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22 Feb 2012 | 10:11 am
Post by: Kim Stephens
Image via CrunchBase
I want to bring attention today to a fantastic resource. This is not a blog post per se, but rather a link to GovDelivery’s Social Media Visionary Kit. The “kit” includes video’s of presentations from Adam Connor, Steve Ressler, and David Kirkpatrick. Adam is the Associate Manager of Public Policy for Facebook and he provides 10 great tips for using social media for government. He addresses many topics including the “L” word–liability. The other two videos are from Steve Ressler, the co-founder of GovLoop and David Kirkpatrick, the author of “The Facebook Effect”.
Here is another article about the 10 tips Mr. Connor addresses: “Facebook’s Top 10 for Government“. My favorite tip is actually a resource list for government agencies.
Resources for Government:
“State & Local governments. Facebook provides an amended set of terms for State & Local government pages. View them here.
Security with DTM-09-026. The Department of Defense (DoD) outlines their policy and guidelines for the effective use of social networking. This DTM applies to all agencies within the DoD. If Facebook is blocked for your agency, this will [give you ammunition to get it unblocked. If the USArmy allows access, why not our agency?] .
Archiving capabilities. There isn’t an archiving tool within Facebook, but Adam offered up two options:Backupify, which backs up and restores data from popular online services (Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and Nextpoint, which develops “cloud-based technology for legal and compliance needs.”
Interagency cooperation. Government agencies and organizations should remember that interagency[…]
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20 Feb 2012 | 3:53 pm
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As you will see from this article, there are those who see opportunity and those who resent efforts to cash in on damage, pain, and suffering after a major devastating disaster. See this article re Joplin, MO in the Chicago Tribune.
This is not a new phenomenon, since it has been going on for years in New Orleans.
Feel free to weigh in with your your views – would you welcome it as a business opportunity or despise the exploitation?
Related articles
Tornado tourism: Should Joplin, Mo., mourn – or cash in? (csmonitor.com)
‘Tornado tourism’ stirs anger in Joplin (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Talk of ‘tornado tourism’ stirs anger in Joplin (mercurynews.com)
Please patronize our sponsor: disasterbookstore.com
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17 Feb 2012 | 6:55 pm
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In the Path of the Storm; Global Warming, Extreme Weather, and the Impacts of Weather-Related Disasters in the U.S. Feb. 18, 2012. EnvironmentAmerica.org.
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15 Feb 2012 | 2:34 pm
In an article titled Natural Disasters Influence Mental Mistakes, the site PychCentral provides a short account of a sessiion on Human Cognitive Performance Suffers Following National Disasters, delivered at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society; February 2012.
The Society has provided an abstract: Human Factors article. Note that the sample size is quite small, but perhaps more research will be done on this topic in the future. Some excerpts from the news article follow:
A new study finds that survivors of natural disasters may experience intellectual challenges in addition to stress and anxiety. This mental decline may cause survivors to make serious errors in their daily lives.
Experts say attention to these phenomena is important given the prevalence of hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes.
The study on how cognitive performance can decline after earthquakes is published by New Zealand researchers in the journal Human Factors.
In the report, University of Canterbury’s William S. Helton and James Head discuss how prior studies have found that more traffic accidents and accident-related fatalities occur following human-made disasters such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Experts believe the mishaps are due to increased cognitive impairment that can lead to higher stress levels and an increase in intrusive thoughts. However, until this time, no research has been conducted on the effects of natural disasters on cognitive performance.
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14 Feb 2012 | 11:12 am
Post by: Kim Stephens
It seems almost everyday now I’m seeing tweets about apps being built by one emergency management agency or another. Today I’d like to highlight the two that were mentioned just this morning.
Tennessee Emergency Management Agency has released a “ReadyTN” application for Andriod. This application has all of the preparedness information that citizens would find on Ready.gov, but with the added benefit of being location aware. The GPS feature presumably can help people locate services, such as shelter locations and recovery operations, near them after a disaster. It also has a stream of data intended to increase risk awareness on the part of the citizen, but it seems for now the risks are limited to weather and roadway hazards. I’m sure this was a function of available data streams.
