Vacuum

crisis informatics, or the study of community emergency response

The "crisis informatics" (Google search) term is new to me, but the research I've been able to find under that term is familiar.  Faced with an unexpected crisis situation that is bigger than what the mainstream media and existing government organizations can easily manage the news flow from, how do communities response in emergency situations with social media and with ad hoc emergency response systems?

Without going into lots of detail I do want to share one recent paper that caught my eye, via Leysia Palen: Backchannels on the Front Lines: Emergent Uses of Social Media in the 2007 Southern California Wildfires.

Opportunities for participation by members of the public are expanding the information arena of disaster.  Social media supports “backchannel” communications, allowing for wide-scale interaction that can be collectively resourceful, self-policing, and generative of information that is otherwise hard to obtain. Results from our study of information practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California Wildfires suggest that community information resources and other backchannel communications activity enabled by social media are gaining prominence in the disaster arena, despite concern by officials about the legitimacy of information shared through such means. We argue that these emergent uses of social media are pre-cursors of broader future changes to the institutional and organizational arrangements of disaster response.

The term "crisis informatics" is credited to Christine Hagar (2006).  If you do a proper retrospective look at the phenomenon without that term, you unearth previous discussion of the use of the net for responses in the Kobe and Northridge earthquakes, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and various power outages and ice storms.  A proper retrospective bibliography awaits someone else's project.

Related articles

Social Media in Emergency Management: The Digital Public Information Officer

records request: ann arbor downtown development authority parking data

update: broken links fixed to interview, thanks John Balogh for the heads up

as sent by postal mail and email

March 14, 2009

 

Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority
150 South Fifth Avenue
Suite 301
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

 

     RECORDS REQUEST

 

Dear Records Request Officer:

 

Pursuant to the state open records act, I request access to and copies of the continuously updated information about the current availability of parking structure occupancy and free spaces, as currently provided to the general public on the web page

http://www.a2dda.org/parking__transportation/available_parking_spots/

For your reference, this system is described in this interview

http://www.homelessdave.com/tt20080411stephensmith.htm

conducted by Mr. David Askins of the Ann Arbor Chronicle, in which a representative of a contractor for the DDA says:

"SS: Oh, okay! Yeah, no, I haven't had a lot of time to pay attention to our statistics yet, but I will at the end of this month. It just rolled out April 1st. Our area associations, I imagine, are going to want to embed this--and we encourage them to--in their own webpages. For instance, Main Street Area Association, and State Street Area Association. There are a lot of them, these associations and other organizations, who could really benefit from it, especially if you're going to have an event, you're telling your attendees to come downtown. "

Despite these assurances, our current requests are met with this error message:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /parking__transportation/available_parking_spots/
on this server.

---

Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 mod_jk/1.2.20 PHP/5.2.1 Server at a2dda.org Port 80

.

 

I am willing to pay up to a maximum of $20 in fees associated with the fulfillment of this request.

As the release of this data is in the public interest - indeed, is within the primary goal and charter of the DDA - I ask that these fees be waived.

 

If my request is denied in whole or part, I ask that you justify all deletions by reference to specific exemptions of the act.

 

Thank you for your assistance.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Edward Vielmetti

mobile meeting notes and mobile social networks

You're at a meeting, somewhere, and you want to quietly and unobtrusively take meeting notes or some other record of the meeting while it's happening, and you have a mobile phone but nothing else.

What tool or application do you use?

Mobile twitter.  Twitter your short notes out to the world, or use a direct message to some bot of some kind that collects and gathers the notes for you.   Twitter's mobile interface is fast, simple, and reasonably complete.  Down side: no easy way to look up something about the person who just introduced themselves.

Mobile Facebook.  Write on the wall of people (or your own wall) as notes come up, and then somehow reconstruct it afterwards.  The people search tool is very handy for looking folks up on the fly, and you can send someone a followup about some question while you're still at the event.  Down side: Slow enough that if people are moving fast you don't keep up.

Mobile wiki (Socialtext Miki).  Keep notes on a scratch pad on a wiki that you edit on your mobile device. A perfectly good text input box and it makes refining your notes into something longer very easy (and you can go back and figure out more about what you missed).    Down side: no lookup on the fly, so if you fumble someone's name you can't look it up.

Other mobile contact network and social network managers - both Plaxo and LinkedIn have mobile versions, and I haven't tried to figure out how to use those while standing up and listening to be a bit more informed.

