Showing posts with label presentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label presentation. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

What happened at Innovation GovCamp 2014 (Canberra)

Last Saturday Australia's first national GovCamp was held as part of the Innovation Month program.

Innovation GovCamp 2014 involved events in six locations across Australia. Over 500 people registered to attend.

I attended (and helped organise) the event in Canberra, at the Inspire Centre at the University of Canberra.

It was a good day - with planned and impromptu discussions across five topic streams. There were a few technical issues with live broadcasting national sessions to all six locations, however we were able to adapt around this.

A report is being compiled by the national organisers, John Wells and Allison Hornery, however I've also put together a video slideshow that tells the story of the day, from my perspective.

The slideshow (embedded below) was compiled from the photos the camera I wore took. Called a Narrative Clip, and used for 'lifestreaming' the camera was mounted (visibly) on my lapel, and automatically took a photo every 30 seconds.

The Narrative Clip was lent to me by Alexander Hayes, an international expert on emerging technologies and Professional Associate with the College of Adjuncts at the University of Canberra, INSPIRE Centre.

The video slideshow was cut-down from the 800+ photos the Narrative Clip took throughout the day.

It was my first experience using a wearable electronic device for that length of time. I found that while it did capture some interesting moments, a large number of the automatic photographs were of not-so interesting moments or simply too blurred for use.

I did reduce the size of the photos (and therefore their resolution if viewed full screen) to accelerate the process of producing the video slideshow.



Read full post...

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Learning how to crowd fund - and launch of Social Media Planner Kickstarter

This morning at BarCamp Canberra I gave the presentation below on how to setup a crowdfunding campaign, based on my personal experience setting up a Kickstarter for Social Media Planner.

For people interested in crowdfunding I've embedded my presentation below.

If you're interested in learning more about Social Media Planner, and potentially backing it, see: kickstarter.com/projects/socialmediaplanner/social-media-planner


Read full post...

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Save the date for BarCamp Canberra - 15 March 2014

The 7th annual BarCamp Canberra has just been announced and will be taking place on Saturday 15 March this year at the Gungahlin Library.

BarCamp is a free day-long event where several hundred people gather to share insights and ideas on a range of topics including design, IT, public service and more.

It's well worth attending and, if you're something you wish to say, presenting at as well.

The unorganisers (which includes me) are looking for people willing to help out on the day and we welcome sponsorship enquiries.

For more information on the event, what a BarCamp is and how to attend or help support BarCamp Canberra, visit barcampcanberra.org

Read full post...

Friday, November 29, 2013

What will future digital services in government look like?

On Wednesday I attended Intrepid Minds' Digital Service Delivery in Government conference. It was a good conference, with decent attendance and an excellent range of speakers (moving far beyond the usual suspects).

At the event I gave a presentation on the future of digital service delivery - a topic which let me discuss some (and by no means all) of the new technologies and trends on our horizon.

I probably didn't go quite futuristic enough on some areas. One area I saw as being five years out, virtual service officers in shopfronts, is already in use by Centrelink (as I was told by a DHS representative at the conference). The future can creep up on us quickly!

However my overall message was not about any specific services or trends - it was about the need for governments to closely consider the consequences of the decisions they make today.

Laws governments create, or technologies or approaches agencies choose, can turn into blind alleys or have expensive and damaging consequences.

While government doesn't generally seek to be an early adopter, it still has enormous influence over how society is shaped through how laws are crafted and grant or assistance programs are designed.

This means that even when governments see certain areas as too immature or risky to get involved with, they can still influence their development and indirectly select for or against certain trends.

We're at a point in history when change is happening too fast to ignore, challenging institutions designed for a slower-changing society. Government needs to continue delivering - but do so in a flexible and agile way that reduces the risk of getting locked into specific shapes or systems that can rapidly shift. To do this, the public service must strengthen its capability to scan the horizon, learn how to fail fast and become better at testing and iterating, using open approaches and platforms and identifying and engaging the right stakeholders.

In the conference there were some strong views for and against some of the ideas I presented - which is a good thing. We need to have these discussions now to ensure that the influence governments have, and the choices they makes, continue to deliver positive social and economic outcomes for society and for within government itself.

Below are my slides. While they don't provide the same depth as my presentation, they may still be useful in stimulating thinking.

Note: All images from The Jetsons are copyright Hanna-Barbera

Read full post...

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Government as a Social Machine featuring Professor Dame Wendy Hall

I blogged today from the Government as a Social Machine forum hosted by ANZSOG and featuring Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton in the UK.

The discussion involved a diverse group of stakeholders from public and private sector organisations and covered the history of the internet and the challenges organisations, particularly governments, and citizens face in adapting to the new knowledge-rich, engagement-rich worked enabled by global real-time distributed communication systems.

Wendy also presented at a NICTA/OKFN event this afternoon, and is presenting at the Semantic Web Conference in Sydney later this week and in Victoria next week at the first Digital Literacy event being held by the Victorian public service (details of most of these events are in my Gov 2.0 calendar to the left).

Wendy opened with a story from before the web, on how no-one predicted the Internet, despite some earlier thinkers, such as Vannevar Bush, who foresaw a memory device (memex) in his brilliant work 'As we may think' in 1945, which contained many of the elements of modern computing systems.

She also discussed Ted Nelson, who coined the terms hypertext and hyperlinks back in the 1960s and Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse, windows and much of the user interface that we find familiar today. In fact Doug gave the 'mother of all demos' which foresaw modern computers and the web.

Wendy recalled that when she met Tim Berners-Lee at the Hypertext conference in 1991 (which rejected Tim's paper on the web), she thought it was presumptuous that he had named the hypertext system he had invented the 'World-Wide Web', presuming that people around the world would use it.

At the time she didn't think the web was original or breakthrough - "how wrong you can be", she said.

Wendy said that Tim's strategy was to give away the web, making it an open protocol and standard - universally free to use and not controlled by any organisation. She said that otherwise Tim felt that the web would not grow or thrive, but be locked down by political, academic or commercial interests.

She also said that Tim believed that to make the web scale, it had to be able to fail. While many at the time believed that a system which could dead-end, linking to a non-existent page, would turn away users, Tim strategically introduced the '404 error' (which appears when a web page isn't found) to encourage individuals and organisations to build out the web, rather than limit it.

Wendy asked whether we could have built the web another way. She believes that we may have to at some point as the web is only 23 years old, "barely out of nappies".

