1. Expanding Capacity and Capability:
Inclusion of Participatory Culture, Technology and Open Data
in Crisis Management
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Emergency Risk Communications Embedment Meeting (#cdcem #smem)
June 28, 2011
Atlanta, Georgia
Heather Blanchard
Co Founder, CrisisCommons
www.crisiscommons.org
heather@crisiscommons.org
Twitter/Skype: @poplifegirl
Notes from Heather Blanchard: https://docs.google.com/document/d/
1Uhm5GAV60VCxaIktE8dqrA7MR6wgKw-TN17bwfX26lI/edit?hl=en_US

2. Participatory Culture -
Future of Societal Good
• People are reporting what they see and hear
• People are directing resources to real or perceived
needs
• People are talking about or have a general view about
brand/organization and the ability to “trust” your brand/
organization
• Employees can be sharing what they know/see about the
company knowingly or unknowingly via their friends
• Technology volunteers and the public are aggregating and
mapping open related to the crisis, which could include
data about your company
• Government at all levels are making decisions which will
affect your ability to operate

3. Right Here, Right Now
Data at the Right Time and the Right Place

4. Can’t Get There
From Here
• Can’t get to the data -
Access, culture
• Can’t use the data -
Technical skill, culture
• Can’t understand the data -
Filtering, visualization
• Can’t use data together -
Data standards

5. The New Deal
• Common hub
• Ubiquitous connection
• Social & cultural adoption, new norms
• Participatory, self organizing &
contributing, reuse
• Geolocation

6. Data Everywhere.
It is Here To Stay.
Making Data Consumer Adoption

7. Global Sensory
Network
Tap The Wisdom of Your Own People

8. Rainbow of Sources
Justin Grimes - iMLS, 2008

9. Our Story

10. CrisisCamp Haiti
•
Columbia
Call to action; global footprint
• 62 events, 8 countries, 30 cities
• Low barrier to entry; replicable
• 2,300+ highly skilled volunteers United Kingdom
• Recognized by CROs and VTCs
• Focus on mapping, missing
persons, language and search Canada
• Surge capacity for existing projects
France

11. What We Learned
• Disasters can create opportunities for innovation, rules
relax, people are willing to be open to solutions from
anywhere
• Disasters galvanize participatory culture = “crisis crowd”
• Disasters can benefit from existing programs with
training and leadership have the best change in effectively
harness the emerging crisis crowd into their existing
community
• Disaster response requests need to originate from the
local area/field

12. Potential of
Technology Volunteers
• Post-Disaster Basemap: OpenStreetMap
• Remote Building Assessment: GEO-CAN
• Monitoring: Big Idea with the Gulf Coast
Oil Spill
• Crisis Content/Trends: Japan Earthquake

13. Key is Data,
Not Platform
• Many emergency management/civil authorities don’t
have access to tools and resources or partnerships
they need to harness additional capability/capacity
• Sometimes if there are resources, its limited to one
person
• Little focus on data preparedness; process
• Focus on data (and its availability) not platforms

14. United Nations
Office for the
Coordination of
Humanitarian
Affairs

16. What We Learned
Official/Affiliated Response Sources Public Sources
Existing Data
Population - Boundaries - Hydrology - Hypsography - Transportation/Roads - Social Capital
Before Crisis Community Indicators Before Crisis
After Crisis Power - Telecommunications - Weather - Alternative Access to Internet - After Crisis
Food - Fuel - Shelter - Transportation - Health Care
Crisis Specific
Self-Directed Public Safety Reporting - Hazard Identification -
Service Disruption Identifier - Public Sentiment - Status Sharing - Resource Management
Need for Data Preparedness

17. Learning from Japan
• Need for a data coordination role
• Need for “pre positioned” open data profiles
• Need for increased GIS practitioners to work
along side of crisis mappers
• Need to turn citizen content into GIS layers
• Need for organizations affiliated with the crisis
to provide data feeds (i.e. private sector,
government response agencies)

18. Observations
• Don’t create a platform expecting people to come
to you, play in an open data space
• Release resources for use (i.e. data, globes,
imagery)
• Technology volunteers want to help, they will
compass towards projects which support people in
need (not institutions)
• Technology volunteers do not support military or
national security objectives

19. Recommendations
to the U.S. Congress
• Inclusion of participatory communities like volunteer
technology communities
• Create mission assignments which provide a compass for
participatory communities
• Engagement in experimentation and demonstration
projects outside organizational boundaries, inclusion of
risk
• Investment in data preparedness

20. Last Thought
• Future of work will have to plan for people
without pre-existing engagement, location
agnostic, skill and collaboration based
• Coordination across the field is necessary, value
can be harnessed by planning for and providing a
compass to encourage efforts to productive use
• Social media is a term of today, we don’t know
what will be tomorrow. We do know its all
about data, location and context

21. Questions?

22. Heather Blanchard
Co Founder
CrisisCommons
heather@crisiscommons.org
703.593.3823
twitter/skype: poplifegirl
www.facebook.com/heather.blanchard
www.linkedin.com/in/hblancha
Thanks!