Notable here is that there isn't a single Google mobile tool in the arsenal.  The Blackberry native mail client is better than the Google Mail java client, and almost anyone can have a text box open, but if there's a mobile Orkut then my world of people doesn't use it.

If I had two hands free to do this I probably would have used delicious as a part of the process - I've gone to a bunch of lecture or seminar type events where my pattern is to google what the speaker says and delicious the results, and if the net is fast enough where that is you can almost do that in close enough to real time to keep up.   But that's too much and too rude to do in anything other than a lecture situation.

Paper has some tremendous uses here - one recent event I went to I used some of Dave Gray's visual thinking skills that he's taught and put into his new book and did things like sketch what the speakers were wearing in addition to taking notes on what they were saying.   I have a much clearer visual memory of that event, but I don't remember anyone's names.

A work in process to be sure.  There were 11 tables full of people, and I got almost everyone's names, and didn't quite catch everything I hoped to catch; thanks everyone for lunch.  The conclusion of the question at the table - would you buy a car from a bankrupt auto company? - is that most people would be worried about service and availability of maintenance and parts, and that a Cuban mechanic would be someone to keep in your rolodex, and that if the worst happens at least we can look forward to an expanded orphan car show in Ypsi.

Wiki analytics: using the new Google Analytics tools to measure and improve a civic wiki

This is part of the Wiki Wednesday and coincidentally also part of the Web Analytics Wednesday series.

UPDATE: changed throughout, some spots still not filled in, I am promising some graphs; want to work in the RichmondWiki blog notes as well.

UPDATE2: analytics for wiki edit failure

Google Analytics has a bunch of new features.  Mediawiki, the code that runs Arborwiki, has Google Analytics installed and is tracking user behavior to help improve the quality and relevance of the content that's there.  Here's some applications of the new features.

1.  Segmentation by geography.

Arborwiki covers information about Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and the surrounding Washtenaw County area.  One reasonable segmentation of the readership and contributor base is to see how people from inside the area behave compared to people from outside the area.

...

(graph)

We'll break down usage for specific pages and see how they differ.  First, look at traffic coming from Wikipedia - how does it compare to everything else?

(graph)

Next, look at the most popular page, the "birthday deals" page, who is seeing that?

(graph)

A further refinement will look at how much birthday deal traffic is coming from surrounding suburbs, e.g. Oakland County. 

2.   Conversion tracking: who edits a page.

We have set up the idea that a page edit is a success criterion and a conversion goal.  More page edits, the better.  Please contribute.

There are at least two end states: a page is edited that didn't exist before, or a person edits a page (because they linked to something that wasn't there) and it was abandoned.  That's a failure condition and a sign that the wiki is incomplete in that specific area.  So we set up reports to look for pages where people are editing the page but it shows up as the exit page, which implies that someone left the page in mid-edit

The method:

• segment by page includes "action=edit"
• top content report (or perhaps
• show "exit rate"
• the higher the exit rate for edits, the more people bailed out; look to improve anything that's red?

(graph)

(report)

3.  ...

...

(quote from Avinash)
(quote from ...)

...

You can overthink a civic wiki; until there's a critical mass of content, report generation is not that much good.  So don't stare at your metrics until you have some idea that there's enough there to work from - a map of the holiday light shows (Richmond Wiki), the great places to go for a birthday dinner (Arborwiki), [your favorite civic wiki's favorite page].

----

More on this topic:

Web Analytics Wednesday meets worldwide: ...
Wiki Wednesday meets worldwide ...
Other civic wikis: RichmondWiki

Great Wall of Panera: what do corporate cafe wifi networks block?

Quite a few cafe networks have filters set up to block various kinds of use.  My usual failure modes with these are that they mark perfectly reasonable internet services as inappropriate.

Here's a litany of Panera complaints, to give you a feel for it.

Tinotopia was blocked for a while, which got the author riled up enough to document some of the failures.  No entries since April 2005:

In this case, Tino of all people is the loser: for he has once again been suckered into coming into Panera only to find that the network is kaput. The network here is now well and truly down more than it’s up, at least when I’m here. It’s even more kaput than usual today, too.

TinyURL.com is blocked by Panera Bread, notes Technology Evangelist :

I can understand Panera choosing to block porn sites, since it could be disturbing for customers to glance over to see a neighboring table watching porn while they're trying to enjoy some bread bowl chowder.

