14 mejri new configurationict-indisasters-ws2014

6 marzo 2014 - 14

2014 Workshop
Conoscenza e tecnologie appropriate per la sostenibilità e la resilienza
in urbanistica
Knowledge and Appropriate Technologies for Sustainability and Resilience
in Planning

Funda Atun, Maria Pia Boni, Annapaola Canevari, Massimo Compagnoni, Luca Marescotti,
Maria Mascione, Ouejdane Mejri, Scira Menoni, Floriana Pergalani

LAUREA MAGISTRALE DELLA SCUOLA DI ARCHITETTURA E SOCIETÀ
Laboratorio organizzato da Luca Marescotti

201 Workshop
Conoscenza e tecnologie appropriate per la
sostenibilità urbanistica - Knowledge and Appropriate
Technologies for Sustainability in Planning

Cover

New communication
configuration during crisis
management
O. Mejri, Politecnico di Milano

Communication and crisis response
 The key obstacle to effective crisis response is the
communication needed to:
• Access relevant data or expertise
• Piece together an accurate understandable picture of

reality

 Information is “that which can be communicated and
understood”
information, before, during and after the crisis
consists of a strategic resource in the contingency
management process.

Who is engaged ?
• During an emergency, heterogeneous categories of persons
and organizations are engaged, as active or passive actors:
1. 1. Operative organizations: taking part in the
contingency management operations (firemen, police,
army, agencies in charge of environmental assessments,
health indicators, etc.)
 2. Scientists and experts
 3. Decisional makers institutions: local, federal, national
and international organisms
 4. Media channels: international and national
mainstreams, local media, internet blogs, etc.
 5. Public: distinguished into the population directly
affected and the more general public

Emergency management workflow analysis

Information

Communication needs for Emergency
response
 The information needed by stakeholders during a
crisis emergency are related to
• Direct consequences of a disaster,
• Resources requests and availability,
• Relief information (e.g., roads, bridges, airports and

railways state)
• The main features of the involved areas

 Furthermore, the communication aspects are crucial
to be monitored among
 Communication status (active, interrupted, etc.)
 Information quality (contents, structures, etc.)

Information classification for Emergency
response (I)
1) Operational and decisional information used and
communicated among the organizations and actors
involved in dealing with the emergency
• Operational and decisional information may be
produced
 in the operative processes and it’s useful for
decisional ones
 in the decisional level and furthermore re-used into
the operational processes

Operational and decisional information
quality
• A main feature over the quality of the information is
tracking “Who is saying What and When” defining
the information source and its timeliness.
• In an emergency it is critical that every bit of
quantitative or qualitative data be identified
 Human or digital source,
 Time of occurrence,
 Status,
 Location,
 Relationships to whatever it is referring to that already

exists within the system.

Information classification for Emergency
response (II)
2) Information that will be communicated to media
channels and spread among the population
 The importance to have the media as part of the

contingency management framework
media are better equipped to transfer information
to people in any case they will be there whenever and
wherever a disaster occurs
 Multiple actors are in theory eligible to provide
information to the media
 How to agree among the police, firemen, medical doctors,
etc. about the opportunity to dispatch a unique information
bulletin, particularly when risks are high and uncertainty
large?

Interactions with mass-media
• Instead of trying to avoid contacts with the media,
that will be inevitably there, one should allocate
time, resources and tools to accommodate the
media within the entire process of emergency
management
• To be as transparent as possible in conveying news
in a turbulent situation
• Exploit media’s capability to dispatch information
for the victims (like facilitating contacts among
relatives and friends, disseminating information
about health care, shelters, etc.).

Official information (I)
• Information is usually considered official if it:
 has an institutional source
 is communicated by reliable media (i.e. mainstream

televisions or radios that may be state or private
according to the country)

• As the ownership of information is considered as a
powering function the institutions are highlyprotective about this authority
• Till some years ago the official information was only
disrupted by the presence of geographically
localised “rumors” and the diffusion of inaccurate or
misleading disaster communication

Official information (II)
• The public and state information owned and diffused by
the public institutions are considered as the official
“version” by the crisis management stakeholders (i.e.
organisations, decision-makers and the more general
population)
• This information is usually used in order to prioritize the
help actions and to allocate the needed resources by
the decisional level, defining in point of fact the whole
workflow of disaster management and recover
• The official information is, as a rule, perceived as the
trustworthy information by the population which utilize it
to take their personal or communitarian decisions

New configuration of Information providers

• Information providers
1. Traditional media
2. New media information providers

• New media sources compete with traditional official
sources of information in the aftermath of disasters,
while reversing the communication process from
top-down to bottom-up.

