betatim / crisis-twitter-guidelines

A simple guide for getting heard during a disaster

crisis-twitter-guidelines

Developing a simple guide for local people to get heard during a disaster.

🚧 This is a young project, lots of things are still undecided. Everyone is welcome to contribute.🚧

Problem

When a natural disaster occurs, lots of aid can arrive quickly, but often the helpers lack local knowledge and information on where to go first. What they need are local Gandalfs - people knowledgeable with the specifics of the location and type of event who could act as local guides. This is especially true in the first few hours or days of an emergency. People have tried to use Twitter and social media to get better information but often there is too much noise and not enough signal.

Solution

This project contains simple guidelines for social-media users who are affected by, or close to, a crisis. The idea is to make their tweets easier to find and more actionable by following three simple guidelines:

1. Attach a picture to your tweet - a picture says more than 1000 words
2. Enable geotagging - let people know where it is you are reporting from
3. Use the hashtag #SOS - to make it easy to find your tweet

In addition, if you have the time it will be useful if you can:

• Try to stay online and answer questions
• Consider creating a new account to protect your privacy
  • If you do want to protect your privacy, make sure that you're not sharing images with any metadata that can be traced to you.

Ideas? Contribute!

Everyone is welcome and the more people contribute the better! If you have experience with any of the below, you can make a meaningful contribution:

• involvement with a natural disaster somehow
• visual design
• distributing aid
• using Twitter a lot
• finding simple solutions to hard problems
• none of the above but eager to help(!)

Whoever you are, checkout the ROADMAP and let's take it from there. Or leave a comment.

crisis-twitter-guidelines's Issues

Unclear sentence in readme.MD (Gandalfs?)

"What they need are local Gandalfs." I have above average Middle Earth knowledge and even I don't understand the meaning of the sentence in the context :)

Related - Hashtag standards

UN-OCHA issued a proposal for standard hashtags to use during crisis. It could be worthwhile to look at? https://app.box.com/s/yvobt4n9wptqa8sd0887
https://irevolutions.org/2014/11/05/social-media-hashtag-standards-disaster-response/

ROADMAP

Where are we heading? This is our map 🗺

Near term

• converge on a version 1 for simple guidelines for using twitter as a victim of a disaster (are the guidelines we currently have the best ones?!). This probably involves talking to people:
  • who work in disaster relief
  • who know about designing simple rules
• get a simple webpage up
• design a postcard with the guidelines on it

Medium term

• for each guideline write down why/motivation for it
• for each guideline write instructions on how to do it
• translate guidelines into three other languages
• v2 of the guidelines

Long term

• translate to lots of languages
• spread the word about the guidelines
• create a software that makes it super easy to find tweets that follow the guideline

Mini-demo sipping from the twitter firehose

Make a mini demo that takes tweets from the firehose (or twitter search?) to show off the idea

Existing efforts?

What efforts already exist in this space?

• https://github.com/ushahidi/platform#ushahidi-3
• tweets during hurricane Sandy: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/02/twitter-releases-numbers-related-to-hurricane-sandy-more-than-20m-tweets-sent-between-october-27th-and-november-1st/
• using machine-learning to match up offers and needs http://firstmonday.org/article/view/4848/3809