10/08/08 EMForum.org Transcript: Crisis Informatics

Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone. Welcome to EMForum.org! We are 
pleased you could join us today, including our first-timers. We want you to feel 
comfortable about participating, and we will be giving instructions as we go 
along.

Amy Sebring: Our topic today is "Crisis Informatics: The Evolving Role of 
Information and Communication Technologies." Please see the Background Page for 
links to related information and Websites.

Amy Sebring: Our focus is the impact of the rapidly evolving social networking 
technologies in emergencies and disasters. There is a related poll/survey 
question on our home page...

Amy Sebring: "Where would the function of monitoring social networks go?: a) ESF 
#5, EM/Situational Awareness b) ESF #15, Public Information  c) Other/Don't 
Know." Please take a moment after our session to respond if you have not voted 
already, and review the results to date.

Amy Sebring: Before I introduce today's guests, for the benefit of our first-
timers, we will go over the order of business. We will begin with a presentation 
and then we will proceed to your questions and comments.

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section. You may want to begin composing during the presentation, but we ask you 
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since it is possible that your question will be addressed later in the 
presentation.

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Amy Sebring: Now it is my pleasure to introduce our guests. Colin Whitmore is an 
Emergency Management Analyst with ICF International.  Previously he was a 
student at Virginia Tech where he was a member of the Rescue Squad February 2004 
until May 2007.

Amy Sebring: During that time he held the ranks of Vice President, President, 
and Lieutenant. As a Lieutenant he coordinated all aspects of training for the 
squad's 40+ members. On April 16, 2007 Colin served as the EMS Commander for the 
tragic shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, coordinating the emergency medical 
response to Norris Hall.

Amy Sebring: Dr. Leysia Palen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at 
the University of Colorado, Boulder and a faculty fellow with the Institute for 
the Alliance of Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) and the Institute of 
Cognitive Science (ICS).

Amy Sebring: Prior to her appointment at Colorado, she completed her Ph.D. at 
the University of California, Irvine in Information and Computer Science and her 
undergraduate education in Cognitive Science at the University of California, 
San Diego.

Amy Sebring: Professor Palen, who partners with CU's Natural Hazards Center, was 
awarded a 2006 National Science Federation Early CAREER Grant to study 
information dissemination in disaster events.

Amy Sebring: Welcome to you both and thank you for being with us today. I now 
turn the floor over to Colin to start us off please.

Colin Whitmore: Thank you, Amy. I'm happy to have chance to talk about this 
topic with the people I think need to learn about it the most. I've given this 
presentation several times in person but never in an online forum so hopefully 
this is an opportunity to spread the message a little further...

Colin Whitmore: On April 16, 2007, a student at Virginia Tech opened fire on 
students in West Ambler Johnston and Norris Halls. He took the lives of 32 
students before taking his own. Just like any disaster, man-made or natural, 
people everywhere want information, many of them need information.

Colin Whitmore: If you were half-way across the country, you most likely heard 
what was happening in Blacksburg, VA from the anchor on CNN or in between sets 
of music on your car radio. As we know, however, these news sources take time to 
get their facts right.

Colin Whitmore: It would be hours before CNN was broadcasting the information 
that students on campus were exchanging in the same way they would communicate 
about any event. This is our first lesson: ...

Colin Whitmore: people use the communications channels they are most comfortable 
and familiar with when disaster strikes -- for a growing demographic of people, 
those channels are Web-centric applications.

Colin Whitmore: What makes the Virginia Tech incident a unique and powerful case 
study is that a disaster occurred in a community of people who are often the 
most active users of social networks and related applications. More interesting 
still, was that the lead EMS agency, Virginia Tech Rescue Squad, was comprised 
almost entirely of volunteer student EMTs and medics.

Colin Whitmore: Our command post was just as likely to watch Facebook for 
information as we were to turn on CNN. We were far more likely to exchange a 
text message with each other than to attempt a phone call. Some of our 
responders heard of the incident via text message -- a sort of SMS dispatch.

Colin Whitmore: Additionally, the police department at Virginia Tech is used to 
patrolling social networks for intelligence gathering and investigation and so 
they turned there as well. This is not a theory we're dealing with -- it is the 
environment we live in and must learn to adapt to.