Wendy also believes that there's many ways to kill or corrupt the web, such as having specific organisations or governments control it - however we don't really know the outcome of these scenarios as we haven't had those experiences yet.

She did ask about what if the Internet disappeared overnight - how would it impact on individuals, organisations, societies, even countries?

The impact of a one-day shutdown of Wikipedia was immense (she said) during the SOPA protest, and there is an increasing risk in some developed nations that blackouts, caused by inadequate electricity supplies, could cause a blackout of information, with people unable to access the information they need to cope with the situation.

Wendy also said that when Tim created the web he understood that it had to include an easy way to write, as well as read, web pages - leading to the development of his first web browser, which was also an editor.

Wendy said that in 1996-8 while the web was growing, the Internet wasn't sufficiently mature for broader use, due to difficulties with slow modems, finding information (pre-Google) and the cost of computers - making categories such as online shopping inconvenient.

However now the technologies have matured Wendy believes that High Streets will disappear. She said that the UK government's decision to sell off the Royal Mail, which was instituted in the Victorian era, is a sign of this change flowing through the system.

Wendy said that years ago she consulted to the Royal Mail, highlighting to them that the new business they needed to dominate was parcel delivery, based on online sales "however they didn't get it".

Wendy also said that "it is very hard to convince the big juggernauts of industry, including government, to change".

She said that, for example, large organisations seem to believe that people will always read books - Wendy believes that yes they will read, but not necessarily books.

She recalled telling biologists years ago that they would be reading papers online. They retorted that the Internet was so slow and computers so heavy that they would never be able to read their papers on the train. Wendy said, "Now, ten years on, biologists are reading their papers on the train using iPads."

Wendy said that Google was inconceivable before the web, and engineers had 'proven' it wasn't possible to quickly index huge amounts of information.

However she said that since Google, the world has changed - and Google is also no longer just a search engine, they are incredibly diverse, "there are at least 2,000 driverless Google cars driving around San Francisco".

Wendy believes that once an organisation has a majority of people using it on a network it becomes very difficult to dislodge. Google, eBay, Facebook and now Twitter are giants, at least in the English-speaking world - different titans exist in China.

Wendy opined that Google may be the James Bond villain of the future - because it knows what you search for, "everyone has searched for something they would not want to be made public". She believes that if Blofeld took over Google they would have something over every politicians.

However, Wendy said, when used benignly or even for commercial profit, Google is fine. She also believes many other industries are in a similar position of potential control over society.

Wendy also believes that even before the arrival of social networking "we should have known how much people would want to write about themselves, take photos, videos and share, based on what we knew about human psychology and behaviour".

Wendy said there is now an expectation that people can find anything, any knowledge online and if an organisation, product, place or individual doesn't have an online presence "they don't exist." As a result, Wendy believes that the web should be the first way any new entity is introduced or promoted.

Wendy said that while Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology and helps set the standards, we (globally) have created the web. We write the websites, blogs and micro blogs. We make the links and the apps. "The web doesn't have shareholders or owners - we are collectively the creators and custodians of the web."

She said that the web exists because we want it to be there, and it will keep existing as long as we want it to exist, so we all have a responsibility to ensure it is a place we wish to frequent.

When people ask her about issues online, she tells them that we didn't make the streets safer by imposing curfews - similarly we need to create the right culture on the web, not create legal restrictions.

Wendy said that Wikipedia was started as an experiment - even Jimmy Wales didn't believe it would work - however it is now equivalent to 1,900 volumes of an encyclopedia, most of which is very accurate. It has grown its own governance, it wasn't invented ahead of time, a lesson for organisations today.

Wendy also said that YouTube is another giant attractor to the web, the place for storing and sharing videos - now owned by Google.

Wendy believes that if an alien had came to earth a hundred years ago and then returned today they would find everything had changed - except possibly education, which is now being transformed by MOOCs. The first platform for MOOCs has also been bought by Google, which is developing it as an open source platform. She asked "who will be the university of the future? Google."

After the break Wendy took questions, giving a view that while cybersecurity is a risk to society, it is not a risk to the web. She commented that it was an area of high expenditure for the UK government.

She also said, in response to comments at morning tea about people being advised not to trust Wikipedia as a reference, that Wikipedia is at least as trustworthy and accurate as printed encyclopedias, plus it has a faster error correction rate. Plus, she said, we create Wikipedia, so it is what we wish to make it.

Wendy also believes that privacy won't kill the web, young people are growing up with different concepts of privacy and will adapt their approach and the web to suit their values.

However she believes that blackouts, siloisation and/or the end of a level playing field for creating and publishing content would end the web. Wendy said that net neutrality is also important. Without it we would lose the level playing field and commercial or ideological interests could control publishing and access to the web.

One of the crowd has commented that probably government is the biggest risk to the Internet, and Wendy says that she has concerns over legislators making decisions about an ecosystem they do not understand, which can lead to all kinds of unforeseen and undesirable consequences.

Wendy said it is hard to dictate in the web, to get people to use something they don't want to use. To get the network effect requires co-creation, meaning that government must work with communities collaboratively to develop platforms which benefit both.

An ABS representative said that they are now opening up a lot of data through APIs and unleashing developers through GovHacks to co-create new tools and services, however it is still a not insignificant challenge to get people within government to just agree on a common definition for Australia or Sydney, to allow datasets to correlate across agency.

Wendy next talked about Twitter, and how its real-time nature can support, even drive, community movements, "the way bad news spreads now is via Twitter. It is a mechanism for warning people to get out."

She said the interesting thing about Twitter is that it is being co-created, with functions like RT, MT and hashtags invented by the community.

Wendy believes co-creation is critical for the web, not only codesigning systems, but using systems which allow people to add value as they go about their daily interactions, such as via ReCAPTCH and Duolingo.

Wendy then talked about the semantic web, a web of data, saying it was in Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the Web. However without sufficient data online (she said) we cannot experiment to find out what this will become or create the network effect, where people share and reshape data and create services or new visualisations with it.

She wrote a paper with Tim in 1996 which identified four principles for the Semantic Web, however says that the commercial sector still didn't get open data, hugging it tight.

Then governments began opening data based on discussions with Tim and others, leading to President Obama's declaration and a cascade of open data releases by governments around the world and initiatives like the Open Data Institute.

Wendy used an example of UK prescribing data, how open data allowed the NHS to identify 200 million pounds in savings each year.

