The future of Crisis Information Management: Some drivers

1. Small ideas
Sanjana Hattotuwa
TED Fellow

2. Focus on process, not just spikes
Narrow band over time adds richness, full spectrum adds context
Local language(s)
Culture
Local actors
Diaspora
Hagiography and myth
Identity and power
Partisan politics
Regional power blocs
Inequity
Demographics (Youth)
Civic media
Verbal storytelling

3. filter bubbles
• "A Squirrel Dying In Your Front Yard May Be More Relevant To Your Interests Right Now Than
People Dying In Africa", Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook
• Human gatekeepers being replaced by algorithmic gatekeepers.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
• A new, pervasive, almost invisible, systemic filtering?

4. filtering to counter filter bubbles
• Ushahidi SwiftRiver | http://ushahidi.com/products/swiftriver-platform
SwiftRiver is a platform that helps people make sense
of a lot of information in a short amount of time.
In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and
verification of real-time data from channels like
Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb0Gs7vtrgk

5. open data

6. open data

7. open data in government

8. open data in government

9. open data by NGOs

10. open data on NGOs

11. CiM drivers from other domains
• Music industry (pattern based search, e.g. Pandora’s technical + human indexing), social
networking (group collaboration,e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook), social networking search (e.g.
Grepling), mobile phone apps (e.g. Guardly), marketing engines (e.g. adaptive persuasion
profiling), digital forensics (e.g. hyperspectral imaging with UAVs), ground truth profiling (e.g.
UNOSAT images on Sri Lanka) many sourcing for situational awareness (e.g. Microsoft
Photosynth), Open Data Initiatives (e.g. British, US govt’s, World Bank), visualisation (e.g.
Infomous)

12. Thank you
sanjanahattotuwa@ict4peace.org