Starfish Community

HISG is always trying to improve communication and information sharing during disaster response. Part of this is a "one-stop shop" website where responders and organizations can get updated information, and teams inside the disaster zone can share urgent needs and information with a large audience. It is a delicate process, because while the web is a fantastic tool for getting information out, we never want to become too reliant on an internet connection during a disaster.

In reading through this posting, I'm adding the generic IDR tag as it appears to me to be relevant beyond just pure IT stuff. Regarding the comment about the tool... the strength of the tool can be impacted by the technological implementation, but the relationships behind those using the tool ultimately is the key.

I agree with your initial posting... and I'm gonna add my vote to it! :-)

Is this site also going to have your Spot Reports and or your SitReps?

Here's a website that provides status updates on disasters worldwide: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/doc106?OpenForm

Is there any merit to creating a disaster specific twitter account that could provide instant updates? This of course, assumes intact mobile communication. But might be helpful outside the actual disaster zone.

I may be missing something, but creating accounts can help.

On the other hand, it seems like the real issue is getting a set of people sharing common hashes in the tweets. Getting everyone to include something like #IDR-(eventname) - example: #IDRpadangquake - so people can post and track others focused on a common subject is a bit more flexible.

Thoughts?

Matt, I don't know that in the event of a real disaster, a coordinated tweet effort would be useful, especially if our partners are not already used to using twitter. However, we should try using hashes to find and aggregate the tweets that do come in from the general public during a disaster to see how we can incorporate that into our reports. In the next disaster, the Vancouver office is going to give it a try and see if we can get valuable first hand accounts during a disaster.

This morning I was in a discussion with one of our partners about how to better facilitate the sharing of information. For example, this particular partner works in China, if a disaster was to hit China he would want a way to get information about the diasaster in China to share with the various organizations that he supports in China. I am thinking that some kind of a feed similar to Twitter where people could post information on our site with certain tags would be a great tool.

I also feel Twitter is a good tool and we should continue to research it's use for such situations when it comes to real time news and information coming out of the various disasters. However, if Twitter is going to be used as a tool we need to choose a certain set of search terms. There is too much useless stuff floating around on Twitter.