Colin Whitmore: You've all probably heard the term "Web 2.0" thrown around 
lately. But what is Web 2.0? It is important to note that the term does not 
denote any upgrade of the hardware that makes the Internet work.

Colin Whitmore: What Web 2.0 refers to is the culture shift in the way we 
experience the Internet. It's a bottom-up model where the value of web-based 
tools (Like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.) comes from the contributions of 
its users just like you and I.

Colin Whitmore: At Virginia Tech, students created groups on Facebook, wrote 
Wikipedia articles and edited the facts as they became clear, and exchanged 
information via blogs, MySpace, and text message.

Colin Whitmore: The important concept here is that the information comes from an 
endless supply of sensors because everyone can contribute. Much the way a group 
of editors checks facts of a writer, users check facts supplied by other users. 
We begin to see patterns of emergency behavior where groups form to accomplish 
tasks and work cohesively to share up to date information.

Colin Whitmore: Recent changes in the way we view emergency management force us 
to be in the intelligence and information business as emergency managers. Our 
responsibility to the people and property we protect is to provide them with the 
most accurate information available.

Colin Whitmore: If we intend to do that in an effective manner, we cannot ignore 
the segments of our population that rely on these non-traditional forms of 
communication. This is increasingly important as our populations age and more 
members of our community are less likely to turn on their televisions and more 
likely to check their iPhones for disaster information.

Colin Whitmore: There are certainly challenges in moving toward a participatory 
role for emergency management in this environment. What are those challenges? 
What do you worry about as an emergency manager with regard to these information 
sources?

Colin Whitmore: I have hinted at a participatory role for emergency management. 
I usually see a lot of people shifting in their chairs when I say that to a 
group. In fact, when I last looked at the poll on emform.org, 67% of respondents 
thought that social network monitoring was an ESF #15 Public Information 
function. I challenge that point.

Colin Whitmore: Certainly, we need to learn to distribute information through 
these sources and we need to address rumors that may start in the same way we 
have always done with traditional media. However, if you were to watch users of 
Twitter during the recent wildfires in California, you would see that people 
were posting information about what they saw, heard, felt or needed.

Colin Whitmore: During Hurricane Ike users on the same site were discussing 
conditions in their areas. We have, at our disposal, an endless network on 
sensors that could provide us with a wealth of situational awareness. We have to 
learn to harness the power of that resource.

Colin Whitmore: There is no denying that a primary concern for all of us is 
making sure that the information we gather from these sources is accurate. We 
are comfortable with the information we receive from traditional media because 
we accept that there is a certain degree of responsibility for accuracy that a 
major news network accepts as part of their jobs.

Colin Whitmore: We think of the Internet as this vast sea of information -- the 
wild west of information even. To the contrary, what we see is that, because 
these groups want information that is more accurate and timely than they can 
find on CNN, they self-police. We see a trend of individuals checking the facts 
of their peers and consensus-forming.

Colin Whitmore: I'd like to caution each and every one of you from trying to 
address these sources in the same way we might normally adapt to change. Our 
tendency is to try and corral new sources of information. We control information 
because we respect the power that it has.

Colin Whitmore: We build levees to steer information where we want it to go -- 
and we do it effectively. However, these communities are not going to be 
corralled. We cannot, for instance, start our own emergency management social 
network and decide that we've addressed this concern.

Colin Whitmore: Hundreds of new Web 2.0 applications are developed each year and 
only a very few of them last. Even fewer become as successful as Facebook and 
MySpace. The key here is that users will select the applications that work for 
them.

Colin Whitmore: What makes them work is an unpredictable combination of timing, 
popularity, features, and ease of use. We have to learn how to be current and 
interact with the community as it exists -- not as we wish it existed. This is 
undoubtedly our biggest challenge.

Colin Whitmore: With that, I'd like to turn the floor over to Dr. Palen who is 
far more versed in these trends than myself as she has been researching them for 
some time. Dr. Palen...

Leysia Palen: Greetings all.  Thanks, Colin, for your terrific remarks, and to 
the EM Forum for the invitation to participate here.

