•  The Data Journalism Handbook

A lot of communication around aid and development is about making sense of data and communicating data-based analysis to the media and donors. The free “Data Journalism Handbook” gives some excellent tips and ideas how to understand and deliver data to a wider audience.

• Crowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters

Take a look at this article, if you are looking for a good overview about what crisis mapping is and why it has potential. It might come in handy if you need to convince a pointy haired boss that it’s something worth exploring.

• 45 hashtags for social change

One of the most common questions I get asked by organizations starting on Twitter is: “How do I know which hashtags to use”? This list of 45 hashtags that are commonly used in the non-profit sector are a good place to start. Socialbrite even includes a PDF so that you can print it and hang it next to your desk.

• Tweets in Translation

Anybody who runs multilingual social media channels knows that translating tweets and staying within the character limit is a real challenge. Here is a graph that shows by how much the character counts normally change when translating tweets from English into 12 other languages.

• “Live with it!” iPhone app

Last but not least, something to make you laugh:  a small, Dutch NGO has created an awesome video in which they spoof Shell’s environmental record. There is an app for that …

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1. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”
2. How a traffic-jam app could help with crisis mapping
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

The panelist for the 90 minutes discussion were:  Jason Cone (Director of Communications, MSF USA), Melissa Fleming (Head of Communications, UNHCR) Claudia Gonzalez (Head of Marketing,The Global Fund) and Daniel Stauffacher (ICT4Peace).

If you have the time, watch the discussion – links are at the bottom of the page. For me, the main points were:

• An HPCR survey showed that a substantial number of aid workers are also active social media users.

For me that shows once more that humanitarian organizations urgently need to assist their staff in using social media responsibly. While NGOs should want their staff to talk about their work, the organizations also have to make sure that their staff knows what is appropriate and what isn’t.

• Traditional media has less and fewer resources to cover foreign news but there is an audience for in-depth foreign news reporting. Humanitarian organizations are increasingly becoming full service news providers, similar to stringers and have to deliver complete packages of text, audio and video to mainstream media. This also means that communicators in the field are expected to deliver to professional standards equal to CNN or the BBC.
• It is much more difficult to emphasize with the fate of a large group of people, than that of an individual. Social media gives NGOs the opportunity to focus on individual stories.
• Humanitarian organizations continue to fail to communicate with beneficiaries. Social media can be a channel through which beneficiaries can talk back.

While this is certainly a possible channel, I personally think that social media cannot be the answer to this issue. We have been talking about this for years and I don’t think that this is a technical problem, it is a cultural problem. Organizations are (for many reasons) simply not focusing on talking to beneficiaries.

• Social media can help humanitarian organizations to get a better picture of the situation on the ground via crowdsourcing and can help the affected people to organize itself.
• Social media is just one tool in a very big toolkit and is frequently not the most appropriate tool (I cannot repeat this often enough).

A recording of the discussion can be downloaded on iTunes  or watched as recorded livestream.

Related posts:

1. Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind
2. Would you let your logisticians manage your Twitter account?
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

The set-up is quite impressive and I think shows what you have to invest, if you are serious about making social media monitoring an integral part of your emergency response operations – unless you rely mainly only the distributed power of volunteers in the crowd. I really hope that AmCross will also make this amazing resource available to other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

And while I can’t see OCHA ever having the resources to build something similar for UN agencies, I  would hope that they at least schedule a visit and take a look.

• Behind the Scenes: The Digital Operations Center of the American Red Cross

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2. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
3. Online training: Tech Tools for Emergency Management

And while the game as such still makes me  uncomfortable, I find their approach to solving the problem quite interesting.

Kim Stephens from idisaster 2.0 wrote a great blog post about how the winning team did it:

• The Social Media Tag Challenge: Crowdscanner describes how they won

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Officially, there is of course no mention of terrorism on the website of “Tag Challenge“, but there can be little doubt that the game is more than an event “conducted in a spirit of fun and curiosity”.

From the FAQ:

“Our goal is to determine whether and how social media can be used to accomplish a realistic, time-sensitive, international law enforcement goal.”

And – why not? TV shows like “America’s Most Wanted” in the US or “Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst” in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have for many years been relying on the public to help solve crimes and catch criminals. Using social media for the same purpose is in many ways only logical.

Then, how come this makes me feel deeply uneasy? I narrowed it down to three issues:

• While the TV-programmes that I am familiar with want people to report sightings of wanted persons, they do not encourage anyone to actively go and look for them. You can of course argue that the “criminals” in the game are not dangerous and that this is therefore acceptable, but I think there can be little doubt that the goal of this exercise is to see how to use social media to find the kind of people who have prices on their heads.
• The organizers encourage the participants to build “networks of spotters and teammates”, which to me is a little too similar to asking people to form a mob.
• While I have no problem with children playing “catch” or “hide and seek” turning a manhunt into a game just feels wrong. It reminds me of a movie I have seen many years ago (it might have been “Fahrenheit 451″, but I’m not sure) where a dissident is fleeing from the government and everybody is asked to step out of their houses and stand on the street, because if everybody was still and watching, nobody could run in anonymity. In short, it feels a little dystopic.

Like any other technology, social media can be used for all kinds of purposes and this “game” makes me deeply uncomfortable.

What are your thought? Please leave a comment below.

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Tracking your every move 

Screenshop of the Waze app. Reports are submitted by pressing one of the icons, the GPS coordinates are being recorded continuously.

Waze does two things: it continuously reports the position of a Waze user’s smart phone via the internet, monitors how fast that person is driving and uses this information to alert others of slow traffic. Admittedly this is also a bit scary and I’m wondering how much bandwidth and battery Waze eats in the process.

Report a collapsed bridge or road block with your smart phone?

The second Waze feature is much more interesting:  users can report hazards and obstacles on the road and, rather than having to fill out a report a la Ushahidi, they can report the most common hazards by pressing images on their screen. Since the phone knows it’s GPS position these reports show up on the shared map in real-time. You can also attach photos to your reports.

I’m really curious to know how easily these categories could be customized for certain cities or dedicated Waze servers so that users in humanitarian emergencies could for example report blocked roads, collapsed bridges or protest marches. Out of curiosity, I contacted Waze to ask them about this, but unfortunately I didn’t get a reply.

Dependent on functioning infrastructure

Obviously Waze is entirely depended on mobile internet being available to its users, something that is simply not realistic in many natural disasters. But it should be possible to develop an offline version which then shares data with the community when being connected to a computer. Clearly, in that case the maps would have to be available offline as well, which is another hassle but not an insurmountable problem.

In any case it might still be an interesting tool for more mid-income countries like Chile or Peru which see many earthquakes and have a robust infrastructure. What I like about it, is that Waze doesn’t require people to learn a complex system. The interface is so intuitive that anybody can understand it.

The bottom line is, Waze is an interesting example how crisis mapping could be made easier. The technology already exists.

What do you think?

Related posts:

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2. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap