Citizens Need Skills For Real Time Information

You are here: Home / Blog

Citizens Need Skills For Real Time Information

December 15, 2012

No Comments

A new trend analysis published by UK innovation consultants PSFK could equally serve as the manifesto for the Citizense website. Documenting 11 trends that describe the “Future of Real Time Information”, the report and associated slideshow touches on many of the key themes that Citizense aims to investigate in detail.

PSFK presents Future Of Real-Time Information from PSFK

Commissioned by the United Nations Global Pulse Team, the report posits that the new wave of real time technologies will enable local communities to “create new solutions that support the care and well-being of the world’s population”.

The authors – who are selling copies of the full report for $150 – suggest:

“We intend for it to be openly shared around the globe between communities, development agencies, academia and other organizations. The aim of the report is to highlight the opportunities that exist for organizations, large or small. In particular, the “left field” examples of data capture and use are published in hope of showcasing how organizations can leap-frog IT investment and still significantly improve the monitoring capabilities.”

The fascinating slideshow embedded here shows the power smart city technology and opendata access policies could have for citizens in cities around the world. Citizense will continue to document examples where communities are taking ownership of these new technologies, as well as providing the resources to enable skills development amongst those keen to participate more actively in the real time information world around them.

It’s A Disaster! Geospatial Technology Conference Now On

December 13, 2012

No Comments

Geospatial Technology conference looks at its potential in natural disaster

This week’s International Conference on Geo-information for Disaster Management is being held in Enschede in the Netherlands. Organisers will ask participants to find steady ground in a new workshop activity aimed at pooling skills and ideas about using data and sensor technologies to respond to natural disasters.

Operational CIOs from around the world will work with emergency services field operatives to trial a realtime response to an earthquake scenario, having to make use of whatever technology and data the group can get their hands on from the exercise field at Twente Military Airport base.

Best practices in harnessing military information, field transport, and urban and police systems will be developed on the fly and documented for the geographical information and disaster management workforce.

geospatial technology The exercise will conclude the conference proceedings which will focus on latest techniques in:

Data modelling and visualisation
Sensor and communication networks
User requirements and best practices.

Keynote speakers include:

Ed Parsons: Geospatial Technologist of Google,
Mark Neerincx: Extensive experience in fundamental and applied research on human-computer interaction for defense, security and health.

Keep up with conference proceedings and presentations at http://www.gi4dm.net/2012/

Our Facebook poll is still open...

Don’t forget to answer our facebook poll on what resources you want from citizense to participate in crisis mapping

The Smart Citizen In A Disaster

December 12, 2012

No Comments

Citizen-led crisis communications face Hurricane Sandy head-on

What information would you need to protect yourself during a natural disaster? How would you let others know of potential dangers caused by floods, fallen trees, or damaged buildings? Crisis communications responses to the recent Hurricane Sandy disaster provide an insight into how local residents of smart cities are sharing information as part of an emergency communications network.

What information do local neighborhoods need before, during and after a natural disaster? The UN’s Disaster Preparedness List of Indicators is fairly useless in helping define the nuts and bolts of what information can make a difference to people’s lives. That charter speaks more of the broad need for citizens to be trained in data systems and for there to be an information network in place, but shies away from mentioning what sort of information can help people build resilience in the face of disaster.

For New York, people needed to know:

What public transport is operating
What areas are evacuated and where to find a relative who lives in an evacuation zone
Where to eat during power blackouts
What roads and transport routes are too dangerous to use
What community services are open?
How best to get a business back up and running after the hurricane.

Hurricane Sandy hit New York from October 26, the week before the national elections. This meant that in addition to the usual crisis communications information, last minute polling booths needed to be established and residents informed of how they could still vote when the original voting sites were no longer operational.

The election timing may have been a boon to support for US Federal funding of infrastructure for a smart city emergency communications network. Industry site sensys reports a new cooperative policy culture emerged from the Federal level down to the local. Petty turf boundaries were superseded by a new recognition that a timely and effective assessment and disaster response could be cultivated from well-coordinated geospatial information coupled with crowd-sourced data such as social media and home-made video.