Leysia Palen: My students and colleagues at the University of Colorado at 
Boulder have been conducting research in the area of "Crisis Informatics."   The 
work is a union of information science, computer science and social science, 
areas of expertise that we bring together to understand the changing role of 
technology in society during times of emergency, disaster, and perhaps other 
forms of crisis.

Leysia Palen: The goal of Crisis Informatics is to understand the information- 
and technology- needs of all players in emergency situations.  This includes 
both formal responders AND members of the public.   This is our starting point.   
If we understand these needs, then we can better shape the development of new 
information technology, its deployment, and the policies that support and shape 
its use.

Leysia Palen: This is an area of research that is gaining ground and that we 
have worked extensively to build at CU with my colleagues at the Natural Hazards 
Center, Dr. Jeannette Sutton and Prof. Kathleen Tierney, and my hardworking PhD 
students Amanda Hughes, Sophia Liu, and Sarah Vieweg, Prof. Ken Anderson at CU, 
and my collaborator out of University of California, Irvine, Dr. Irina 
Shklovski.

Leysia Palen: There is other work to be aware of as well: Prof. Christine Hagar, 
of Dominican University is a library information scientist who did some even 
earlier work on "crisis informatics" during the early 2000s UK Farming Crisis in 
the early 2000s, and coined the term.

Leysia Palen: Other researchers from other disciplines are doing some 
informative work in the broad area of disaster and information technology.  For 
references to these other sources, I kindly refer you to the papers we have 
written on this topic.

Leysia Palen: At the heart of the research we are doing at CU, we connect 
knowledge of how people communicate using technology under normal conditions to 
explain how they do and will use technology under non-routine, emergency 
conditions.

Leysia Palen: Because we are a society that increasingly uses information and 
communications technology (ICT) to manage our lives by connecting to information 
and people we need, it is quite natural and not surprising to know that people 
will turn to those same resources in disaster situations, and will do so at an 
increasing pace.

Leysia Palen: Furthermore, we know that in times of disaster, pre-dating today's 
ICT, people turn to each other---family and friends--for help.  People are 
natural information seekers, and ICT provides another means for them to find and 
provide information to each other. The difference is the scale and speed of 
these interactions.

Leysia Palen: In the Virginia Tech Shooting, students turned to each other to 
learn about what was going on---to make sense of the event on limited 
information (because information is always limited in times of crisis and 
emergency).  After doing safety and welfare checks with family members, 
students, who were told to stay in their dorm rooms, turned to their computers 
to connect to their vast social networks.

Leysia Palen: But they couldn't connect directly to everyone---people on 
university campuses casually know lots of people after all.  Among other things, 
they turned to applications that would let them detect the on-line presence of 
their friends and acquaintances.

Leysia Palen: This included instant messaging applications and social networking 
sites, like Facebook.  There, students didn't have to directly talk to each 
other necessarily; at a minimum, they could figure out who was okay by who was 
on-line at the same time, or had been on-line recently.

Leysia Palen: This congregation of people on-line---and their ability to pool 
information, as well as to make inferences about their welfare---set the stage 
for a massive, international, highly socially distributed problem solving 
activity.  Once the public knew how many people had been killed and injured, 
this was the impetus for members of the public to pool knowledge to figure out 
who those fatalities were.

Leysia Palen: It sounds morbid and voyeuristic, but it wasn't.  The listing of 
the victims was done with great respect, seriousness, and concern for accuracy.  
Lots of people wanted to help during and after the Virginia Tech event.  Pooling 
information and doing 'research' of this sort was one way for people to help, 
even from a distance.

Leysia Palen: The results were remarkable.  In just a few of the places that we 
were able to study, there were no inaccuracies on the lists.  Furthermore, the 
lists were compiled in different orders, and no one list was complete. Yet 
across even our sample, all the names of fatality victims had been correctly 
deduced, mostly in advance of the official announcement from the university.

Leysia Palen: This is proof of a kind of "collective intelligence" in the way 
that Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff long ago predicted, where the public 
produces accurate information together, and without executive orchestration.

Leysia Palen: The results of the work do NOT have any kind of implications that 
would suggest that VT officials should have worked faster.  Let me re-iterate 
that this is not the lesson. Rather, the conditions of this emergency were such 
that they created a "closed problem solving environment" that let us 
definitively see features of collective intelligence in action.

