If these early reports are verified, this is clear case when all possible warning systems, including the EAS, should have been employed to warn the Greater Boston public to Shelter-In-Place. The timing of the event should have led to a regional and event-specific EAS SPW that would have asked commuters outside the city to not drive or commute into the affected area.

The entire emergency management community has still not identified the entire range of emergency public information (EPI) tools as resources to be managed along with SWAT, Engine companies, food, water and the like. Some thankfully have gotten the message. For an example of what such a warning might look and sound like, here is an example from 2010 from the emergency management agency in Nassau County that has it right.

When I talk to emergency management groups about public warnings, here is my first question: At any time during an emergency, is there something you want the public to do or not do that will help? The events that unfolded in Boston that led to the Shelter-In-Place decision seem to indicate that a national conversation on major change in how all emergency management agencies treat EPI must begin. EPI, including EAS, must be a first level top-of-mind forethought in EM decision making, not an afterthought.

The entire Incident Command System (ICS) needs to bring EPI in as a core resource to be managed. My personal opinion is that the classic ICS divisions of Finance, Operations, Logistics and Planning do not clearly and cleanly do this in many local, regional and state emergency management agencies. As many of you know, there is indeed EPI training in the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Some will argue that this is enough. I respectfully disagree.

If after action reports from Greater Boston indeed show that EAS was not used to issue the Shelter-In-Place warning, it is time for the entire emergency management community to take to heart and really put in practice the name of FEMA’s still new protocol — IPAWS (Integrated Public Alert and Warning System). The United States still does not have a unified and coherent public warning strategy, a missing link that my fellow founding Trustees of the Partnership For Public Warning identified when we came together after the events of September 11, 2001.

To address the issues above, I have initiated two actions which you can be a part of.  First, I have drafted an online petition asking Congress to enact an overall public warning strategy.  I ask that you visit the site, read the petition, and if you agree with my thoughts please join the many others in the greater warning community who have signed the petition.

Second, FEMA just started an online collaborative idea tool for improvements to NIMS that extends to our area of public warnings; I have two postings on that site that I hope will help make the point that EPI should be treated as a response resource, as I detailed above.  Please visit the site, register if you are not already registered, and weigh in – look for my two posts on EPI and Congressional Action Needed – click “I Agree” to join in my effort.  If you have your own ideas to float, this is the place to do it.  FEMA used this tool effectively leading up to the national EAS test.  I’m glad to see they are using it to improve NIMS.

Supporting as well as opposing views on all public warning issues are welcome.

The best examples of best practices often come from real life.  Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) showed the rest of us strong best practices when they issued the shelter-in-place order last week.  MEMA used the new broadcast cell system, Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), to help spread the word.  That’s exactly the type of event, an imminent threat, WEA was intended for.But, MEMA took the WEA message further.  They clearly showed us how WEA can work with other media.  As they issued the shelter-in-place alert via WEA, they also sent an advisory in advance to media to make sure media knew that WEA was about to be used.  It’s possible this was the first time some people in the media had heard of WEA (formerly Commercial Mobile Alert System).

WEA messages really start people talking because of their unique appearance, sound, and vibration and because most people don’t know who’s sending them, since they didn’t have to sign up.  Because of the MEMA media advisory, local media could help the public understand who was sending these unusual messages to their cell phones, and why.

Then, MEMA Tweeted to its followers that the WEA alert was issued.  The Tweet was then re-tweeted, some people referring to WEA as a “phone siren”.  (See earlier post here.)

As a former broadcaster, I guess I can see how some broadcast media could consider WEA a competitive system, since it uses the cell network which can compete with broadcasters for the public’s attention.  But, in this situation, it’s not hard to see how broadcast and cell work together, even compliment one another.  The WEA alerts serve as a “phone siren”, as the Tweeters have started calling it, and get people’s attention.  Then, people are told to go to local media for more information.  (More on this later.)

Meantime, at the risk of getting too personal here, I must say that MEMA use of WEA and its media advisories is another example of why I feel like my son, whose office is across the street from one of the bomb sites, is in good hands up there.  Throughout the situation local, state, and federal authorities directly involved have set good examples for us all…and I’m very thankful.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB) has finally released a report on the November, 2011 national test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS), entitled, “Strengthening the EAS: Lessons Learned from the Nationwide EAS Test”.  While the report doesn’t reveal any great revelations on the test results that weren’t already generally known, the more important content is the action that PSHSB recommends the Commission take to improve the EAS.

