Italian Campers joining the conversation

The first Italian #SMEM Camp

The first Italian Camp on Social Media in Emergency Management took place in Bologna, on the 17th of March 2012. It has been a great camp, not only by the number of participants (40!), well beyond our expectations, but for the quality of the work done and the commitment of the whole group. 

Special thanks go to CrisisCommons for the support, guidance and for keeping us focused on the global #SMEM conversation: there is a pattern emerging from the latest camps, a model that could be replicated. We are also collaborating with Stefania Milan, researcher and Italian expat, who is helping CrisisCommons better understand virtual volunteering.

Highlights from the Camp

The SMEM theme is particularly felt in Italy as a result of some emergencies of the last winter: many of us strive to foster a serious discussion on the topic and a more effective use of social media for risk prevention and emergency in Italy.

11 short talks were made during the morning, all very interesting and varied: a presentation on the basic concepts of emergency management and the Italian context, one on the impact on the legal framework, and one on communication/official communication; two startups (Metwit and UPTU) working on the topic! and many others.

Three talks were particularly relevant for the global conversation on SMEM:

1. Alfonso Crisci presented his amazing work on Twitter semantic analysis, showing the tools used and how well such analysis could monitor an emergency, and predict risk.

2. Michele d’Alena talked about #boneve, the beautiful, enlightening case on how Twitter had been used during the last snow emergency in Bologna

3. Emanuela Risso and Flavio Ciaranfi presented the stunning case of Angeli con il Fango sulle Magliette: how to reach millions of people and engage them in few days, using Facebook.

[Quote: “Twitter is king and Facebook queen of Social Media in Emergency.”]

In the afternoon we divided into three working groups to address the best practices of Twitter usage (guidelines, hashtags, …) in three different types of risk: health, volcanoes and earthquakes, geological.

Some of the presenters at the CrisisCamp Italia

We concluded the day with more open questions that we had before the camp, but different and definitively better ones!

One month later

After the camp the discussion continued online (there are now 85 people in the group), for the questions require some answers and, as Elena Rapisardi (co-founder of CrisisCamp Italy) reminds us: “emergencies do not wait”.

Here are the main points:

• it is rooted in the “citizens as sensors” approach that, to be a sensor, means to switch from an emotional participation to a proactive collaboration. It means to learn how to be ready, how to recognize a normal natural phenomenon from a risk, and thus be proactive when coping with natural hazards and emergencies:

• there is a serious demand coming from Civil Protection bodies, rescue bodies, monitoring research centers, scholars and volunteers for guidelines in Twitter usage

• itʼs not possible not control the hashtags but it is possible to influence them, and we have to find better ways to manage hashtags

• the geographical dimension is the most complex to manage online, tools are not there yet (we could ask Twitter to improve their system, right?)

Learning how to be a proactive – and not passive – sensor, could be a huge challenge, but the main stream on disaster reduction underlines that the wave of the cultural change could come from a wider citizens engagement: 

”Disasters can be substantially reduced if people are well informed and motivated towards a culture of disaster prevention and resilience, which in turn requires the collection, compilation and dissemination of relevant knowledge and information on hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities.” (Hyogo Framework for Action).

A common tag strategy could help raising awareness on natural hazards and emergencies among citizens. We are working on the rationale document aiming to contribute to the wider international debate, and preparing a short guideline for citizens (the SMEM Vademecum) to support the switch from emotional participation to proactive collaboration and engagement.

Whatʼs next

The Italians woke up later than others, but are moving fast: there is a strong interest for another camp soon and the Angeli con il fango sulle magliette have kindly offered to host the next Camp in Genova, likely in June. In the meantime the work continues online!

Official event web-page and slides of talks:

http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/SMEMCamp_Bologna_2012

Talk audio recording by Radio Perusia (Italian): http://www.spreaker.com/page#!/show/ radio_perusia

The documents are divided in three categories: strategic planning, grant and meeting/call notes. They reflect the work undertaken by the IMT in the last 18 months to lay the foundations for the continued growth of the Commons.

Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts with us.

His debrief of the work accomplished …

Francesco is a leader in the use of emerging technologies by volunteers in disasters in the European scene. Francesco contacted CrisisCommons to see how we could help in establishing a bridgehead for the promotion of the use of social media in emergency management in Italy.