Wendy said that while engineers and scientists often think of the web as a technological byproduct of a set of simple standards, it is a socio-technical construct, effectively a 'social machine' co-created through interactions between technology and millions of humans.

The technologies that underpin the web didn't create the web - people did, providing the content, linkages and developing, sharing and using the apps and websites that sit on it. However without the technology the web could also not exist.

Wendy said that social machines start with an incomplete specification that evolves and grows to cover more of the problem via interactions. They achieve participation through local incentives and the network effect, eventually succeeding through a process of rapid trial and error involving subsets of participants.

Wendy is working on understanding social machines through a 'web observatory' at Southhampton University that observes, monitors and classifies social machines as they evolve. She said this will also become an early warning system for detecting new disruptive social machines and identifying the 'tipping points' where they become ubiquitous.

Her group is studying Twitter networks, as well as Wikipedia and YouTube, amongst other services, to understand 'activity pulses' and how they help explain social movements and trends. For example, Wikipedia was a better indicator of a trend around 'Gangnam style' than Google with the trend occurring a month earlier on Wikipedia.

She asked how does Government, potentially the original social machine (as one audience member commented), transform itself to take advantage of digital channels to be a better social machine?

How do governments employ gamification, the network effect and web observatories to develop and deliver better policies and services?

How do we address the challenges of the 24-hr news cycle, election cycles and other factors which make developing and maintaining social machines difficult?

Wendy said she can't help reflecting back on governments from Victorian times, the 19th century, that created amazing long-lasting infrastructure in Britain that still serves the population today. She believes they were amazing social machines and still have lessons to teach us today on how to transform government to address the challenges of the 21st century.

Read full post...

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Has government found its feet in social media?

Earlier today I gave a presentation to the IABC's Canberra chapter on the use of social media within the Australian Government.

The slide deck I used is below, and fairly well carries my point - that government has indeed found its feet in social media, however there's still uneven ground waiting to trip it up if it missteps.

I'm interested as well in whether others agree with my assessment of the 18 Australian Government departments into social media leaders and followers (slide 17).



Read full post...

Friday, October 04, 2013

My presentation from RightClick - the latest in global digital government

Earlier this week I presented at RightClick in WA about the latest in global digital government.

My main points were that government in Australia has largely been doing OK in the digital stakes, although talent is thinly spread and there is not a consistent level of expertise across agencies.

For example, the fourth computer in the world was built by CSIR, an agency in the Australian government, and the WA government was using the internet seven years before Facebook was created.

Yes things have changed enormously in the last ten years, however the use of digital is now well-embedded within the public sector, not only in Australia but also across a large proportion of the world.

The challenge is to keep improving, to focus on designing services for digital which are relevance, simple and easy to use for citizens and to become better at connecting - reusing what others have done and at sharing what agencies are doing.

At the end of the day, however, it is not about the technology - that's simply an enabler - it's about meeting agency goals.

So even when you feel your agency, or you, are a dinosaur, remember that dinosaurs can survive massive change - provided they are prepared to change themselves.


Read full post...

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Can government policy, reports and consultation documents be communicated through animated infographics?

Government reports are often dry - really, really, really dry.

They are also often wordy, complex, long and, due to these properties, largely incomprehensible to the broader community.

Government policy and consultation documents can suffer from similar conditions. They are often quite complex, long and structured in ways that make sense to career bureaucrats but not necessarily to the general public.

Many agencies also dislike this and make all kinds of efforts to provide summaries, to simplify language, use images and charts and use other techniques to spice up these often long and complex government documents.

However at their core, they generally remain documents, words on paper that would be familiar to the scholars of Middle-Ages Europe, to the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians and to the many dynasties of the Chinese over the last six thousand years - although they may now be distributed by electronic as well as physical means.

Surely modern society can devise better ways to communicate complex information than relying on an approach that is now around six thousand years old.

And we have - by drawing from techniques that are much older and more resilient in human cultures. Pictures, dance and song.

Now I don't expect governments to communicate their reports, policies and consultation materials entirely through the use of the performing arts. Not all our politicians or public servants are as accomplished singers as, say Chris Emerson, who can be viewed below communicating about government budget reporting and the Charter of Budget Honesty in song with his band Emmo and the Wipeouts on an episode of The Hamster Decides.



However with multimedia and the use of infographics it is now possible to communicate government information in far more engaging and understandable ways than ever before.

This is being done by some agencies already. The Department of Planning and Community Development in Melbourne made a series of animated infographics to communicate material from their consultation, PlanMelbourne (which I've been privileged to work on through Delib Australia).



The use is not yet widespread, with most government reports, consultation documents, policies and other material still released as words on paper - however what if it was.

What if governments mandated that agencies were required to follow a visual first approach for all materials they released to the public, only using words on paper as a secondary technique?

Could agencies rise to the challenge, communicating their material far more succinctly in visual form - a five minute video rather than a 200 page single-spaced, small-type report?

Not possible? Material too complex and long? Too many statistics to cover?

Maybe the examples below might shift a few opinions.

The first example is from the creator of PHD Comics, Jorge Cham. As an internationally renown animator Jorge asked students to describe their thesis in two minutes.

Jorge chose the best descriptions and turned them into animated infographics, such as the one below from Adam Crymble on Big Data and Old History.



Second is an example from Peter Liddicoat, a materials scientist at the University of Sydney and the winner of the Chemistry category in the 'Dance your PHD' competition.

Peter's PHD was on the topic 'Evolution of nanostructural architecture in 700 series aluminium alloys during strengthening by age-hardening and severe plastic deformation' - a wonderfully complex and obscure topic that doesn't seem to naturally lend itself to dance, but somehow works.



What I think these example demonstrate is that there are alternatives ways for government to communicate complex material. They no longer must rely on words on paper.

Certainly bureaucrats can argue that word on paper are easy for them to produce, that they satisfy a substantial proportion of the community and they have a long track record - that 6,000 years of history I mentioned earlier.

They can also argue that there's no silver bullet for communication, no technique that will satisfy 100% of the audience, and that is perfectly true.

However while governments may consider words on paper the default position, the lowest common denominator way of making information available to the public, I think they are often used as an excuse to be lazy and unengaging.

Paper make the lives of public servants and politicians easier. Paper documents are relatively cheap and fast to write, review, approve and distribute - none of which is a benefit to the intended audience and community or improves the outcomes of a consultation.

Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

For governments words on paper are their long letters - the approach easiest for them, rather than for the recipient, their community or audience.

Agencies can now do better - using images, animations and video to communicate relegating words on paper to a back-up role.

I challenge them to try.

Read full post...

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Social media impacts on ICT teams - presentation from the Technology in Government conference

Over the last two days I've been down at the Technology in Government conference - an event I thought went very well, with a great group of speakers (including the UK Government's CIO Liam Maxwell).

I gave a presentation this morning, and chaired the afternoon, for the Connected Government stream and have uploaded my presentation for wider access.

In it I discussed the impact of social media on agency ICT teams and some potential approaches they can take to work with business areas to ensure that agency goals are met with a minimum of intra-agency friction.

Overall my message was that social media must be engaged with, not ignored, in government and agency ICT teams have a role to play.

There's several stances ICT teams can take - whether as a leader, supporter or observer of agency social media efforts and, depending on this stance, they could take on a greater or lesser involvement in the various roles required to implement a successful social media approach.

Social media offers benefits for ICT teams, as it does for other areas of agencies - it is simply up to ICT leadership to either step up and work with business areas in a closer ongoing way, or stay out of the way and allow other areas of an agency to move forward.



Read full post...

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Fantastic article: The more things change: Technology, government and the public sector

Martin Stewart-Weeks, Senior Director, Public Sector, Cisco Consulting Services, has written a fantastic article on the potential for technology to disrupt and create new possibilities for governments and the public sector.

The article discusses how technology is changing the shape and speed of government, as well as many jobs in the public sector, and looks at potential models for reshaping the public service to meet the needs of the 21st Century.

The article was presented at the Australian Government Leaders Network event in July 2013 and, with Martin's permission, I've included a copy below.

It is well worth a read! 



Read full post...

Monday, March 18, 2013

Australian CTO presentation on social media: SOCIAL(MEDIA)ISM at the International Public Sector Convention

John Sheridan has been an active senior public sector advocate for the use of digital technologies in government for some years now.

He's stepped this up a notch with his recent appointment as Australian Government's Chief Technology Officer and I thought it was valuable to share one of his most recent presentations on social media, as published in the Australian Government Information Management Office's blog, to demonstrate and share how the Australian Public Service's thinking in this area has matured.

John touches on a number of the themes I often touch on in this blog - the benefits of social media use outweigh the costs, social media is manageable and gives agencies more scope to influence discussion and media coverage, good use of digital channels provides service efficiencies and convenience, and there's no time like the present to start (stop prevaricating).

So, reproduced under their CC BY copyright license, here is John's presentation, attributed to the AGIMO Website - http://agimo.gov.au:


SOCIAL(MEDIA)ISM at the International Public Sector Convention

13 March 2013
This is a presentation I made at CPA Australia’s International Public Sector Convention on 22 February 2013. My message was that the time is right for Australian Government agencies to utilise social media and other online tools to bolster and expand their communication strategies. The costs of doing so in a targeted manner are not that high, especially when compared to those of the opportunities that not doing so could forego. You can see a shorter summary of the presentation here.
Picture of two statues with caption, 'SOCIAL(MEDIA)ISM, Maximising Web & Mobility Opportunities in Government'
Photo by Ze.Valdi used under Creative Commons
When you’re preparing for these sorts of talks it’s interesting to think about your audience and what it is that you’re going to say. And when I was first invited to do this some time ago, I had thought initially that this was my chance to get back for accrual accounting. But I sort of softened a bit on that and thought well, no, maybe I shouldn’t pick on the audience like that.
Perhaps they want some innovation? And then I thought what’s innovation, in the terms of accounting, and a Tony Soprano notion came to mind, rather than anything else. So I decided that instead I’d settle on starting with some facts, showing you what I think the sort of web and social media and mobile activities are, and then talking about what I think Public Servants should be doing about it.
Fifty-two percent of Australians are on Facebook. Now that doesn’t sound like all that many when you start, but then you think the ABS tells us that 19% of Australians are younger than 15, so 14 or younger. Now I think we can assume that many of them, if they are on Facebook, are probably supervised by their parents, so we can probably add that to the 52. I also know that there are some 4% of Australians who are 80 or over. Now some of them are indeed on Facebook and using social media, but I think again generally as a rule we can probably say maybe they’re not.
So what does that tell us? If you add 52 and 19 and four, you get 75 I think, or close enough for Government work, and that what that tells you is there’s only 25% who aren’t covered by that number. In other words, the people who are using Facebook in Australia outnumber the people who aren’t using Facebook by two to one. Right? There’s an enormous change in what we’re doing in social media, what we’re doing online, and the imperative to do something about that in Government is obviously, I think, very important.
A graph displaying social media usage captioned, 'EVERYONE'S DOING IT, e-Gov Satisfaction Survey 2011'

Now we know that everybody does use digital tools for a range of things. We’ve been running a survey for six iterations about the use of digital technologies in eGovernment, and what we discovered – this slide shows the last three iterations, 2008, 2009, and 2011 – and 2011 was the last year we ran the survey, and the reason we had to stop is the questions had stopped being relevant. We could still collect the information, but it was no longer useful in terms of how the world had changed. And in the last year you can see that 84% of the some 3,000 people that were surveyed (indicating to presentation slide) – and this was, you know, like a responsible survey, not one done using Survey Monkey one afternoon – what it does is test the fact that many Australians were indeed using digital technologies, eGovernment, to contact and get services.
An image taken from the e-Gov report captioned, 'E-GOVERNMENT, 1/3 of Australians'

We saw that when asked about how they last contacted Government over, over six iterations of the survey here (indicating to presentation slide), 1/3 consistently said at the Federal Government level, the State and Territory Government level, and at the Local Government level, that they were using technology, online internet technology, for their last transaction with Government.
Now it isn’t everybody, and there are of course things that occur. We see for example when we examine some of these statistics further that people would sometimes do a lot of work on the internet and then ring up armed with the facts. It’s the sort of scenario I think that Doctors face all the time when people come in and tell them what diseases they’ve got because they’ve been looking them up on the internet. It’s slightly better in getting Government services, but we do know that there are a lot of people using those tools to find out what’s going on, to get the information they need.
A screenshot of the australia.gov.au site captioned, 'GETTING IT TOGETHER, MyAccount to MyGov'

