• Audience
• Why take these actions
• Checklist
• Free Google Tools
• Case Study
• TT Posts

Checklist for sharing information during a crisis

Google Crisis Response Website

Excerpts from a Google doc titled:
How your information can be quickly & widely distributed in a crisis

Audience

Individuals and organizations (e.g., government, nonprofit, schools, utilities) with information important to the public during times of crisis (e.g., transit information, power outages, shelter lists, and weather paths).

Why take these actions

When a crisis strikes, you'll want to get information out to the public as quickly and broadly as possible so that people can take action. Unfortunately, a lot of technical and organizational challenges arise during times of crisis that get in the way of these goals: large volumes of traffic crash websites, people duplicate work, and data gets lost in the shuffle. These following tips will help you prepare your technology to stay up in times of crisis and make it possible for others to access and distribute your information.

Checklist

Review this checklist with your Information Technology (IT) staff or technical service provider/s:

• Websites
  • Ask that in a time of crisis your websites can be quickly converted to only show static content in order to reduce server load, or the work your machines need to do, to handle spikes in website visitors during events.
  • Work with your IT team or vendors to develop a backup plan for website to handle any large increases in traffic.
• Social media
  • Set up social tools to rapidly inform the public about new information during a crisis. Build your subscriber base by including your social media property information in your communications (websites, blogs, etc.). Update your social media pages regularly so people get used to relying on you for certain types and quality of information.
  • Arrange for multiple staff members to be trained on these tools and have an organization-level login for the accounts in case the regular account owner is unavailable.
• Data Publishing: Publish all critical information on your website using these tools and standards:
  • Web feeds, such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), make it quick and easy to update your content and to send those updates to interested parties who subscribe.
  • Open standards, like Keyhole Markup Language (KML) or the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), are better than posting only PDFs on your websites. Although PDFs enable people to take the information offline, they also increase the load on your servers and make it difficult to easily re-share or combine your data with other information to create more useful visualizations. PDFs also do not work well as well on mobile devices, which are highly utilized during crisis events. Failure to use open standards may result in duplication of work, or delays in achieving your goals.
  • Structured files that conform to widely known open standards like Extensible Markup Language (XML), Comma Separated Values (CSV), and JavaScipt Project Notation (JSON) allow other individuals or computer systems to understand your information, and automatically ingest and share it. By publishing the content in a way that can be easily mapped or converted by a 3rd party provider, everyone benefits.
  • Open and sharable licenses, or those considered public domain (copyright-free), permit other groups to quickly consume the data without worrying unnecessarily about licensing issues. Otherwise, people might not re-distribute your content for fear of not having the rights to do so. Mark your licenses clearly on your website and in the files you publish.
  • Time stamps let those consuming the information know how old the data is and when it was last updated so they can decide whether to re-share the data.
  • KML format enables your geographic data, such the location of shelters or the movement of storm paths, to appear on certain geographic Google products like Google Earth and Google Maps, and to be shared across many mapping tools on the web.

Free Google Tools

• These products can help you implement the checklist above. Give them a try.
  • Google Fusion Tables allows you to host, analyze, collaborate on, and present huge amounts of data through a tool that updates automatically. This works for both geographic information that you can turn into maps, and other types of information that you can turn into charts and tables. It can handle a large number of visitors accessing your information at the same time, reducing the chance your information will go down in a crisis.
  • For simple maps, with only a few points, you can create a custom map in Google Maps. This feature also allows easy collaboration and sharing.

Case Study

Hurricane Irene, Vermont, USA: After Hurricane Irene passed New York, it made its way across Vermont, dropping massive quantities of rain, overflowing many rivers and streams. Many roads and bridges were washed out or damaged, and numerous towns were totally cut off. The Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) kept close track of the status of state roads and bridges as they were repaired, but their web infrastructure was ill-suited to meet the high demand brought on by the crisis. In order to adjust to this heavy volume and disseminate critical information to the public, VTrans published a KML feed of their road and bridge status data, and made it available through a Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) based map which was easily published on the VTrans website, as well as the websites of other state agencies and news outlets. Thousands of citizens in Vermont benefited from the information on this map.

TT Posts

Posts from 2007 at ToledoTalk.com

• Lucas County Small Crisis Team
• Lucas County Emergency Vehicle
• Amateur Radio Operators
• Reporting on the San Diego County fires
• Network News in a Box

My comments from the 2007 San Diego County fires Toledo Talk thread:

comment one ...

What about disseminating information? What's the local process for informing the public in a timely fashion? What's the protocol for sharing information with other counties, including those across the state line? I wonder if area crisis teams in the future will exploit and promote the use of social media to inform people regardless of the size of the disaster?

Coordination by the local media and agencies for TV, radio, and Web is needed. Don't forget the ham operators and citizen eyewitness accounts and collecting and distributing that information.

All of these Web services could be used, and they're free or cost little. Nothing to install. The software and information are hosted on the servers of these Web companies.

• Wordpress or Typepad [or Blogger ] - blog for long informational posts.
• Google - maps for a visual display of affected areas, shelters, etc.
• Twitter - micro blog service for rapid-fire updating. Citizens can subscribe to the crisis twitter account to receive updates on their cell phones. The owners of the twitter account can post from their cell phone. Web version exists too.
• flickr or photobucket - photo sharing
• YouTube - video sharing
• Pbwiki or Wikia - wiki for organizing the information and services listed above. Could be used as a starting point or home page.

Those without power, Internet access, and cell phones, can get updates from a battery-operated radio, assuming the radio station has power. If the radio station or stations do not have power, what's the backup plan for broadcasting? Can another station in the area be used, assuming it's not a widespread power outage, like what the public station in San Diego managed to do during their fires last month?

Those with power can continue to update the Web services. Radio and TV stations capable of broadcasting to those without power can read the info posted on the Web services. The information released by the media and government agencies should be replicated on some Web service for lookup later by those who happen to miss the radio or TV broadcast.

comment two

I should have mentioned that all of the above Web services, except for the Google maps app, can syndicate its content through RSS feeds, which means one site can scarf up all the RSS feeds from all the Web services used and display the info on one page. Or the single site could use a separate page for each RSS feed. The Google map or maps can be embedded into this single site that's aggregating the RSS feeds.

In other words, while the crisis teams, media, etc. are using multiple Web services to distribute information, as long as all the information can be syndicated with RSS, then the public only needs to know the URL to one site. The "aggregator site" would contain links to all the Web services used and to the Web sites for the media and government agencies. RSS feeds only contain the most recent 10 to 20 or so posts. A user may need to go to the Wordpress, Twitter, or media site to see old postings.

During the San Diego County fires last month, San Diego's PBS station KPBS actively maintained a Twitter page, and KPBS displayed their twitter postings on the front page of their station's Web site by snagging their twitter RSS feed. KPBS also created a fascinating Google fire and shelter map. KPBS streamed their radio broadcasts over the Internet, informing those beyond radio range. Multiple ways to keep the public informed.

One service I left out in the previous comment was Craigslist and its forums. http://toledo.craigslist.org/forums/. Craigslist forums have been used as a communication tool in the past for other natural disasters.

#emergency - #collaboration - #communication - #local