Leysia Palen: When we later turned our attention to the Southern California 
Fires one year ago, the highly diffuse nature of the event made it harder to 
point to tell-tale indications of collective intelligence in quite the same way.

Leysia Palen: But critical information sharing by members of the public was 
present.  This is something that is very difficult to quantify and empirically 
measure, so we make no claims to how much of this was happening during the 
event.

Leysia Palen: But when we look at the some of the types of communications and 
information exchange that went on, we can see what the future will look like, 
and I think make some informed predications of what we should be thinking about 
for the future of emergency response.

Leysia Palen: In that event, the major take away lessons in this research I did 
with Irina Shklovski and Jeannette Sutton was that people will use the 
"backchannel" (the informal channel) to supplement "front channel" or formal 
communications.  Those members of the public who are close to the action can 
come to serve as local experts-eyes on the ground---

Leysia Palen: and can provide information that is often more accurate than what 
broadcast media can provide simply because of their previous local knowledge of 
the area, their personal investment in what is going to happen, and their 
ability to communicate that local knowledge with each other.  They do this 
because it helps them cope.  They want to help and they will help in this way.

Leysia Palen: Furthermore, they will often correct what they hear on big media.  
AND, importantly, even though information on the backchannel might also be 
incorrect, they will correct that too.

Leysia Palen: What we have the potential for here in disaster response is a 
massive self-checking and correcting system, if we begin to think in these 
broader terms.

Leysia Palen: These are my brief remarks on a topic that I know many of you have 
a great deal of practical experience and wisdom about, and I look forward to 
discussing these with you today.  I will turn the floor back over to our 
Moderator to start the discussion.

Amy Sebring: Thank you very much Colin and Leysia.  Incidentally, you can find 
the research papers Dr. Palen referred to from a link on our Background Page for 
today's session.  [See http://www.cs.colorado.edu/users/palen/new_papers.html] 

Amy Sebring: Now, to proceed to your questions or comments. We are using a 
Moderation feature today. When you click on Send (or hit the Enter key), your 
question or comment will not go directly to the screen...

Amy Sebring: Instead, it goes to a Moderator's Admin Panel, to be released into 
the chat at the appropriate time.  We will take the questions or comments in the 
order submitted.  Please be patient as it may take some time to get to yours, if 
there are  several ahead of you.

Amy Sebring: Please do NOT submit multi-part questions or very lengthy comments.  
Instead, if you have a second question or a follow up question, please compose 
and submit it separately. Please try to direct your question to either Colin or 
Leysia by name if you can.

Amy Sebring: We are ready to begin now, and you can enter your question or 
comment anytime you are ready. We especially want to hear your comments about 
any specific experience you may have had in this area.

Hal Grieb: Along with keeping up to date with current Web 2.0 trends, we need to 
filter what we read and what we put out as far as information. ESF 5 is 
responsible for reviewing all information internal and external and making 
decisions based on that information. By using ESF 15 as not only a filter but a 
fast response update tool to the public seems wise. My concern is what may 
become "cyber terrorism" through organized false reporting that we may view as 
credible during big unfolding incidents. What steps do you think could help 
filter for an accurate and timely picture?

Amy Sebring: Colin do you want to take a stab at this first please?

Colin Whitmore: This is a fairly common concern - the idea of a sort of counter-
intelligence terrorism attack - especially in the law enforcement community...

Colin Whitmore: I'd love to tell you that there is a magic answer to somehow 
"filter" for this sort of thing but currently there isn't. In theory, however, I 
think there are two keys to addressing the issue...

Colin Whitmore: 1st: How likely do we really think this is? The feasibility of a 
group of people organizing to disseminate information incorrectly as an act of 
terrorism without a greater number of "community" members pointing out their 
wrong doing seems highly improbably to me...

Colin Whitmore: 2nd: I think this is a matter of deciding how we interact with 
the social networks on a case-by-case basis for each disaster. Obviously there 
is little impetus to disrupt hurricane response, and a far smaller chance of 
being successful in doing so. This would be in opposition to the chances that 
after a terrorist attack the perpetrators or sympathizers might attempt to 
spread the effects through counter-intelligence. I hope that addresses your 
questions somewhat.

