The “Social Media for Good Roundups” are a series of posts in which I share interesting articles and other resources that I come across. This week’s roundup looks at good examples for email-newsletters, improved security for Twitter accounts, a critical look at the lack of coordination between crowdsourcing initiatives and additional thoughts on the role of social media after the Boston bombings.
Stormpins is an iPhone app that tries to close the information -> decision loop by providing responders with a smart way to use crowdsourced data about hazards.
It has been a month since Hurricane Sandy passed over the Caribbean and hit the US East Coast, and a lot of people have written excellent posts about the role social media played for either the affected population or the responders. Here are the articles that I found most interesting.
While almost everbody agrees that online volunteers can bring valuable skills and resources to disaster response operations, things become more complicated when established humanitarian organizations try to work with the Volunteer and Tech Community (V&TC). A new guide is trying to improve how both sides can work together.
The Philippines are currently reeling from the impact of three successive typhoons that have displaced close to 250,000 people and killed at least 50. Being one of the countries with the highest social media penetration, affected communities and disaster responders alike are using Facebook, Twitter and standard Google tools to communicate needs and coordinate the response.
In many situations, the main problem faced by information managers is not a lack of data, but the fact that data is stored in too many conflicting formats and full of inconsistencies and errors. This week I discovered a few free Google tools that can help to turn messy data into clean data.
On June 1st, USAID launched its first ever crowdsourcing project. Yesterday, they shared their lessons learned during a webcast, in a power-point and a case study. Here are the main takeaways.
Like many consultants, I spend a lot of time reading articles and blog posts from around the web. Here are some posts I found particularly interesting. This time they are about branding your organization on Twitter, how WHO used Twitter in a health crises, lessons from managing virtual teams and an e-learning course that can improve your communication with beneficiaries.