EAS Test Results

The Commission received data from over 16,000 EAS Participants (the FCC’s term for the mostly broadcast stations and cable systems that are required to participate in the EAS), some reports coming in as late as November, 2012 following an FCC outreach effort.  The report stated that, “the FCC and FEMA concluded that the nationwide EAS distribution architecture is basically sound”.  Indeed, a chart in the report indicates that only three of 62 Primary Entry Point (PEP) stations failed to carry the test, and 83% of broadcasters and 73% of cable systems received the test.  Problems noted were those previously known: poor audio quality, lack of PEP stations in all areas of the country, short test length, and anomalies in EAS equipment programming and operation.  Equipment problems included user error during the test, errors in programming the equipment for the test, and issues related to the test’s use of the Washington, DC location code, as well as obverse equipment reaction to the garbled audio and second set of Emergency Action Notification (EAN) tones.

Enforcement Action May Be Coming

Regarding those EAS Participants that did not report results of the test to the FCC, which they were legally required to do, the PSHSB has a word of warning buried in footnote 22, “However, there are a significant number of EAS Participants that still appear not to have filed the required reports.  Accordingly, the Bureau plans to confirm cases of continued non-filers and refer them to the Enforcement Bureau (EB) for possible further action.”  This was stated in relation to the late-2012 outreach effort that the FCC conducted to elicit responses from the stragglers; that was apparently the final opportunity to avoid the EB’s radar.  It was noted several times in the report that the State of Alaska authorities requested and received a waiver from participating in the November 9, 2011 Nationwide EAS Test, due to impending severe weather in the state.  Thus, footnote 24 in the report states that “Alaska was granted a waiver and was not required to file a report”.

Another National EAS Test Coming

The PSHSB recommends that another nationwide EAS test take place, but concludes that certain Commission actions should occur first; among those are:

• Release a rulemaking on proposed changes to EAS equipment rules to ensure that EAS equipment operates in a consistent fashion.  This would include uniformity in the EAN text video crawl wording and speed, as well as a determination if an EAN should be forwarded immediately regardless of the Issue Time in the alert.
• Issue a Public Notice to states to update EAS plans for accurate EAS monitoring assignments.
• Work with FEMA to develop and issue best practices for EAS Participants, as well as a public workshop to address EAS Participant concerns and questions on EAN operations.
• Develop a new Nationwide EAS Test Reporting System.  The report suggests, “As a first step, the Bureau should host roundtable discussions with various EAS Participants as well as members of the commission’s bar”.
• Encourage the Executive Office of the President to reconvene the Federal EAS Test Working Group (FCC, FEMA and NWS).

The Bureau did not indicate whether it anticipates that the next Nationwide EAS Test would involve Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) alerts or if it would be a re-test of the legacy EAS alerting networks.

New EAS Rules Coming

As noted previously here on AWARE, there were a number of items in EAS Fifth Report and Order released in January, 2012, which were deferred until after the Nationwide EAS Test report was issued.  In addition to the proposed actions above, the PSHSB recommended that the FCC now address those deferred items.  Some of those proposed changes are:

• Creation of a nationwide EAS location code.
• Use of the National Periodic Test (NPT) Event Code for future tests (although the PSHSB noted in the report that “the rules as currently written, however, do not allow the NPT to perform in the same manner as the EAN” for nationwide testing.)
• Whether EAS Participants should continue to use an EAS Operating Handbook.

As part of a proceeding on these matters, PSHSB suggests that the FCC hold a “public workshop to discuss these issues with EAS stakeholders”.

Some other items deferred in the Fifth Report and Order that were not acknowledged in the report include proposed changes to the FCC Mapbook, the Required Weekly Test (RWT) and Required Monthly Test (RMT).  These and a few other issues were left hanging as well, and need to be addressed.

New SECC and State EAS Plan Rules

Another set of unaddressed issues in the EAS Fifth Report and Order is a possible revision of the rules regarding the State Emergency Communications Committee (SECC) and the State EAS Plan.  The EAS test report had several references to SECCs, for instance, “…state EAS plans, which are developed voluntarily by SECCs, volunteer committees usually comprised of state broadcasters and state emergency management officials.  The SECCs make technical and operational recommendations to state and local area authorities involved in emergency communications, write EAS plans for their state, serve as liaison with the FCC and maintain liaison with appropriate industry committees at the national, state and local levels.” (a quote that the footnote shows is from a 1994 EBS Report and Order).  This very statement by the PSHSB, not currently found anywhere in the EAS rules, may well serve as the basis for the needed SECC and State EAS Plan rules.  On the topic of state plans, the report stated, “the Commission should also consider whether to make the state EAS plan process into an online, rather than paper filing, process.”  Although it was proposed by PSHSB staff in a recent EAS summit, there was no mention of the Commission developing a State EAS Plan template.

Conclusion

In addition to the many EAS stakeholder workshops suggested in the report, it continues, “meetings among PSHSB and IPAWS staff should occur at least once a month”.  All this open communications should bode well for a well-written revision of the EAS rules.  We await the FCC’s next action.