Amy Sebring: Leysia, would you like to add?

Leysia Palen: I'll chime in just a bit

Leysia Palen: ..

Leysia Palen: a couple of things:

Leysia Palen: I am not convinced that the destination for publicly-generated 
information goes to the PIO function or the intelligence functions yet...

Leysia Palen: I think we don't know the answer.  I think that the massive 
changes of information dissemination in the public sphere might have even more 
significant changes in the formal organization of EM.

Leysia Palen: Also, I think we tend first to think about cyber-terrorism as the 
primary concern...

Leysia Palen: when I think the greater concern is that we miss out on all the 
valuable information that is NOT cyber terrorism, and finally....

Leysia Palen: this is a huge open question that we need to do research in. This 
is something we are trying to do at CU, where we are bringing together domain 
expertise like yours,...

Leysia Palen: social research, AND computer science techniques. The solutions 
are both social and technical.

Leysia Palen: One more thing:

Leysia Palen: social in the sense of both "human interaction as it works peer to 
peer" but also in our institutions and organizations that manage emergencies.

Jake Westfall: Talking with others in the EM community there is a lot of 
skepticism about web 2.0 communication because of their funding models.  They 
are either funded solely by venture capital that could eventually run out, or by 
advertising that may not be acceptable for your agency.  Directly funding a 
communication system builds more confidence that you can depend on it.  How can 
this concern be dealt with?

Amy Sebring: Colin, since this goes to your point regarding the failure of many 
of these sites, would you like to address this one please?

Colin Whitmore: I'll try...

Colin Whitmore: I'm not precisely sure what you mean by skepticism, of what are 
you skeptical?...

Colin Whitmore: I'd say that if you're skeptical about the reliability of the 
network....

Colin Whitmore: Then you're looking at this from the wrong perspective...

Colin Whitmore: One primary key to adapting to these new modes of communication 
is that we need to be as flexible as they are.

Colin Whitmore: If you want to use Web 2.0...

Colin Whitmore: Then you have think like Web 2.0...

Colin Whitmore: Web 2.0 is bottom-up - i.e. not funded by your friends at the 
local courthouse

Amy Sebring: Leysia?

Leysia Palen: I concur with Colin...

Leysia Palen: and I'll summarize by saying that what people are going to be 
using tomorrow to communicate will be different then in the next 6 months....

Leysia Palen: and different again in 1 year, and so on.  We need to prepare the 
organization of EM for this, not try to outsmart the technical solutions that 
are being created every day.

Amy Sebring: So ask your 18 year old son or daughter which sites are hot?  
(Rhetorical question.)

Isabel McCurdy: Colin, how does one ensure privacy of victim's rights in these 
mediums?

Amy Sebring: and a similar related question.  Let's combine them...

Matt Lane: What about the liability issues with socially driven information 
sharing, i.e., HIPAA issues, identity protection and so forth?  Wouldn't there 
be a concern by the emergency management community of sharing personal 
information via these venues when typical lines of communication are hampered or 
no longer exist?

Colin Whitmore: We can only address that as EMs from the standpoint of how WE 
act in these communities. I don't think there is any motivation for us to be 
discussing private aspects of a victim's situation...

Colin Whitmore: I've received the question many times and when I reply with 
"What would you like to post on Twitter that violates your citizen's privacy 
rights?" No one can give me an answer....

Colin Whitmore: I think the concern comes from our involvement, and perhaps 
associated facilitation or approval of, in the way others share information 
online...

Colin Whitmore: And we don't want to be associated with the sharing of private 
information. That being said, the communications are already taking place and I 
don't read about privacy concerns today in the paper from victims of Hurricane 
Ike. I have no reason to think our participating would change that. Leysia, 
anything to add?

Leysia Palen: I'll just say that my student Sarah Vieweg....

Leysia Palen: and I looked at Facebook behavior at the Northern Illinois 
Shootings in Feb....

Leysia Palen: to see how their behavior was different, if at all, from VT, and

Leysia Palen: what we found is that the precedent of VT guided behavior around 
what kind of information people thought was ok to share...

Leysia Palen: so many VT students told NIU students NOT to post victim's names.