The other App is not a traditional “preparedness app” or even an app designed to help you locate city services, rather this application allows citizens to help each other. It’s genius, really. It’s called “Pulse Point” and it works by allowing citizens who are trained in CPR to sign up for notifications they receive on their cell phone when someone near them requires CPR. Here’s their description of how it works:
Notifications are made simultaneously with the dispatch of paramedics to anyone within the area that is CPR-trained and has indicated their willingness and ability to assist during an SCA emergency. These notifications are only made if the victim is in a public place and only to[…]
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13 Feb 2012 | 1:26 pm
Guest Post: Scott Reuter
I’m fortunate to be working with a group of #SMEM* friends who like to help each other during disasters. We train on real disasters as well as live non-disaster events, such as conferences and fast-moving popular events, so that we can test new social media tools and techniques. We do this to learn for our own varied emergency needs, and to share what we learn with others in order to contribute to the development of social media disaster operations in all phases of disasters. We call ourselves the “Virtual Operations Support Team“, or VOST for those who prefer acronyms.**
We are a diverse mix of professional emergency managers and disaster volunteers of varying skill levels with one major thing in common: an enthusiasm for learning how to use social media in disasters, and for developing ways to operate that will make things easier for ourselves and others in future disasters. We like to share what we learn with others.
Here’s a quick definition of the VOST concept:
Virtual Operations Support (VOS) as applied to emergency management and disaster recovery is an effort to make use of new communication technologies and social media tools so that a team of trusted agents can lend support via the internet to those on-site who may otherwise be overwhelmed by the volume of data generated during a disaster.
VOS Teams (VOST) are activated to perform specific functions in support of affected organizations & jurisdictions. Each VOST has a Team Leader that reports directly[…]
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13 Feb 2012 | 3:45 am
In today’s NY times, there is an interesting article about rebuilding decisions in Japan.
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10 Feb 2012 | 8:17 am
Post by: Kim Stephens
Alice Johnson of Zawya.com recently posted an interview with retired Admiral Thad Allen about disaster response. She uses a quote from his as the title or her article: “It’s a leadership challenge, it’s a legal challenge, it’s a policy challenge, it’s a resource challenge”. Most readers will remember him for his role in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as the Principal Federal Official, he’s now a VP at a consulting firm. I have pulled out the section of the interview where she asks him about emerging technologies, and he specifically addresses the role of social media. I love his answer to the question about what government thinks about this new environment we live in. He basically says it doesn’t matter what government thinks, people will use social media to report what’s happening to them in a disaster (and “participate in these events”) whether we like it or not. Love it!
Q: Are there any new forms of technology or processes that have ensured more effective responses to large-scale catastrophes?
A: I think there are technologies that allow crowd-sourcing, allow us to try to understand where the need is for a response. On the other hand, you’re automatically going to be graded by the public and it will be announced publicly immediately through social media. I think that is something that’s dramatically new in the last five or six years.
Q: So how have responses changed in light of the social media phenomenon?
A: Well, it can help you mobilize resources,[…]
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10 Feb 2012 | 5:48 am
Los Angeles, CA
I just learned about this UASI -funded effort in LA. For details about their ongoing recovery planning efforts as well as other projects completed and underway via the Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant project, go to this local site.
Use this link for the Feb. 2012 report on the Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant program. [Thanks to All Hands Consulting for the link.] The report is 19 pages.
Fairfax County, VA:
Fairfax County just completed its pre-disaster recovery plan, which I was told is the first in the country to follow the format and recovery support functions of the National Disaster Recovery Framework. With support from federal grant funding, and the help of a consulting firm, the county has just published its recovery plan. (Note the download is 368 pages.)
When I have had the chance to read and analyze it, I will add comments.