We built, starting a couple of years ago, a My Account function in australia.gov.au. Now the big blue bar in the middle just rules out my secret name (indicating to presentation slide), so that you can’t use it and find out all about me. Some 1.9 million Australians have accounts on australia.gov.au, 1.3 million of them are linked to various services – Centrelink services, Medicare services, the personally controlled electronic health record, Veterans’ services, and some child support services.  Using this account facility you can login and you can find the arrangements that you have, and explore what they are.
You’re going to see much more detail if someone’s using all of those services. Capturing mine doesn’t give you very much information, and I didn’t really want to bore you with my visits to the Doctor, so you could see the facilities that are here. But it is a very important tool. Indeed so important that what we are currently doing is moving from the My Account function to a new My Gov function run by the Department of Human Services, because it’s been seen that our organisation, having got this stood up, established the worth of it, and being able to support it at the numbers we started with, is no longer going to be able to support what is likely to be tens of millions of Australians using these services, because we know that people want services they can get easily and quickly – they don’t want to be waiting, they don’t want to be in queues, and they want their information quickly when they can get it.
A picutre of a tablet showcasing an app from Department of Human Services captioned, 'WHEN YOU NEED IT, DHS mobile apps'

Interestingly they don’t just want it sitting at a desk in their study or at some kiosk in the library or something like that, they want these services in their pockets, they want to be able to get them wherever they are, and all sorts of services that Government provides. The Department of Human Services has been doing a lot of really exciting work, developing mobile applications that their customers can use to get information about their entitlements.
It’s a really interesting change, because I think even those of us really interested in it, probably didn’t think that this was going to be such a significant change over time. You think that, historically, people sit down when they’ve put the kids to bed and check their finances, or do their sums, or things like that, but instead what we’re seeing is that they’re taking the opportunity to do this at other times during the day, so there’s a pressure on us to develop mobile friendly sites for Government, things that provide not just applications, but also the basic work that we have.
A screenshot of the mobile version of the Australian Government online directory captioned, 'WHAT'S HER NAME!, Mobile Government online directory'

This is a screenshot of the mobile version of the Government online directory (indicating to presentation slide), and if you follow it through what you can find is a whole range of useful information about the Commonwealth Parliament, about the Courts, about the Governor General, and about the 19 odd Government portfolios. Indeed if you were to go to this site and search for Sheridan, you would find me and my role. And, because of the use of mobile technology, you could click on that and email me, or ring me – or at least ring my office – ring me and connect straight away.
We’re actually finding that this is an advantage not just for citizens, not just for our customers, but even for Public Servants themselves. I use this application on my iPhone now all the time. Now there’s another interesting thing that I’ll just touch on while we’re on this. You heard me say my iPhone, and this is another trend that we see, people are providing, Public Servants are providing their own devices, they want to use those to get the sort of services that they need as well. Indeed one of the challenges that we addressed at some considerable length in our work on the Government 2.0 taskforce was how we would allow people to use social media at work on their Government computers, and this occupied us for some considerable time, it was one of the recommendations that the report made and was addressed by Government at the time.
What’s interesting is that since then the world has moved on. Anyone who wants to access social media and internet and the web does so from a device in their pocket most of the time. They’re not interested in using their work systems. And what we’ve seen is that this has become so mainstream that it isn’t about IT control, but rather about personnel management control, making sure that Supervisors understand what it is that their staff are doing, and are making sure that they’re making reasonable use of the resources that they have, but are also getting on with the rest of their work. It’s that change from the technology frontend to the management middle that I think indicates how mainstream these technologies have become.
A photo of various promotion materials from WordPress captioned, 'GOVSPACE, cheap at twice the price'
Photo by Peregrino Will Reign used under Creative Commons
Now we also provide a platform for agencies to create blogs, other forms of communication with their customers. Govspace.gov.au, which you can search for very easily, contains some 53 sites already, with another 40 odd queued up, that are in development for agencies to use. We charge $4,500 a year for the basic site on data, on govspace.gov.au. You’re probably thinking, “Well why are they bothering to charge that?” Well of course I think we all know that free goods aren’t valued particularly highly, and by having a nominal charge, indeed less than you can pay on your Government credit card, what we ensure is that people who start a site and find that it doesn’t work for them, or aren’t using it, or it finishes their purpose, it can be closed down or archived, retained for the record, but it isn’t an ongoing management burden for us.
And I think this also gives you a feel for the ease and the speed at which the uptake of mobile and web technologies in this Web 2.0 world is occurring – it’s a significant change in what we do. We’re seeing now, through the use of Cloud computing, that agencies who want a new site, want a new application, can literally have it turned on in days, where previously it might have been months at least before even some of the simpler applications could get turned on. This paradigm has moved so that these things are no longer restricted to IT, and one of the messages that you take away from this is this notion of making best use of the web and online technologies is not about IT, it’s about business doing things, and working out what they can do to change how they are doing their business.
Now one of the very strong use cases for social media is in the emergency management field. We saw, and those of you who are actually from Queensland will probably know, at the time of the floods and cyclones a couple of years ago the Queensland Police Service media unit drove a considerable change in the way they were providing advice to citizens through a range of online channels. And this, I think, is an example that’s been picked up by a range of other organisations. This is a shot from the A.C.T. Emergency Services Agency’s webpage (indicating to presentation slide), and what they are finding is that by using a combination of Twitter, and Facebook, and this webpage, they’re addressing the concerns of citizens really quickly. So a citizen can see some smoke, look at the website, and discover that there’s burning off going on.
A screenshot of the ACT Emergency Services Agency website captioned, 'NO LONGER NEWS, emergency servcies online'

Now, remembering of course that, if you weren’t sure, the ACT is marginally smaller than Brisbane, so that we’re probably a slightly tighter knit community, but you can actually see what’s going on all the time, and this new level of awareness is obviously, I think, what people are seeking.
Now there are some, again, interesting challenges in this level of awareness. Social media does allow people to use platforms that essentially are free or very cheap, so if you think of the QPS’s Facebook page, you don’t pay Facebook, as I’m sure many of you know, because two out of three of you are already using it, but you don’t pay Facebook to set up the page, and you don’t necessarily control all the things that are occurring on it, so there are some challenges that grow in the way that people respond. You can see in the left hand, bottom left hand corner there (indicating to presentation slide), the caution not to use this page to report a crime.
A screenshot of the Queensland Police Facebook page captioned, 'MAKING FRIENDS'