Leysia Palen: So again we see some self-regulation here. But otherwise, yes, I 
concur with Colin that just because we participate in on-line environments for 
some kinds of information...

Leysia Palen: it doesn't mean that we release publicly information about private 
citizen matters.

Amy Sebring: Leysia, would you take this next one first please...

John Tommaney: Isn't there the danger of "information overload" using social 
networking in emergencies?  So many different systems and users that you can't 
possibly wade through all the information (correct and incorrect) and stay on 
top of trends?

Leysia Palen: I think we are living in a world of information overload right 
now!  I think that is a cusp that society is on right now, which is trying to 
figure out how to manage ALL this information that we could look at, even under 
normal conditions...

Leysia Palen: but in times of emergency, this is a question I do hear about: How 
do emergency managers deal with information overload?....

Leysia Palen: My answer is not a specific solution-based answer, but instead a 
perspective-based one,...

Leysia Palen: which is, that we know that members of the public share 
information with each other in times of crisis because THEY experience 
information dearth.

Leysia Palen: In other words, information overload and information dearth are 
two sides of the same coin...

Leysia Palen: so what I think we are ultimately talking about here are 
information bottlenecks that are only made more 'bottlenecky' when we try to 
incorrectly control flow...

Amy Sebring: Colin, your thoughts?

Colin Whitmore: I agree with Dr. Palen that it's more an issue of perspective-
shifting than buying a solution to manage the information....

Colin Whitmore: That's what I want to chime in on from the industry side - I 
caution against buying the latest greatest piece of software to manage all your 
social network accounts or intelligence monitoring programs...

Colin Whitmore: There are some great solutions out there, but you're really just 
trying to hold water in a burlap sack. By the time you learn your fancy new 
software, another new technology will exist that it cannot monitor. Just my two 
cents.

Rick Tobin: Has anyone evaluated what happens to the generation using the ad hoc 
systems when those sources of information aren't available for decision making? 
In other words, will they trust the other established information paths and 
respond appropriately without peer feedback?

Amy Sebring: I think this goes to sociology perhaps.  Leysia, do you want to 
start?

Leysia Palen: Good question. I don't know of research on this point....but...

Leysia Palen: I think, to use Colin's water metaphor, what will happen is that 
the water flow will seek out the next best alternate path...

Leysia Palen: I don't think it is the case that people don't trust established 
sources...

Leysia Palen: it is that they ALSO trust sources that they might have 
established as trustworthy using other criteria...

Leysia Palen: Even predating ICT, we know from the risk communication and 
warning empirical literature that people always checked...

Leysia Palen: with their family and friends to see if they were really going to 
evacuate...

Leysia Palen: so I think people will endlessly pursue information, and get it 
wherever they can.

Amy Sebring: We have 2 questions/comments that relate to each other....

Amy Sebring: let me enter them both and then I will ask Colin to start ...

Gerald Smith: A few years ago our Province had a disaster. The Government 
website had 900,000 hits per day from people looking for information. Why not 
develop a section of this Government website to accept information from people?  
I like the idea of having many "ground sensors". Do you know of any negative 
implications of using a Government website? If we receive a vast quantity of 
information, how can this be processed in a timely manner in order to be 
beneficial?

Hal Grieb: Both of you seem to be against PIO run network sites. What do you 
feel the proper route should be, and why?

Colin Whitmore: Excellent questions...

Colin Whitmore: I think you should start your website that allows input from the 
public tomorrow if you can. But let me caution you...

Colin Whitmore: There are many agencies around the world that have done this and 
the most common complaint they receive is that...

Colin Whitmore: no one responds to the messages!...

Colin Whitmore: People sending you messages on your website might expect you to 
be as responsive as their peers would be in a social forum....

Colin Whitmore: You can't possibly do that during an emergency...

Colin Whitmore: But if you can at least have people who are assigned to 
addressing these concerns or letting people know that a real person reads 
them...

Colin Whitmore: you'll have better luck...

Colin Whitmore: As for how to process the information, I don't know of a 
specific answer for that. I'd say its part of the disaster life-cycle - not 
enough information becomes more than you can handle very quickly when you start 
seeking it....

Colin Whitmore: As for PIO-run websites...