But why is TinyURL.com banned? Why not just block inappropriate sites that people may be trying to access after being redirected from TinyURL.com?

BookOfJoe documents the Panera Blocked Site Hack:

I remarked Saturday on the fact that I couldn't access bookofjoe on my local Panera's WiFi because it was blocked.

Reader Benjamin Tung of the great state of Michigan confirmed shortly thereafter that the Italian–American corporate version of the Chinese firewall is up and functioning in a similar fashion at his local branch of the sandwich/bakery chain.

Benjamin wrote, "Don't make me choose between the cinnamon raisin bread and reading your blog."

The solution is as simple as it is perfect, and should work nearly anywhere.

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=http://www.bookofjoe.com/

translates bookofjoe.com from english to english via $GOOG.  hey presto.  Replace the URL as needed, and bonus points for the next step of turning this into Greasemonkey or your favorite bookmark tool.

Interview with Dave Sommerness, GovDelivery COO

The City of Ann Arbor has started an email-based delivery service for changes and updates to the city's web site run by GovDelivery.  I contacted Dave Sommerness, a University of Michigan graduate and their COO, to find out more.

How did your organization get started, and who was your first customer?

GovDelivery, Inc. was started in 1999 by our two co-founders, CEO Scott Burns and EVP of Sales Zach Stabenow.  We developed the GovDelivery Digital Subscription Management system in 2000 in collaboration with the City of St. Paul, who had a need for reliable communication with its residents.  We found this need to be pervasive across public sector organizations, and it's taken off quite well from there.

Government web sites are built with all kinds of technologies.  How do you manage the process so that it all looks the same to the user?

We integrate with client sites by simple links on their web pages.  The effect is seamless because we customize our web and email templates to match the look-and-feel of each client.  Behind the scenes GovDelivery is deployed as a multi-tenant, SaaS system, so Ann Arbor is using the same basic application as our other clients.

The service I signed up for was an email based one.  What are your plans for looking at web 2.0 technologies for notification, e.g. using something like Twitter to do messaging?

We're always looking forward to new technologies and applications to our system/market.  A couple years ago we added RSS capability, so our clients can publish their messages as RSS feeds in addition to sending them out through email.  We've seen a lot of excitement in our market over Web 2.0 technologies, so we're developing functionality to take advantage of that and promote more options for communication and collaboration between government and citizens.  A few examples of Web
2.0 notification that we already support include automatically posting messages to blogs, updating a Facebook page, and using public RSS feeds to publish bulletins to widgets.

Do you work with libraries as part of your business, and if so, can you share some good stories from those implementations?

The majority of our experience has been with government bodies - from small cities and counties up to the largest federal departments - and transit authorities, though we have some experience with education,
non-profits, and other organizations.  We work with a number of libraries, mainly through city accounts, but the most notable stand-alone library account is the Library of Congress.

What makes St. Paul a good place to run this business from, and not Silicon Valley or Washington, DC?

Good business is about good people, and there's a great pool of talent in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. We're one of the fastest growing software companies in the area, which attracts talented people and helps us to retain and keep them challenged.  We don't have the issues that Silicon Valley has where folks are more apt to jump to the next flavor of the day.  Because of the density of clients in D.C., we do maintain a sales office and staff there, which we plan to grow as the business does.

Who do you root for when Michigan plays Minnesota?

I grew up a Bulldog hockey fan in Duluth - the Gophers were big rivals, so it's been tough for me to become a fan of any of their teams.  The real dilemma for me would be if Michigan ever played UMD in hockey.

--

Thanks Dave!

November 8, 2008: Podcamp Michigan

Now you know just about as much as I know.

Web site: Podcamp Michigan
Twitter feed: Podcamp Michigan

140 characters or less: Saturday, Nov 8, Free Unconference for bloggers, podcasters, and all fans of new media.

Venue: November 8th , 2008, 9-4 at Embassy Suites Hotel, 28100 Franklin Road, Southfield, MI
Hotel phone: (248) 350-7007

DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE, OR QUIET ENJOYMENT

yes, yes, yes, just let me in.  now what exactly did I agree to?

=Terms of Use=

*Lotsa Helping Hands, LLC* ("Lotsa Helping Hands") welcomes you to its web site
(the "web site"). On this web site, Lotsa Helping Hands makes available to you
its Internet service for helping others along with information, software,
documents, communications, files, text, graphics, publications, content, tools,
forums, resources and links to other web sites.

the particular bizarre clause is

IN ADDITION, EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY PROVIDED OTHERWISE, LOTSA HELPING HANDS AND ITS AFFILIATES, PARTNERS AND SPONSORS DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE, OR QUIET ENJOYMENT.