Now the fact that QPS had to put that there indicates a range of things. Firstly, this new channel open to people was very interesting and useful for them, and they thought they could do that. But also they discovered that people were unaware of the traps of doing so. For example, if you use your Facebook account to say, “I was just here and I saw this crime occurring,” that maybe the criminal’s seeing that too, and knows what your name is, or knows how to find you as a consequence. There are also obvious concerns about some of the tragedies that the Police Service generally deals with, and seeing some of them played out in social media on the Police’s Facebook page would cause some concerns.
So when you’re setting up something like this, you also need to do the sort of risk management that you expect across really any Government activity. I’ve been having a discussion in the last couple of hours on Twitter as a consequence of a meeting I had with some senior, I guess mainly Communications Executives in Government yesterday in Canberra, and we were talking about the steps that you need to take in social media, and we all agreed that many agencies now, if not the majority of agencies, like many large organisations now, are monitoring Twitter, are monitoring Facebook, are monitoring other social media, to see what people are saying about them. And we all agreed that that was a pretty basic first step that people should do.
But I actually think there’s another step – and this was the focus of the discussion – there’s another step that people have to take immediately. Many of you will know that the speed at which a train smash unfolds on social media is about a thousand times the speed that some disaster unfolds in other forms of media, and as a consequence I put to them that I think what we have to do in Government now is not just monitor things, but have some form of disaster recovery plan in place that says, “If I see a disaster on social media, this is what I do about it.” If I see some discussion of my department that isn’t going well, that isn’t factual, and is damaging our reputation, it’s not enough to sit back and say, “Ooh, I didn’t think that was going to happen,” and before you know it not only is it over, but there’s not much you can do about it.
You’ve got to be, I think, in front of the game, and I’m quite sure that one of the things agencies have to do now is not only monitor social media, but be prepared to react to social media. They might not be on it all the time, but they need to be able to do something about it. It isn’t something that you can leave to the CIO or the IT team to tell you about it. Your communications people have to be in there, knowing what’s going on, and ready to react if something doesn’t work.
This is a shot of my Twitter page (indicating to presentation slide). It’s interesting because some people think, you know, you’ve got 1,500 followers, is that very exciting? Well, yes and no. I think it puts me in the top 150 non-communications, or non-arts people with followers in Australia, but you should understand completely, since I’m sure many of you never heard of me before today, that doesn’t really reflect the reality of the situation, rather it reflects that there are not all that many people who’ve got well developed profiles in this area, particularly in the mainstream of the APS.
If you look at the people who are using Twitter as part of their work, as I do at the moment, you will see that they’re largely restricted to the people who are already the spokesmen for their agencies – so some of you, if you followed the Department of Human Services, may have heard of Hank Jongen, who’s their spokesman; if you follow some of the discussion of migration policy, boats and things like that, you might have seen Sandi Logan, the media spokesman for Immigration. These people use social media things a lot, but as to other people using them, the Chief of the Defence Force uses Twitter, and indeed Facebook as well to get a message across, I think not just to sort of stakeholders generally, but also to the military people in his organisation. It gives them an opportunity I think to personalise the organisation.
This is one of the changes that social media, but the new online presence is also driving – people have become identifiable, public servants are seen as having personalities, are seen as being connected to the real world in a way that hasn’t occurred previously. Now whether one likes it or not – and make no mistake, I think there are a lot of people who would prefer that that wasn’t the case – whether one likes it or not, it’s changing the way that we do our work.
Let me give you an example. My bio slide you saw at the outset said I’m the Australian Government Chief Technology Officer, and indeed I am, and have been since the 4th of February, that’s as a result of a change in our department. Previously I was one of the two division heads in the Australian Government Information Management Office. Three or four years ago we were involved in the Gershon review of ICT. Now those of you who’ve got an interest in Government IT will actually have only heard about one of the recommendations that Sir Peter made in his review, that was around reducing budgets, business as usual budgets of IT departments, by a billion dollars over four years, which we did successfully.
At the outset of that period when we saw press coverage about AGIMO and about our work, it was almost universally negative. Now I think you need to understand that the amount of Government IT Press there is, is relatively limited, indeed there are probably less Journalists working in Government IT than there are people in the room now. But nevertheless I would wake up on Tuesday mornings, because that’s the computer day inThe Australian and in the Financial Review, and dread turning the page to discover what had been said about our results in budget savings , etc.
Just after that the taskforce started, we established our own blog and we started to publish on the blog, and all of a sudden – well not all of a sudden, over a period of time we saw a change. Because we were now releasing stories IT Journalists didn’t have to make them up, and because we were releasing facts and details, and were pointing to them in Twitter or on social media, they could write about things that actually had some basis in fact. And what we saw over that, we’ve seen over that three year period is actually a change in the sentiment around how our work was being reported, from what I would have described as universally negative, to universally neutral, with the occasional good thing.
Now I’ve got to tell you that in Government, if you can get that sort of response you’re doing really well. And all that’s changed is that we’ve been putting information out, we have been telling them, we have been making the stories, and this is a really interesting example of what a good internet presence can do for an agency. What it can do is, like the reforms of business took out middle management in the ’80s, the reforms, changes in the internet, the changes in Gov 2.0 are taking out the middleman, the Journalist that interferes with your message.
Previously, the Minister or somebody put out a Press Release, it just went to the Journalists, they decided what to do with it, they decided how to interpret it, they reported it in the papers, and you had to live with the effects. Now that’s changed, and we can make our own stories directly with what it is that we’re doing, and I think this is a really interesting improvement.
A screenshot of the web guide website captioned, 'HELP?'

