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When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, disaster-relief organisations like the American Red Cross received tweets from people trapped under buildings. But these short messages sent via the microblogging service Twitter created a conundrum for th
When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, disaster-relief organisations like the American Red Cross received tweets from people trapped under buildings.
But these short messages sent via the microblogging service Twitter created a conundrum for the emergency services there was no co-ordinated response for dealing with them, let alone enough staff, and no systems were in place to speed up the time-consuming task of sifting through a mass of information.
More and more people are using social media in emergencies, or say they would do so in the future, an online survey of 1,058 people released by the American Red Cross this week found.
And agencies such as police and fire departments are increasingly using such media to issue warnings, the survey found. But most are not ready to respond to electronic distress calls. A vast majority of first-responders said they don't have the staff to monitor incoming messages and respond rapidly.
Moreover, people do not yet trust that responders will act on calls for help via social media 59 percent said they would feel they should phone the agency to make sure they had seen the request and 44 percent thought it was very likely that the emergency response organisation wouldn't even know about their request.
"The social web is creating a fundamental shift in disaster response - one that will ask emergency managers, government agencies and aid organisations to mix time-honoured expertise with real-time input from the public," Gail McGovern, American Red Cross president and chief executive officer CEO, said in a statement. "We need to work together to better respond to that shift."
Even before Haiti, social media were beginning to play a vital part in finding information in disasters.
When the worst flooding in 40 years hit the Philippines last year, cutting off power and shutting down mobile phone networks in many areas, tech-savvy locals turned to social networking sites to get information flowing about friends, neighbours and strangers stuck in the rising waters.
Experts now say the humanitarian response has been fundamentally changed through new technology, and that the Haiti quake was a harbinger of new ways to bring help to communities affected by disasters.
Facebook, the world's most popular social networking site, got more than 1,500 status updates per minute soon after the Haiti quake, and it created a global relief page. "Haiti" quickly become the top "trending topic" on Twitter, overtaking the usual mix of celebrities and "the weird and the wonderful".
But much of that was to express sympathy with victims and survivors. The task at hand now is to coordinate technology and disaster response.
Volunteer networks, such as CrisisCommons, have been getting together to create tools that can be used in future disasters.
Technology experts are developing new ways to help, such as a "Tweak the Tweet" syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from disaster-hit areas. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.
The list is getting bigger. But there are big questions too - not least, if you raise people's expectations that help will come following a tweet, or a Facebook message, how do you provide a timely response? In times of instant communications, patience is running thin as the Red Cross found in its survey - three out of four would expect help to arrive within an hour.
Today, the Red Cross will host an "Emergency Data Summit" at its Washington headquarters to bring together government agencies, disaster response organisations, technology experts and citizens to address how to reply to digital cries for help more effectively.
You can follow the event on Twitter via #crisisdata or watch a live stream here. The stream will be archived at the Emergency Social Data Summit blog.
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