A new configuration

• A new configuration of everyday’s life, as well as
crisis situations, was reshaped by the introduction
of technology and new communication tools
“we cannot deal with disasters without taking into
account the new configuration of people
communication and use of technology. The entire
process has to be re-considered in order to manage
this new way of life” – Lagadec

The configuration of the
possession of information is transformed

New ICT configuration: Cloud Computing
• Cloud computing refers to
the delivery of computing
and storage capacity as a
service to a
heterogeneous
community of endrecipients.
• The name comes from the
use of clouds as an
abstraction for the complex
infrastructure it contains in
system diagrams.
• Cloud computing entrusts
services with a user's data,
software and computation
over a network. It has
considerable overlap with
software as a service
(SaaS).

Web 2.0
• Web 2.0 includes search engines, social media and
the global hypermedia public sphere
• Offers through the different protocols and formats
(e.g., http, HTML, XML, RDF, etc.) the possibility to
represent data and to guarantee the
interoperability among it
• Permits to integrate the interpersonal
communication technologies such as mails, forum,
blogs, instant messaging, social networks, etc.

Web 2.0 for crisis management
Online public tools and infrastructures permitted in the last years
to memorize, share and access crisis information
•

Video-sharing websites: the most famous all over the world is
YouTube.com. Freely subscribed users of YouTube can upload, view and
share user-generated video content

•

Image-sharing websites: Flickr is the major image hosting website (51
million registered members and 80 million unique visitors and hosting
more than 6 billion images in 2011) that offers to its freely subscribed
users to share and embed personal photographs

•

Social networking websites: Facebook is the most popular social utility
that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live
around them. The site is free and has over 1 billion active users, more
than half of them using the website on a mobile device

•

Microblogging websites: Twitter is the worldwide most popular
microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based
posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets"

Unofficial VS Official Information
• In this new scenario, the official information is in “conflict” with
unofficial information that is produced by private citizens
or NGO’s, made visible and available to everyone, all over
the world, in few seconds, through the net and the social
networks.
A revolution in terms
of disaster
information
providing, sharing
and dispatching

Unofficial information properties
1. The source of the information may be considered private
(i.e. most of it is produced by single citizens)
2. The access to the information is made public by the use of
public media-sharing websites and social network platforms
3. The diffusion of the information follows both peer-to-peer
and broadcasting paradigms depending on the technological
tool it employs reaching not only the private population but
also the institutions and the different stakeholders of the
crisis management process
4. The sharing information activities over the net are immediate
and follow a rather real-time model
5. The population (i.e. victims of the disaster and more general
population) elevated focus on the disaster, especially the
highly damaging ones and during the few hours following it,
create a huge increasing demand of information that is
replied by the production of a massive quantity of
content-related information about crisis

Participatory journalism
•

•

During crisis situations, the citizens involved in a
disaster (e.g. floods, tsunamis, fires, explosions,
earthquakes, etc.) are increasingly witnessing what
they are watching to by reporting breaking news, often
more quickly than traditional media reporters.
The disaster information sent from the field may consist
of a simple text alert, pictures or videos.
Example: during the last flood events in the city of
Genoa in November 2011, for the first twelve hours, the
unique source of information about the evolution of the
situation on the field was the Youreporter website.

•

The entire world had also the possibility to watch
the same videos of the devastating 2011 Great
Japanese earthquake and tsunami that were
produced by single private citizens before receiving
any professional media images.

• The unofficial information as described above is not
certified and may lead to the diffusion of inaccurate
description of the situation if not analyzed in the
right way by for example contextualizing it in time
and space.
• Some examples of “old” information which is
reloaded or manipulated demonstrated that the
control and the certification of the contents are the
first steps in order to use this information in public
and traditional media.
• The use of this information should also be
traduced in useful information for the emergency
managers

Information fusion
1. Official communications are very present in the
net, shared as texts, images and videos extracted
from TV and radio channels diffusions (e.g.
earthquake magnitude and epicentre, radioactivity
presence, number of official losses and injuries,
etc.).
2. Traditional media diffuse amateur videos and
pictures present in the media-sharing or in citizen
journalism websites
- Rolling news TV channels get the possibility to
update their news constantly by the reception of
an extended potential number of on the groundreporters videos.

Information, IT and ICT

• A simple definition of Information : “that which
can be communicated and understood”
• We can then put together a basic definition of IT
as:
“Information Technology is the use of
information in order to meet human need or
purpose”.
• The definition of ICT therefore became: “the use
of information in order to meet human need or
purpose including reference to the use of
contemporary devices such as the Internet”.