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Please patronize our sponsor: DisasterBookstore.com
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9 Feb 2012 | 4:25 pm
FEMA recently issued a document titled “Crisis Response and Disaster Resilience 2030; Forging Strategic Action in
an Age of Uncertainty.” URL: http://www.fema.gov/library/viewRecord.do?id=4995
Image via Wikipedia
For an overview of the contents of their work on strategic foresight planning, see the podcast and slide set from the presentation done by David Kaufman, Director of Policy for FEMA, in his recent presentation on EM Forum ( www.emforum.org). The direct URL to the slide set is at: http://www.emforum.org/SFI/120126SFIbrief.pdf
Related articles
FEMA Strategic Foresight Initiative Releases New Report, To Host Webinar (geodatapolicy.wordpress.com)
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9 Feb 2012 | 3:34 pm
JAROSLAV VALUCH / Standby Task Force (Photo credit: SHAREconference)
Post by: Kim Stephens
It seems there has been a lot of conversations on the #SMEM (or Social Media and Emergency Management) twitter hashtag about using volunteers to help response organizations deal with the huge volume of information that comes from social networks during a crisis. (One conversation was this recent chat.) Organizing those volunteers into a group with set expectations of what they will provide, and then integrating their work into the response effort, are the logical next steps.
One organization doing just that is the Standby Task Force (SBTF). They have set out to “…[turn] the adhoc groups of tech-savy mapping volunteers that emerge around crises into a flexible, trained and prepared network ready to deploy. The SBTF is a volunteer-based network that represents the first wave in Online Community Emergency Response Teams.”
The SBTF was tasked by the United Nations in March-April, 2011 to provide sense-making to social media data during the ongoing crisis in Libya. Jen Ziemke posted this video to the Crisis Mapper’s blog of Helena Puig from SBTF discussing the deployment during the ICCM conference . I thought it really provided some great insights into what went well and what could be improved.
Another great resource, for those interested in the topic, is this google doc: Standby Task Force UN OCHA. It is their After Action Report of the Libyan effort.
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8 Feb 2012 | 6:05 am
While I blogged about this topic some weeks ago, see this article which provided a fuller discussion of the disaster experiences in 2011, which was just published in the new issue of EM Magazine.
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4 Feb 2012 | 3:45 pm
Guest Post by: Bob Fletcher
I have been in the field of emergency management for more than 40 years and have studied hazards and threats of all kinds; natural and manmade. I lived through the Civil Defense Era with the looming threat of strategic nuclear attack and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. I fear the power of nature as well and its destructive forces. And an emergency manager at the national level for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a career senior executive at FEMA, I have witnessed first-hand 4 decades of incidents of all types . And as a consultant to government, I have dedicated the last 12 years to imagining catastrophic future threats and their consequences. So you might conclude that there aren’t many things that I haven’t considered possible in the realm of hazards. That would be wrong.
The use of nano-technology for terrorism has recently become one of my biggest interests and concerns. I have been aware of the field for many years. Who hasn’t read Popular Science articles or Sci-fi novels where self replicating swarms of nano-bots threaten our very existence. “Prey” and the recently released “Micro” by Michael Crichton fascinate us with descriptions of nanotechnology gone awry. I have often read books such as these and pondered the timeline for emergence of these threats. I believe that the time for concern is now.
While paging through Flipboard recently, I stumbled upon a YouTube video that shocked me. The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing[…]
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4 Feb 2012 | 9:09 am
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New Report on the Domestic Natural Disaster Health Workforce, released by NDMPH
It is 194 pages long.
Coping With a Disaster or Traumatic Event; CDC website.
The effects of a disaster, terrorist attack, or other public health emergency can be long-lasting, and the resulting trauma can reverberate even with those not directly affected by the disaster. This page provides general strategies for promoting mental health and resilience. These strategies were developed by various organizations based on experiences in prior disasters. Site produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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2 Feb 2012 | 2:16 pm
Post by: Kim Stephens
Meteorologist are fast becoming some of the most ardent proponents of social media. I love this video from The Weather Channel on why social media is important. I’m posting this so that I have it in my arsenal next time I present!
I noticed it doesn’t want to show from the blog site so I’ve included the link below.
http://www.weather.com/weather/videos/news-41/top-stories-169/education-of-disaster-being-connected-25892
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