Is it over? No. People still are looking for tools and new tools are being developed to help with new platforms of social media.

Looking at tools today may be necessary, but only after one develops the need for using social media. This article focuses on tools that can foster and forge team building and communication.

Tweet scheduling (including Facebook and Google+)

Should there be a need to schedule tweets, a number of services exist to facilitate that effort.  Leading the pack has always been Hootsuite, though Buffer and SocialOomph are finding followers among the adapters.

Each has different features.  For example, @NavyMARS uses SocialOomph to schedule Bravo Zulu posts, saving the post as a template and changing the verbiage as necessary.

Buffer and Hootsuite allow scheduling to Facebook pages.  Also, using If This Then, one is able to update Twitter with Facebook posts and vice versa.  One can see why tools should not be the focus in social media when one considers that ManageFlitter can allow Google+ updates to Twitter. Hootsuite also supports Google+ as does If This Then.

A competitor to Hootsuite is Gremln, a platform that supports Twitter, LinkedIN, and Facebook.

Twitterfeed takes your Really Simple Syndication feed and pushes it out to Twitter. So does DLVR.IT, Hootsuite, and Google’s Feedburner along with If This Then.

Are you seeing the pattern?  Focus on the why and the how becomes easy.

Do you have your social media plan in place?  Which tools do you use to support it?

The Wisconsin Department of Justice (WDOJ), which maintains that state’s Amber Alert website, substituted its previous Wireless AMBER Alert logo with a campaign featuring the new WEA logo.  This information is posted prominently right in the middle of the site’s homepage.  Clicking on the WEA logo links to an article on the AMBER Alert transition to WEA, and an explanation of how to receive these WEA alerts on your mobile device.  WDOJ took the additional step to post an MP3 file demonstrating the sound that WEA alerts trigger on mobile devices when a WEA alert is received.  Further attention was drawn to the issue through a press release issued by Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen, and there is a link to that press release on the website as well.  Local TV stations picked up on the press release, and ran coverage of the new AMBER Alert WEA system in newscasts.

Many AWARE readers are aware that I am involved with the Wisconsin Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wisconsin Amber Alert Program.  While I had a hand in co-authoring the referenced article, I must say that I am proud and impressed with the multi-pronged approach that WDOJ developed out of my simple idea of just posting an article.  I would encourage others to seed a similar idea with their local and state authorities.  Wisconsin’s example shows that authorities do see value in promoting WEA.  The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) was so impressed that they cited Wisconsin’s efforts as an example for other states to follow.

This type of coordinated, multi-faceted public awareness campaign is what is needed to not just promote WEA AMBER Alerts, but WEA in general.  Emergency managers, as well as law enforcement agencies, can take a page from Wisconsin’s book in how to conduct a successful promotion of WEA alerts to the public.  Take a look at the website as a starting point for your own public outreach campaign.

Source: Radiomuseum.org

Yes, the image above has two triangles. Otherwise known as “Civil Defense” symbols, they are images of the Cold War.

CONELRAD: Radio meets the Civil Defense describes the two radio channels folks would tune to listen for news and updates in the “event of an actual emergency”.

CONELRAD became the Emergency Alert System and the triangles on the AM radios on the dash of the automobiles became Cold War Relics.

That was then and this is now. Has it improved?  Today, there is competition for the message. The emergency manager is challenged with getting the word out to folks listening to their MP3 player inside a house with the windows shut and the vacuum running.

No longer does the emergency manager have two frequencies upon which to place his warning message. The emergency manager must be aware of ALL the methods is customer uses to get news and information and, yes, even entertainment.

When the emergency manager hears that the customer wants him to be on Social Media, which one of them should he use? Does he dare omit Twitter to favor Google+? Does he simply say “I’m on Facebook. If you want the message, tune there.”?

This is why warning professionals encourage folks to have THREE ways to get information. At any given time, all three will be working or two may not.

What three are you using?

Almost a year has passed since the roll-out of Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA, previously known as the Commercial Mobile Alert Service, or CMAS). In this time, public safety officials (primarily the National Weather Service) have sent about 3,000 WEA messages to mobile devices. News stories on this new capability are becoming more commonplace, and more WEA-capable mobile devices are coming online. You may have even received a WEA message on your device by now.

Unfortunately, some message recipients have responded to these messages by looking for a way to turn them off—presumably because they do not perceive the alerts to be relevant to them or their local area. They then take to their phone looking for the settings menu where they can opt out of the alerts.

However, there is wide variation in how these menus are designed and which alerts they allow the user to opt in/out of. WEA rules allow users to opt out of imminent threat messages (the vast majority of which are weather related) and AMBER alerts, but not Presidential alerts. But many device menus do not mirror this directly. I have a BlackBerry Bold and an iPhone 4S. As you can see in the images below, the menus vary significantly.