Now one of the things that you need if you’re going to do this is some guidance for Government. We have a web guide that you can find very easily if you just type into a search engine of your choice “AGIMO web guide”, you’ll be able to find our online web guide very easily. It’s got some mandatory requirements for the Australian Government, but it’s also got some really good advice. You can tab through there, near that page (indicating to presentation slide), to our guidance about social media,Social Media 101, but there’s a wealth of information around about what you can in order to improve an agency’s online presence, both in social media and in the more traditional Web 1.0 way.
If you’re using Twitter, you can follow the hashtag gov2au – that Twitter feed will involve you in the discussion that goes on about what can be done better in this Web 2.0 social media related world.
A picture of an open toolbox containing various tools captioned, 'NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS, carpenters don't ahve hammer strategies'
Photo by Andre Hofmeister used under Creative Commons
Now I’m going to talk a little about the way that you might approach things in deciding to say, “Well I’ve got an message, and I want to do something about it.” First of all don’t get tied up in the notion of the tools. One of the things that I really hate to see is someone telling me that they’ve been developing a social media strategy, and just as the slide says here (indicating to presentation slide), carpenters don’t have hammer strategies, carpenters want to build things, they want to build houses, they don’t have strategies, they have ideas about what tools are good for something, they generally, well not always, don’t hit screws with a hammer, but they understand that there are tools for particular choices. And this is, I think, a really important message – don’t get stuck in the tools – remember that what you’re setting out to do is set up a communications strategy.
And secondly, because of these tools, you’re not just broadcasting what goes on, you actually need to be prepared for collaboration, or for two-way communication, for discussion with your audience, you need to be prepared for people to comment on what it is that you’re doing, and take you up on points, and ask you questions, and your strategy’s got to be around how do I deal with these new mechanisms in communications, not how do I use Twitter, or how do I use Facebook?
A picture of several rows of empty chairs captioned, 'AUDIENCE? Who and where is yours?'
Photo by Kevin Dooley used under Creative Commons
Establishing where your audience is, and who they are, is also very important. One of the more ironic things I often see is an agency decides they’ll set up a Twitter account, but they’ve decided that it’s important not to follow anybody because that would risk sort of some sort of bias – would they follow this person or not that person; is that a problem for their agency; what message does that send – so you see an agency that’s got sort of 20 followers of their own, but they don’t follow anybody.
Now using Twitter as a mechanism for getting a message out like that is not as effective as standing at the bus stop and yelling out, because you’ll actually get more people if you do that. The challenge is to understand that there are new things involved. What you’ve got to do – and a lot of these discussions will be occurring without you now, so if you just set up a webpage and say, “Well I’m going to have my webpage here, and this is where people are going to come to talk about the things that I’m interested in, or I want to drive the conversation about,” you actually find that that isn’t the case because they’re already having those conversations in other places, and what you’ve got to do is find where those other places are and I would say subtly get yourself into the conversation so that you can correct things.
Again, Human Services has done some very good work on busting myths about inoculations and other related matters – by going to air some of those discussions have occurred – and inserting facts into the argument. Again, if you’re using Twitter you’ve got to put a hashtag on it, or use the hashtag that’s there so that people who aren’t following you have a chance of seeing what the message is. You can’t just sit there and hope that they’ll come and see what you’re doing, because generally speaking they won’t.
Now another thing, I meant to mention before, I will just touch on tools carefully. Once upon a time all the tools that we used for things in Government, all the IT tools, were big and expensive, and it meant that you had to have a lot of investment and training. I’m sure that all of you are well versed in the functions of Excel, and in fact can create pivot tables and do all sorts of data sorting and stuff like that very easily, but most people use much less of the facility of those things. They still cost a lot. People think… I think that some of the tools you need now for social media or communications might also cost a lot, but they don’t. I use this slide App regularly now, it cost me about $2 on my iPad, and I spent another $10 on buying some nicer fonts, I produce those slides, and the appearance of it on PowerPoint now is because I emailed it to the Conference team – I didn’t need to use it on PowerPoint myself, I could do it very cheaply, and the sort of tools that you see in being used for social media are similarly not expensive, and you don’t necessarily need an enormous lot of resources for them.
A picture of a sound mixing deck captioned, 'CHOOSE. Which channels suit your audience?'
Photo by Sergiu Bacioiu used under Creative Commons
What you do have to choose is what channels you’re going to get your message across. Now first of all let’s be quite clear, there is still a digital divide. Although it might be glib for me to talk about users of Facebook outnumbering non-users by two to one, the challenge is still that many of the people to whom we need to provide Government services don’t have access to these tools. Now what a good choice of channel strategies can do here is ensure that actually what we do is balance the resources that we spend on people who do have access to these tools, because generally these things are cheaper than our historical methods of doing them, and move those resources to communicate with the people who can’t necessarily make use of these more online channels. But it’s very unlikely that what you’ll be able to do is restrict yourself to only one channel. But just as we’ve seen Government advertising, move from being in newspapers to being online, I do think we’ll continue to see a change and a growing importance of the channels that use online communications.
The next thing is to make sure that you have clarity about your message. Now that can be taken a number of ways. The first one is you’ve got to plan what it is that you’re doing about this. If your plan is to establish a social media presence, and that’s where it stops, it’s like having a plan to go for a drive in the car, rather than having any destination in mind. What you need to do is say, “Why am I using these communications? What is it that I want to get across to people, and how will I get my message out?” Whether it’s a message about the availability of services, the problem with some disaster, a change in policy, you need to understand what the message is and then make sure you use those channels to get the message across.
A picture of figurines on a bech with and a message carved into the sand captioned, 'Dont confuse your audience. MESSAGE CLARITY'
Photo by Stefan used under Creative Commons
It’s going to mean that sometimes you have to look at who it is, who’s providing the message for your organisation, just as we’ve done historically with other communication strategies. There are people who speak officially for our organisation, and people who don’t. It doesn’t mean that you can ignore the ones who don’t speak officially because you want to make sure that they’re not doing something that’s negative, you want to make that if asked they can say, “Well actually I do know about this,” or “This is the person you should ask.” But you need to get that message clarity.
I don’t know if many of you watched Media Watch on Monday night, but I was fascinated to see the ABC social media policy being discussed, and the notion that for ABC employees, their personal use of Twitter and social media is actually more constrained than that of the official accounts of ABC shows and programs, and things like that. Now I’m not actually advocating that at all, but I think it shows that they are interested in getting message clarity where it’s important.
A picture taken inside a library captioned, 'CONTENT IS KING, post regularly'
Photo by Marcus Hansson used under Creative Commons
I think the other thing that people sometimes forget is that content is what brings people back to your site. They might come the first time because it’s shiny and new, or it has good widgets or something like that, but if you don’t provide good content, people won’t come back to it, and your message will be lost over time. You need to ensure that if you set up a webpage that it’s just not static content, that it’s regularly updated. I’m sure that many of you have seen Government webpages that look like they haven’t changed since the last time the Government did. If this happens, people will just forget what they’re doing. Make sure that you’ve got a plan to provide content. If you embark on a communication strategy that involves blogs, and Twitter, and things like that, have a plan about what it is you’re going to tell people, prepare more than one post ahead, because I think we all know that in Government sometimes the urgent outweighs the important, and all of a sudden you don’t have time to put that post together if you haven’t thought about it earlier. If you want people to come back you’ve got to provide content.
Like anything else in Government work, if you don’t measure it you won’t be able to manage it. Now there are some useful ways to measure online content, and some ways that aren’t particularly useful. There’s a tool that’s supposed to measure credibility in social media, and I saw my score on that the other day and I was pretty pleased, because it said that I was in the sort of top 5% or something like that in the world. That sounded very impressive, until you worked out exactly how many people were using these things in the world, and that was sort of it made me one in 200 million or something like that. It’s like remembering that in China if you’re one in a million there are 2,000 people just like you.
A picture of a lit up cars odometer captioned, 'You can't manage what you don't measure'
Photo by dawnhops used under Creative Commons
Those tools aren’t particularly useful. And indeed one of the things that I saw was that I was actually being very highly regarded for my skills in sailing. Now you guys don’t know me, or most of you don’t, I think I’ve been sailing once in my entire life, but exploring this I saw that there was some search situation that happened to link mentions of people with my surname at least on a site that had some details about sailing. What it showed is that in expert analysis of the results, is it going to provide you with useful information about how you’re performing?
If you go back to the beginning of my presentation where I showed you those social media statistics, they’ve actually been done very carefully by those organisations, to make sure they pick up unique visitors visiting more than once, and sort those things out. You need that level of measurement and that level of sophistication if you are indeed going to make useful work in this area.
A picture of a bollard denoting men at work captioned, 'Start building NOW!'
Photo by wayneandwax used under Creative Commons
Now to some extent what I’m saying to you is that this is a call to action. There isn’t necessarily for many organisations a burning platform that says they must go better online, they must do more in social media, although I think it does exist for a range or organisations, but instead what I’m saying is there are things that you can do relatively simply now that can prepare your organisation for, if you decide that your communication strategy warrants it, taking a bigger role in online activity.
As I’ve described, the tools to do so aren’t very expensive. It’s not that resource intensive, particularly at the lower levels. You can use a lot of information that’s around now, and advices provided to help with organisations like that. Indeed if you work for the Federal Government you can email me about it atjohn.sheridan@finance.gov.au and I’ll help provide some information about it. But I do think that what we need to do is prepare for what’s going on. It isn’t enough anymore to sit back and say, “This digital revolution will wash over just like other revolutions have.” I don’t think it will. I think when people want information now, in their pockets, at the bus stop, when they’re moving along, if they want to provide feedback to Government quickly and on the spot, whether it’s about potholes to Local Government, the closures of offices to State and Territory Governments, or actual frontline services at the Federal level, they’re not going to take the excuses that, “Well we were just sitting back to see how it’d go.” I think it’s too late for that. It’s time to get started on this now.
Thanks very much for your attention.

