these networks. This behavior is akin to sending out news releases, but with a new way of releasing the information. The next step some organizations have taken is to begin to mine social media during emergencies and disasters for information on what is going on to increase their situational awareness. Twitter and Facebook being two tools that are used extensively. Getting to this stage can be incredibly difficult because of the resistance to trusting citizens and others to provide accurate reporting on events that they are observing and documenting with photos and video.
What I'd like to propose is the next stage in the development of social media is the incorporation of citizen response into that of the governmental response. This will take the Incident Command System and change a portion of it to the Incident "Direction" System as governments and Incident Commanders tell the public what they can do to assist in the response from where they are located. The truth of the matter is that people are already self-organizing to help in the disaster response using social media tools. This has included mapping the response, identifying people in need of rescue, and organizing response activities like sandbagging for flood events. Even without government direction they are contributing to the disaster response and recovery efforts.
Government does not have the resources needed to be everywhere at once and to meet every need. In the current economic downturn government capability has dwindled and may atrophy even more in the next several years. There are those in the emergency response community, I'm guessing the first responders, who will say that this is their work and it is up to the "professionals" to respond. In reality we see the history of emergency response going full circle. In the beginning there were no first responders. it was up to the citizens to band together to protect life, limb and property. Along the way we professionalized the emergency response. Still today there is a huge number of volunteer fire departments across our nation that provide the protective services to their communities.
It is not only the residents of a community who can be incorporated in the to "Whole Community" effort. There are businesses and nonprofits who are also part of the social fabric who can be positively leveraged to help with a disaster response and recovery. What they need is direction on what types of help is needed, where it is needed and who else to coordinate with on the delivery of goods and services. Governments can use social media to provide that direction. A key element is to also provide information that keeps these social media responders safe if they are going to a disaster scene. It is an aspect that should not be forgotten. I'm not advocating that untrained personnel show up at a HAZMAT incident and only add to the casualties.
Together we can make a huge difference by working as a team. Leveraging all resources in a community by using social media is one way to turn the corner on bringing new capabilities to bear in emergencies and disasters. We need to look for ways to be more inclusive when it comes to using available assets--social media can help in those efforts.
See Kim's introduction to the report below. I encourage you to download it and learn from what people shared at that event.
Post by: Kim Stephens
Last March the first "Social Media for Emergency Management Camp" took place in conjunction with the mid-year NEMA conference in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. There were many objectives for the camp, but the overarching goal was simply to gather people together who were interested in discussing the impact social media and emerging technologies are having on the response community as a whole. Heather Blanchard, in a stroke of genius, recommended that we enlist the aid of a volunteer research team, led by Dr. Clarence Wardell of CNA, to document the effort. CNA, is "a non-profit institution that conducts high-level, in-depth research and analysis to inform the important work of public sector decision makers".
The team listened to our discussions as we organized the camp, captured the data from the camp itself (including tweets from actual and virtual participants), and then researched the topic in-depth, as evidenced by their 74 cited references. The result of their effort is an in-depth analysis on the role of social media in the realm of emergency management and its potential as a transformative technology. The 46 page report is entitled: "2011 Social Media + Emergency Management Camp: Transforming the Response Enterprise".
In the report, Dr. Wardell et al. outline three major findings from camp discussions and catalog six recommendations they felt would need to be implemented in order to close the gap between the current state of social media usage for emergency management and the desired state. The authors do not necessarily identify who should be closing this gap--in some instances the "who" could refer to researchers (e.g. "establishing a baseline on social media usage via a survey of domestic EM agencies"); in other instances "who" could be the SMEM community itself.