Emergency communications network tools and maps

The New York Times created a number of data visualizations and information management aids to support local residents stay informed. This included a map of all Hurricane Sandy-related deaths and regularly updated data on:

Subways and Buses

Power Failures

Tunnels, Trains and Airports

Wastewater

Flooding

Fires

Wind

The philanthropic-funded Crisis Mapping project managed by Google Emergency Response Team also produced a map with feeds from government bodies, the city’s open data platform and community-based social media conversations. A New York City map showed weather details and could be filtered to show any number of data sources including:

Latest alerts, NYC Emergency Mgmt
City of New York on Twitter
NYC Emergency Mgmt on Facebook
WNYC Transit Tracker
NYC.gov information
Damage Assessments and Power Info
Volunteer Opportunities
Sandy-related YouTube videos
Senior services
Shelters and recovery centers

NYC food distribution points
Red Cross shelters
NYC evacuation centers
FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers
Road Conditions
Emergency Alerts
Local emergency Twitter feeds
Public Alerts
Weather radar (precipitation)
Weather and observations[/bullets]

Following the crisis, a nearby city authority Fairfax County in Vermont published a metrics report showing how local citizens made use of emergency response data. For example, their blog jumped to 384,651 views with just over 600 comments during the storm, and 111 local residents shared hyperlocal information for a crowdsourced crisis map detailing power failures, road hazards, and location of volunteer resources. This map was viewed by over 12,000 residents during the days of the storm and the weeks following.

The next steps for citizen-participation in crisis communications

While there was a high level of community mobilization in sharing information during the hurricane, observers from the iDisaster website, which tracks the use of social media as an emergency management tool, made the following recommendations to support more active citizen engagement in future:

Organizations should plan how to redirect calls for assistance and information requests that may come through via social media channels. Trying to educate citizens about not using twitter to ask for emergency assistance needs to give way to creating a system in which citizens’ calls for helps could be directed from wherever they come from.
Community members should be trained up as Virtual Operations Support Team volunteers to assist with responding to the influx of social media requests at key local authority and emergency management services.
Communicators need to package information so that it can be accessed in bite-size chunks on mobile devices by local residents needing to be kept informed.
Emergency shelters and resource centers need to make it easy for people to recharge their mobile phones, as this was how local citizens accessed up to date information and shared warnings for others via social media.

What you can do in your city

Ask your local emergency management services to start up a volunteer social media support team program to enlist local citizens in helping with crisis communications during an emergency like Hurricane Sandy.
Start collecting different mobile phone recharger cables and donate them to your local Red Cross or other body responsible for providing recovery shelters during crises.
Train yourself or members of your local community group in how to make short videos showing a city problem like a road blockage or overflowing drain, so that citizens can help feed in hyperlocal crisis communications information.
Check out the Google Crisis Maps and Ushahadi community-created maps. Who should take responsibility for coordinating this element of an emergency communications network like this in your city?

Understand and improve crisis communications in your smart city

What citizen-accessible resources would you like to help you contribute to disaster management activities in your city? Head to our Facebook page and vote for which resource you would Citizense to create: volunteer training kits, a crisis mapping ebook guide, or a video tutorial on making disaster documented videos!

iCity Project Gives Developers A Smart City Platform

December 11, 2012

No Comments

The iCity project, funded in part by the European Commission, has announced a call for enterprises, citizen groups, and innovators to participate in designing services using an open data ecosystem. This model of smart cities empowerment aims to generate new public service projects by facilitating access to municipal data, digital assets and city infrastructure.

The project – with a total cost of €5.21m – will operate until the end of 2014, and is a collaboration amongst the cities of Barcelona, Bologna, Genova and London.

iCity Project Special Interest Group

A Special Interest Group currently being set up will allow developers early access to iCity project resources. It will encourage the creation of public service solutions using the iCity platform:

Developers can register online at http://www.icityproject.com/#, but be warned the autocomplete form can be unwieldy as finegrain location data left our computer freezing for several seconds when trying to input our details!

62 entities have already joined the group, including apps developers, city authorities and institutions, research labs, and media consultancies.

A presentation overview of the planned infrastructure has been developed by the project team to demonstrate how the platform works:

You can follow the iCity Project twitter stream or keep up with our Facebook page to receive news updates on this and other smart cities world initiatives.

Citizense has registered to be a part of the iCity Project and we look forward to providing reports on our involvement regularly at this site. Let us know on our Facebook page if you would like to be part of Citizense’s iCity Project volunteer team.