Not only information
• ICT can be used effectively to address diverse issues in the
immediate post-disaster period as demonstrated by the
following non-exhaustive list of examples:
• SAHANA disaster management system in the aftermath of
the Indian ocean tsunami in 2004 and Pakistani earthquake in
2005 ,
• UNOSAT ’s role in disaster response during the 2004 Indian
ocean tsunami,
• USHAHIDI ’s platform permitting the construction of near real
time up-to-dated crisis map available to the humanitarian
community for Haiti and Chile earthquakes in 2010,
• GOOGLE Person Finder is a web application that allows
individuals to post and search for the status of relatives or
friends affected by a disaster developed for Haiti’s
earthquake.

ICT for Emergency Management samples
•

•

Sahana, a free and open source software (FOSS)-based
system developed by Lanka Software Foundation, is a suite
of web-based applications that provides solutions to the
problems arising in a post-disaster situation.

• The United Nations Institute for Training and Research
Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT)
provides the international community and developing
countries with enhanced access to satellite imagery and GIS
services.

• UNOSAT: a satellite-derived estimation of the number of
civilians leaving the Chadian capital of N’Djamena and
heading towards the Cameroonian border

• UNOSAT: In the case of
January’s earthquake in
Haiti, an SMS message was
received at 23:20, Geneva
time, on January 12, only
minutes after the quake.
Immediately, UNOSAT
began organizing and
downloading satellite images
for analysis, to create the
very first maps used by relief
workers in Haiti.

•

The Ushahidi Platform is a free and open source project
combining crisis information from citizen-generated reports,
media and NGOs and mashing that data up with geographical
mapping tools. It uses mobile phones as a primary means of
both sending crisis incidents and receiving updates

•


The people located in Haiti, can report emergency info and
location by texting 4636.
• A web interface that allows Creole speaking "dispatchers" -from anywhere on the Internet -- to take the SMS messages
off the queue to organize and tag them.
• The system tracks information in the several categories and
subcategories including: emergencies, threats, responder
activities, news about individuals, and the location of
resources.

•

The Ushahidi Platform
Ushahidi, is a non-profit technology company
voted by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the
50 most innovative companies in the world
alongside Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Crowdmapping : lessons learned in
Haiti
• “Information fragmentation” as the humanitarian
community calls it, was one of the core information
management challenges that the humanitarian
community faced in Haiti:
“the division of data resources and analysis into silos
that are difficult to aggregate, fuse, or otherwise
reintegrate into composite pictures.”
Patrick Meier (Ushahidi)

Pointillism
• Pointillism is a technique in which “small, distinct
dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an
image.”
• Think of these dots as data points drawn from
diverse pallets but combined to depict an appealing
and consistent whole.

•

Google Person Finder is a web application that with an API
based on the PFIF open standard which lets press agencies,
non-governmental agencies and others to contribute to the
database and receive updates. In addition, websites can
choose to embed Google Person Finder as a gadget on their
own pages

Centralized information : http://www.google.co.jp/intl/en/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

Resistance to ICT
• The technologies make a major difference in the
speed, interactive exchange and analytical
capacity for the organizations participating in the
disaster response and recovery system
• BUT
• Actually, each category of actors has its own
relationship and interpretation of the IT,
depending on several factors. As in organization
management the technology makingsense process
has to be explored also in crisis management, since
such interpretations of technology critically influence
the way people act around IT .

Technological frames : interpretation of
information technology by stakeholders

• If the IT interpretations are significantly divergent
from a category of actors to another, emergency
management failures may be encountered.
• While organizational researchers has examined the
role of collective cognitive models in organizational
action focusing on technological aspects, they did it
for normal situations not considering crisis
management situations.
• Why people will adopt IT or not, which
technology will be chosen and how it will change
the disaster organization actions?

Technological frames properties
• Nature of technology: people's images of the technology
and their understanding of its capabilities and functionality.
• The technology strategy: people's views of why this
technology is offered to them. It includes their
understanding of the motivation or vision behind the
adoption decision.
• The technology-in-Use: people's understanding of how
the technology will be used and the likely or actual
conditions and consequences associated with such use.
• The interpretations of technology are central to
understanding technological development, use, and
change in contingency management processes.

User-centred design approach

• Designing with a user-centred approach requires the
involvement of the user from the very beginning, as it is
fundamental to understand the reality of peoples actions,
i.e. what, how, when, and why actions are performed.
• A user-centred design approach often works by trying to
answer typical questions like who are the users, which
are the user tasks and goals, what information do the
users need and so on.

Earthquake Emilia , Italy – May 2012

New technologies, “new” behaviors ?

14 mejri new configurationict-indisasters-ws2014

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