Although he’s already very active with different projects merging humanitarian aid and technology, Francesco wanted to hear more from the experience in integrating social media into emergency management from this side of the Atlantic Ocean. He’s particularly interested in the contribution that citizens and volunteers can make when disasters strike and building relationships with official agencies
Francesco Ciriaci talks about SMEM and CrisisCamp Italia 2012

It’s another example of the role played by volunteer technical communities (in this case CrisisCommons) in developing relationships and capacities that would be of great service to areas impacted by disasters and the authorities responding to them.

Francesco Ciriaci, a co-founder of CrisisCamp Italia explains the reasons behind the March 17 gathering:

In the past weeks we all witness the emergecies occured in Italy: the earthquake and the snow. The web is actually playing an important role in the exchange of information, and Twitter is becoming an acknowledged source of information, also for the talk shows and tv news.

Crisis Camp Italia is organizing a one-day camp to discuss operational proposals on how to use Twitter and social media to propagate information about risks, and emergency.
We are aiming to collaboratively define a one-page poster explaining the very basics of SMEM to citizens: the do (and don’ts) of social media in emergency and promote it in Italy.

Registration is open and free: http://smem0.eventbrite.com
(event will be in Italian, only, with live Tweeting in italian and english.

Here’s a link to the story:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/25743-crisiscamp-shows-how-open/

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/02/201225141223210347.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/weather/2012/01/20121309403666565.html 

We’re helping the StandBy Task Force to answer Al Jazeera’s call for help by disseminating the request for help.  They asked us to help them in recruiting volunteers from the region and for this reason we are looking for volunteers that:

1. Speak the following Languages:

• Bosnian
• Croatian
• Serbian
• Slovenian
• Macedonian
• Albanian

2. Or that come from the following countries:

•  Bosnia
•  Slovenia
•  Macedonia
•  Serbia
•  Montenegro
•  Croatia
•  Kosovo
•  Bulgarian

If you do, or know people that do, please contact Anahi (anahi@standbytaskforce.com) or Patrick (patrick@standbytaskforce.com)

Photo Credit to tourism.tallinn.ee

First and foremost:  Thank you!

Your shared vision, passion and energy made CrisisCommons a sustainable force for good in the world.  We will all miss your active leadership in the CrisisCommons community.  I know you will be incredibly successful at whatever you decide to apply yourself to in life.

I wanted to share with the community how I became one of the first CrisisCampers, attending the inaugural CrisisCamp DC event in June 2009.  It came, appropriately enough, through twitter.  I had become increasingly aware of the planned CrisisCamp through its promotion on twitter by those like-minded individuals interested in helping the victims of disaster with technology – a field I have been in for close to 20 (gasp!) years now.  But I wasn’t planning on attending – it being all the way in Washington, DC and me living so far away (spur sarcasm) in Brooklyn, NY – until one of my own Sahana community members from India tweeted me asking whether I was going to go to the CrisisCamp.  It made me pause and think that this event might be different, if people from half way around the world had heard of it and were interested in attending – an event I had considered until that time to be a very insular and too inside-the-beltway focused to be of any value.  So I took a look at the eventbrite link (which is still up there today: http://crisiscamp.eventbrite.com).

What struck me about the event was not just the vision and agenda for the event, but who was coming that marked it as significant – with significant representation from the US Government, the World Bank, technology companies, academic and research groups, and an incredible number of individuals with experience – some of these people I knew personally, others I knew of professionally and others I wanted to get to know.  So I made plans to attend, packed up my family in the car and drove to DC for the weekend.  At the Ignite sessions on Friday evening at the World Bank, I met Noel and Heather for the first time, and we’ve since become close allies professionally and friends personally.  Along with Andrew, they share a vision for a Commons and have always balanced well the need for leadership with the independence of the community.
Sometimes I thought that they needed to step up and be more decisive about making decisions – but they understood their role was to bring people to the table – not to direct.  CrisisCommons has become a far more resilient and successful organization than I could ever have imagined because of the blood, sweat and tears that they put into it.

And it has spurned on other efforts such as Random Hacks of Kindness and the Standby Task Force.

I know this is not a community that feels comfortable directly credit at individuals, but every time someone attends a CrisisCamp, a RHOK, a GWOB hackathon, or supports a deployment of the Standby Task Force, they have Heather and Noel to thank, in part, for that opportunity to make the world a better place.

I know I do.

Love bombs right back at you.

Best regards,
Mark

Heather was a visionary and a founder, and co-founder Noel Dickover (both at right with Andrew Turner, also a co-founder); CrisisCommons will continue to move forward, build her vision, and make her proud.

Thank you, Heather and Noel and good luck!