Read full post...

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Using social media in emergency and disaster management

I’m currently in Singapore, having just finished running a two-day masterclass for Singaporean public servants on how to use social media in emergency management.

It is a very interesting topic and one I don’t think is high enough on the radar in Australia or many other countries, although there’s now plenty of case studies on the topic.

Source: http://visual.ly/case-emergency-use-social-media
I’m not going to share the full two day master class (it is both too long and too complex to go through) – particularly as it includes several in-depth exercises where teams create their social media infrastructure for an emergency and then test it in a custom simulation exercise.

However I thought it worth sharing a few of my thoughts on the topic.

Firstly, in my view, not using social media for emergency management invites disaster.

Whether emergency service personnel and management ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Facebook, Twitter or other social media and online channels is now irrelevant. Citizens, media organisations and other groups increasingly rely on them to share information, tactics and to organise outside of any central control by an agency and regardless of their wishes.

A clear example of this was reported in the Crisis Comms blog, which has a great example of a police department reaching out to media and the public to help them by checking surveillance footage, looking for a suspected murderer.

The media and public were so willing to help that the SB District Attorney then attempted to rein in the situation with a tweet ‘The sheriff has asked all members of the press to stop tweeting immediately. It is hindering officer safety. #Dorner’

Mumbai terrorist attacks (2008)
As the Crisis Comms blog points out, and I agree, it is ludicrous to ask people to stop engaging, particularly after they were specifically invited to help. This misrepresents the authority and influence held by official bodies in our new connected world.

In other emergencies where official bodies have chosen to not engage via social media channels, the gap has been filled by the public, such as in the Mumbai terrorist attacks. There’s simply no way for emergency services to prevent this – and nor should they.

For example after the London riots, some members of parliament suggested closing down the internet to prevent rioters from spreading information.
London riots (2011)

This was in apparently unawareness that rioters were actually using Blackberry’s encrypted message service which wasn’t connected to the internet, and overlooked how valuable the internet was in allowing authorities to elicit the public’s help in identifying rioters (via a Flickr group), helping London residents to inform police where riots were underway and to help other residents stay clear or in the cleanup efforts afterwards, where social media was used as a primary way to organize citizens to clean-up different parts of the city.

Social media also allowed London Police to monitor the relative intensity of riots and allocate their officers more effectively – essentially giving them more than six million additional pairs of eyes in Greater London, without the inefficiency of manning phone lines or sending police out as ‘scouts’ (with all the risks this would entail).

So how can social media help around emergencies and disasters?

Source: http://visual.ly/case-emergency-use-social-media
I believe social media can help in all stages – from helping to inform citizens of what they should do in case of a particular emergency, letting them know when one is emerging/impending (such as a bushfire or flood), sourcing intelligence and communicating information during emergencies to help minimise casualties and direct resources where they are needed and, in the recovery, to marshal the right resources and supplies to the right places via volunteer citizen labor and donations.

Social media, in helping people share their experiences during a disaster, can also help with psychological recovery, something strongly reported in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, where its been reported that social media has replaced churches and community centres (many of which were destroyed) as the place where people support one another and share experiences.

Christchurch earthquake (2011)
To conclude, social media is now part of the fabric of society, normalized into how many people communicate and share information.

It needs to similarly be normalized into emergency and disaster management plans and activities, used productively and effectively to aid professional emergency workers in their roles and to inform and engage citizens as appropriate in specific situations.

Emergency authorities who are still stand-offish about social media, because their management and staff don’t use these channels themselves, or because they have particular concerns or fears, need to bring in the appropriate talent to help them normalize social media in their own operations, otherwise they may be placing lives at risk.

Read full post...

Bookmark and Share