Colin Whitmore: I am not AGAINST a PIO-run website as you might gather, but I 
don't think it has anything to do with social network participation...

Colin Whitmore: Social networks are not going to be successfully created by the 
folks in Washington, DC...

Colin Whitmore: They are selected by the people who use them and prosper based 
on their ability to meet needs and usability. The proper route to participation, 
in my view, is to understand that you cannot control this information but you 
can benefit from it. Then learn to participate just like every other community 
member, but use the information you can glean to help fulfill you role.

Amy Sebring: Leysia, do you have an opinion on this issue?  I have looked at a 
couple of these Public Affairs type sites, and although they may have been 
started with good intentions, they look like they petered out in some cases.

Leysia Palen: I think Colin answered this well--and let me say that I am also 
NOT against PIO-run sites. Not at all. they have a place....

Leysia Palen: it is just that people are looking for frequent updates, and will 
need robust sites (sites that stay up), so there need to be multiple places for 
people to go. People are always looking for....

Leysia Palen: authoritative information, but how they judge authoritative 
information might be calling their friend who stayed up on the evacuated 
mountain because he's got a cell phone and can drive around to see the 
neighborhoods.

Amy Sebring: We are running out of time and will not get to all pending issues, 
but I wanted to highlight that this is not just text messaging, but includes 
posting damage photos, collaborative mapping etc.  Leysia, you recently looked 
at Flickr I believe ...

Amy Sebring: can you tell us just a little about that?

Leysia Palen: Yes, led by my student Sophia Liu...

Leysia Palen: it is available on-line. It really gets at how these on-line 
environments are themselves adapting....

Leysia Palen: to be useful in some fashion to disaster response.

Leysia Palen: For Flickr and other photo-sharing sites, this is all 'in process' 
I'd say, but what we do see there is people trying to organize and find ways to 
help and participate in the event,...

Leysia Palen: even from afar.  I think the lesson of that study is to once again 
say that people want to participate in disaster events--it is a human need--so 
they'll do it in creative ways.  Some of this doesn't have to be managed by 
emergency response; it is just there and speaks to this mass-collaboration 
phenomenon.

Amy Sebring: Colin, other types of collaboration or ways people get their 
information?

Colin Whitmore: I recently came across a fascinating diagram done by Fred 
Cavazza called "Social Media Landscape" which he has, ironically, posted to 
Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredcavazza/2564571564/.  I would recommend 
looking at that to get an idea of how vast this environment is...

Colin Whitmore: We're not going to be able to ever sit and list all the possible 
ways for us to interact using these applications, and by the time we get a 
partial list aggregated, it's outdated. I think the entire point here today is 
to draw attention to this.  Much in the way that people's need for information 
on a large scale creates the motivation to create these tools, our motivation as 
a community of EMs and academics to understand this will eventually lead to 
innovative ways for us to participate.

Amy Sebring: Time to wrap for today. Thank you very much Colin and Leysia for an 
excellent job. And thanks to all our participants for great questions and 
comments. I am sorry we do not have time to get to all of them. Please stand by 
just a moment while we make a couple of quick announcements...

Amy Sebring: Again, the formatted transcript will be available later today.  If 
you are not on our mailing list and would like to get notices of future sessions 
and availability of transcripts, just go to our home page to Subscribe.

Amy Sebring: Don't forget to vote in our poll, and PLEASE take a moment to do 
the rating/review! These folks deserve "excellent"...

Amy Sebring: We are planning an Open House event to try out Live Meeting, and 
more info will be coming out on our mailing list about that it in the near 
future. We hope you will participate, as we will need your help ...

Amy Sebring: Today is the International Day for Disaster Reduction, and this 
year's theme is "Hospitals Safe From Disasters." In honor of the campaign, our 
next regular program will be October 22nd, when the topic will be the PAHO/WHO 
Hospital Safety Index with Pat Bittner. We hope to be using Live Meeting for 
that session.

Amy Sebring: Thanks to everyone for participating today. We stand adjourned but 
before you go, please help me show our appreciation to both Colin and Leysia for 
an excellent job.

Colin Whitmore: Thank you very much for having us. If I can be of assistance to 
any of you, please feel free to contact me at cwhitmore@icfi.com. Thanks!