Mobile phones can be a great tool to help people in emergencies. To help organizations or activists decide when and how to use SMS, the GSMA recently published a draft “Code of Conduct for the Use of SMS in Natural Disaster”.
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 “Social Media for Good roundup” is an infrequent series of posts where I share interesting links I found on the web. This week with: Open Street Map for dummies, examples of multimedia storytelling, social media guidance for civil servants, community based humanitarian response and tech tools for emergency management.
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.
I have just spent a few days brainstorming on a policy paper about how information collection and analysis can be improved to lead to better decision making in times of crisis. This blog post contains some of our central thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think about them.
One of the most promising uses of social media in disasters is for remote assessments of situations on the ground. “Geofeedia” just made this job easier.
Patrick Meier visited the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington D.C. and got a tour of the brand new Digital Operations Center which AmCross is using to monitor social media during emergencies.
As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.
