NGIS Australia is leading a project to investigate ways that social media could be used by government and other agencies in the event of an emergency.
Emergency 2.0 seeks to deliver a practical, high profile showcase of how traditional, controlled information can be complemented with unstructured, self-organising information created by civilians before, during and after an emergency.
The project is being led by Maurits van der Vlugt, NGIS’ Principal Consultant and one of Australia’s leaders in the design and implementation of interoperable spatial information.
He is joined by NGIS’ Lead Solutions Architect Graeme Browning, who is charged with conducting the Leading and Emerging Practice review as part of the project.
Emergency services, the ABC, online businesses, government agencies and members of the Gov2.0 Task force met earlier this month in a roundtable discussion, ‘Emergency 2.0 Australia: Geospatial and social media making a difference’ to discuss ways agencies can support and leverage established social networks and how issues surrounding legitimacy, accuracy and access to these networks can be addressed.
The effectiveness of communications between government agencies and the community became the subject of intense debate following the Black Saturday bushfire tragedy that destroyed thousands of homes throughout Victoria in late January and February 2009.
Maurits van der Vlugt says the event provided some insights into how people prefer to communicate with one another when they need to distribute important information quickly.
“During the Victorian bushfires, we saw the emergence of the use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies by the community for crowd sourcing and sharing information about fires, threats and evacuations,” Maurits said.
“People are increasingly turning to networks like Twitter, Facebook and Mapping Mash-ups as their preferred source of everyday information - so there is a golden opportunity for the emergency service agencies to use the power of crowd sourcing and add a ‘human intelligence” dimension to emergency communication strategies.
“Using social media networks and infrastructure as an additional way to get critical information out to the affected community in near real-time enables fast and easy ways to reach out to communities,” he said.
“There is no doubt that in future emergencies, this phenomenon will be even bigger, and will play a pivotal role in emergency information management, parallel to the traditional channels provided by the emergency agencies and services.”
Maurits has authored several articles on these subjects, including articles on “Customising Google Earth” and “Dispelling the Myths around Web Services”, and taught “Customising GIS for the Web” at the University of Redlands (USA).
To learn more, visit the Project website at http://gov2em.net.au