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Twitter Could Save Your Life in a Disaster

Posted by Anthony LaFauce on January 17th, 2008 9:50 AM

Stefanie Olsen over at Cnet has covered a topic near and dear to my heart. She recently posted an article on a program called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEED).

“We’re not talking about pulling the red phone out of the bottom drawer here,” said Rasmussen, a former adviser to U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, referring to Twitter and Facebook. “We’re talking about using ubiquitous, free software that is repurposed when necessary to fit into a humanitarian need.”

This ’simple’ quote gives the entire scope of what InSTEED is trying to cover. I used to work at the Pentagon so I can translate that ‘govermentese’ for you.

What Mr. Rasmussen is saying is this: the private sector has come up with a pretty good idea and the government is going to adopt those tools as needed.

InSTEED is the brain child of Dr. Larry Brilliant. His goal is to create open source solutions that can help people and agencies communicate in the event of an emergency.

Olsen’s article gives the example of combining Twitter’s multi-channel bot framework with Google Earth’s geo-tagging service to create an emergency communication tool that can work in less than stellar reception areas.

The application of these services as an ad hoc emergency network is nothing short of brilliant (pardon the pun). Twitter is the perfect tool for cross platform communication, signaling phones, emails, Facebook pages, and a myriad of other networks.

Combining all this information in a Facebook style network will allow humanitarian agencies to reach thousands of people who could provide information and services.

I have been racking my brain all morning thinking about social tools that can be used to help create a humanitarian network. Do any of you out there have any ideas? Let me know.

Posted in Applications
  

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 5 Comments

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    What is a "brilliant" idea worth if there is no realistic strategy for execution? Hey, how about a magic pill that stops disasters from happening in the first place?

    Isn't one of the largest hurdles to this concept the issue of connectivity? Granted it was almost 7 years ago, but during 9-11, having a cell phone would be a great thought but was relatively useless to anyone in NYC and many in the Washington, D.C. area. The service providers can't sustain emergency disaster scenario where large amounts of individuals are trying to access at the same time.

    Twitter during a school shooting is interesting (assuming the students use twitter), but Twitter for disaster on a large scale -- useless not because of Twitter but because of connectivity.
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    The technology is based on the principle that SMS and Tweets take far less bandwidth, there for less signal, than standard cell communication. Several DoD agencies use simple messaging services to reach there staff in the event of an emergency. Using Twitter just expands on those ideas.
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    Great article. Twitter could be great tool to distribute on-the-ground human intelligence across a network in real-time (maybe somewhat asynchronously).

    Twitter, however, appears to have some significant architectural issues that they haven't been able to overcome. If Twitter goes down during Steve Jobs' keynote, can it stand up to a real emergency? If they get these issues resolved, there's real value in such a tool in disaster situations.
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    Yeah ... in response to your title. The only lives that twitter is saving is that of the geek that can't "live" without it.

    Andrew makes a great point ... if Twitter can't survive Jobs, how is it going to hold up against a real disaster.

    People have been talking about the implementation of a Twitter like app since the UVA shootings ... again, worthless thought until there is some sustainable execution strategy. But hey, it gives us a reason to use the word "Twitter".
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    Interesting discussion. Twitter is just one of many resources available in an emergency. Check out the work of the nonprofit Stargazer Foundation in VA, at www.Stargazer.org. There you will find an entire suite of Web tools for emergency preparation AND response. It's free and built on an IBM Websphere platform. The services have been used successfully by the Red Cross and the Washington D.C. Metro Council of Governments. Also see the Tracker service, that allows form-based communications via PC or Web-enabled device so people can send, receive and track information and other people in an emergency. By the way, text type messaging did not go down during the major disasters...only the voice networks were inaccessible, as noted by Anthony.

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