The "quiet enjoyment" clause refers roughly to your right to live in an apartment undisturbed; I have no clue what it's doing inside an online services agreement.

Quiet Enjoyment

(more after the jump)

Coping with community growth

The a2b3 meeting today at Eastern Accents had 26 or so, again filling as many tables as we could manage to reasonably fill.  I asked the question "How do you keep your calendar" and got a full round of answers, as many as you would ever need.

The meeting is at the edge of what the venue can handle, but I want to keep inviting new people to it (every Thursday; you're invited).   So somehow there needs to be a growth strategy that absorbs new people in but that doesn't expect all 280 people on the email list to show up weekly because I know that they never would fit.

 

How do you cope with community growth?  In particular, if you have an organization that has regular meetings and it outstrips the capabilities of its venue, what do you do to keep it going?  Some ideas.

1.  Hold the meeting more frequently.  If the monthly meeting is full every time, do a second event on alternate weeks.  This is what movie theaters do with popular films (matinees, midnight films, 10a showings) or what busy religious congregations do.

2.  Move the meeting from place to place.  Some people will come if it's convenient enough, so if you move from place to place you'll get a variety of people attending who wouldn't otherwise because it's incrementally less convenient.  Motor City Connect has ten meetings in eight cities around the Detroit area every month, with the idea that it's going to be somewhere close to you some time.

3. Let the group subdivide laterally, with some part of the original collection of people doing something related at a different place and a different time.  The a2b3 group spawned (in some sense) the microcoworking group, which started with one day and has expanded to three days at three different locations.

4.  Raise the bar for participation, so that your community grows more slowly.  At an extreme, you get new member initiation rituals that approach hazing, and so anyone who wants to stick around really wants to stick around; at the extreme, this coupled with no new member recruitment gives you groups that stop growing and start to grow old with the same people there every time.

5. Grow into different forms, e.g. take an offline group and put it online, or take an online group on one community platform and add it to another community platform.  a2b3 has a very strong and functional mailing list, so people don't have to be at the meetings to post a job offering or get bike repair recommendations or locate a trusted network security auditor (to give but three examples).

6.  Use one group to bootstrap the creation of a new group, and then pull your energy out of the first group.  In a religious setting this would be a splinter church, and just by that very name you get some sense at some possible social friction that would result. 

7.  Move your focus from local groups to national or global ones, and grow a community of practice globally rather than just locally.  Wiki Wednesday meets on the first Wednesday of the month worldwide; the Web Analytics Wednesday group coordinates Wednesday meetings worldwide.  The local meeting is probably still local, but it's part of a bigger world.

Some of these growth strategies yield more managable growth; others recognize that groups might just reach a happy steady state where you don't really want to multiply your size. 

beer, barbeque, urban alienation and intranets

some interesting research from Marcus Foth in Australia about community networking; any paper that cites " Intranets and Local Community: 'Yes, an intranet is all very well, but do we still get free beer and a barbeque?' " is OK by me.

Participation, Animation, Design: The PAD Approach to Urban Community Networking

Foth, Marcus (2007) Participation, Animation, Design: The PAD Approach to Urban Community Networking. AI & Society.

This is the latest version of this eprint.

Full text available as:
PDF (author-version) - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.

Abstract

Theories of networked individualism and forms of urban alienation challenge the continued purpose and relevance of conventional community tools in urban neighbourhood. However, the majority of urban residents surveyed in this research still believe that there are people living in their immediate neighbourhood who may share their interests or who are at least personally compatible, but they do not know them. Web-based community networking systems have the potential to facilitate intra-neighbourhood interaction and support community building efforts. Community networking studies have shown that technical connectivity alone does not ensure community, and that new and weak communities do not benefit from community networking systems as much as existing and strong communities do. This paper builds on these findings to present a methodology combining principles of Participation, Animation and Design (PAD). It is currently being employed and tested in a master-planned inner-city residential development. PAD builds on intrinsic motivation in residents to find out about and meet one another in a private and inobtrusive way. It encourages residents to take social ownership of the community building process and the community network. PAD recognises the network qualities in the communicative ecology of urban residents and supplements collective approaches towards community building with personalised networking strategies.