Crowd Sourcing and Crisis Mapping

  You’ve no doubt heard about volunteers across the globe helping assist with Haitian, Libyan, and other crises by crowd sourcing: geolocating and tagging new reports and data from a wide variety of news sources like phones, web forms, tweets, email and more. By filtering for keywords and locating these reports on a map, a wide variety of emergency managers, researchers, and citizens can rapidly get a better feeling for late breaking information – well before a reporter or others have had time to synthesize the data into a summary or overview.

Kathleen Farrell just pointed out this excellent article, Academics Join Relief Efforts Around the World as Crisis Mappers, from the Chronicle of Higher Education that provides a good overview of this info – points out some of the open source software (from Ushahidi) that is being used behind the scenes to make this happen.

It would be fun to see if we could add some of this functionality to our own web site – so we could rapidly set up a situational information page – at least for internal if not also external use after an event. Something like this would allow business owners to report in with their status via a variety of means. Currently we’re exploring use of Google Maps for managing our critical locations, but this would take things another level deeper!

King County is also looking at a regional situational awareness upgrade, to advance beyond what WebEOC can provide, so ideally all these systems can play well together.