Emergency Social-Repeater System
Since I first posed the question in April “Has a Twitter emergency alert system been built yet?”, I’ve noted that several other people have pondered the same concept. Some examples are here, here and here.
It has already been substantiated that when an emergency occurs almost anywhere in the world, the first notification of the event occurs online among socially connected individuals using systems like Twitter.
Social groups of loosely aggregated individuals with similar interests, microcrowds as I’ve been calling them, or groupings as Stowe Boyd calls them, seem like an ideal communication channel for use in emergency situations. Microcrowds overlap and each have “pack leaders” or “social seeds” with deep downstream social connections in the form of followers or friends. The leaders in these groups are generally highly connected through the use of communication hardware like WAP phones and laptops with EVDO connections so highly important information can flow through the #microcrowd channel in near real-time.
If Chris Messina’s concept of #hashmarks as an impromptu channel creation methodology is adopted in Twitter, then perhaps this can also be used to create a repeater system that binds together the alpha leaders of the largest social groupings and emergency response teams, thereby using the massive redundancy of social nets to ensure that important messages are broadcast far and wide.
Adding geo-context to the emergency message would be an important aspect to consider. Temporal-context would also need to be applied so that as the message ages, additional information and updates can be properly contextualized along the timeline of the disaster.
As our dated analog systems fall further behind the power and immediacy of social communication perhaps it’s time to propose an emergency social-repeater system, where emergency information can not only flow quickly, but flow to the people and systems which can possibly affect the speed of response teams and mitigate the negative effects of any disaster.
Filed under Geo-temporal, Mashups, Microcrowds |8 Responses to “Emergency Social-Repeater System”
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Geo-context — brilliant idea. Imagine being able to have automatic geo-tagging with messages, so that one message indicates time, location, and description (the message itself).
Several commenters on my post were concerned about whether there would be access to Twitter after an earthquake. That’s a concern of mine as well. For a system like this to work, there would be a need to have some server redundancy outside of high-risk disaster areas like California.
It’s likely that even if I don’t have internet access from my phone, i’d have text messaging abilities, but if the server is located in the disaster zone, it would be quite useless, I’m afraid.
Applied as a semantical microformat, geo-temporal information is a powerful bit of meta data that can drive a much deeper degree of context for all online interaction, enabling many possible new interaction methods to be created.
[...] them to serve our human needs in the most vital times. It’s ideas like Brian Caldwell’s Emergency Social-Repeater System or the recent thread on the coworking mailing list for P2P health care that suggest that [...]
Interesting idea. My only real concern, though, is that the medium of deployment (e.g. Twitter) is just as redundant (read: not at all) as conventional notification systems such as phones, televisions, and radio stations. One unfortunate earthquake near the Valley wipes out 90% of Web 2.0.
If we can build redundancy and predictability into the process, then we definitely have an interesting idea to consider.
[...] design them to serve our human needs in the most vital times. It’s ideas like Brian Caldwell’s Emergency Social-Repeater System or the recent thread on the coworking mailing list for P2P health care that suggest that we’re [...]
[...] eponymousX » Blog Archive » Emergency Social-Repeater System Microcrowds overlap and each have “pack leaders” or “social seeds” with deep downstream social connections in the form of followers or friends. The leaders in these groups are generally highly connected through the use of communication hardware (tags: emergency microcrowds twitter messaging) [...]
[...] thus Twitter as an emergency channel entered my [...]