BlackBerry users can opt in/out of Severe and Extreme alerts, as well as demo the WEA alert delivery.

The BlackBerry menu gives the user the option to opt in/out of AMBER alerts and “Extreme” and “Severe” threat alert messages. These are designations of the National Weather Service, but both fall within the imminent threat alert type. The menu also has a greyed out option for “Presidential Alert Messages”, which indicates to those in the know that the user cannot opt out of these. If you scroll down, the BlackBerry menu even allows the user to demo an alert, complete with sound and vibration.

Android devices apparently offer similar options to BlackBerry’s.

iOS6 labels WEA alerts “Government Alerts” and offers fewer subscription settings than other operating systems.

The Apple iOS6 menu looks very different. First of all, the alerts are called “Government Alerts” (which furthers the branding challenge we’ve talked about before). The user can toggle on/off “Emergency Alerts”, which presumably correspond to imminent threat alerts, but there is no distinction between Severe and Extreme threat alerts.

The problem is that these different menus make for a very different user experience from device to device, which impacts the public’s opting out of WEA messages. BlackBerry or Android users choose to receive more serious Extreme alerts (e.g., Tornado warnings) while opting out of Severe alerts (e.g., Flash Flood warnings); Apple users can only choose to receive all or no imminent threat warnings. The variation also has the potential to create more public confusion about this service.

Part of the answer to this is to create standards for device configuration for WEA messages to ensure a more cohesive user experience and uniform options for opting in and out of alerts. This also needs to be coupled with more public awareness of WEA and the types of messages the public can receive. After all, the Severe/Extreme distinction is not very valuable if if the public does not understand what these terms mean.

This need also brings up at a larger risk: that a significant number of message recipients could be opting out of WEA as a whole right now, and they may never opt back in. The nature of WEA’s cell broadcast technology means we cannot know how many users are disabling the alerts, but one need only search for “how to disable WEA alerts” to see how much interest there is in tuning out. This would be all the more unfortunate as WEA continues to mature, and alerts become more relevant and precisely targeted. Standardizing the user experience and educating the public about this capability would help keep more people opted into the system, and more recipients will mean more lives and property saved.

Why the Change?

The FCC’s reasoning for the change was stated as, “These revisions will conform the name used for the wireless alert system regulated under our rules to the name used by the major commercial mobile service providers that participate in the system.  Accordingly, the rules will more accurately reflect common parlance and thus reduce confusion.”  Although not stated, it is further presumed that the Commission is likewise eliminating the use of its other term for this system, the Personal Localized Alerting Network (PLAN).

Why No Public Comment?

Typically, before making any changes to its rules, the FCC issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking which is followed by a public comment period.  The Commission’s reasoning for the lack of a public comment period concerning this Order was stated as, “The revisions adopted in this Order and set forth in the attached Appendix merely change the name of the commercial mobile alert service regulated under Part 10 of our rules.  These revisions are thus ministerial, non-substantive, and editorial.  Accordingly, we find good cause to conclude that notice and comment procedures are unnecessary and would not serve any useful purpose.”

This is a Good Thing

The FCC is to be commended for making this move to eliminate two of the three different names previously used for describing the WEA/CMAS/PLAN system.  While this change may take some adjustments on all fronts, the American public will be best served by the federal government now settling on one term to describe WEA – presuming that FEMA will follow FCC’s lead in adopting the WEA name.  As has been stated before numerous times here on AWARE (most recently by our Secret Shopper, Liz), consumers should look for the WEA logo shown above when shopping for a new mobile device.  With common branding now between the carriers and the federal government, it will make promotion and awareness campaigns by both parties more effective.

The FEMA test laboratory at the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) – photo courtesy of FEMA

FEMA recently held a webinar giving the latest details on its Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), as well as tips for local alert originators on acquiring and using IPAWS alert origination systems.  The session also offered an update on the forthcoming alert originator test lab detailed in December here on AWARE.

COG-to-COG Messages

All users of IPAWS gain access to the system via their local agency’s Collaborative Operating Group (COG).  Participants in the webinar were reminded that COGs can not only send messages to the public, but messages can be exchanged COG-to-COG.  This might be done to keep neighboring jurisdictions current on the alerts a particular agency is issuing, or for the purpose of exchanging messages between systems from different vendors at different agencies as all vendors are able to send and receive the universal Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)-formatted IPAWS messages.  All of these COG-to-COG messages can be designated in CAP as “private”, and thus are not distributed to the public.

JITC Test Lab

Alert originators (AOs) were reminded that a special IPAWS test environment is being set up at the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) for AOs to test their systems offline from IPAWS, but in an environment that functions the same with your alert origination software as IPAWS would.

When the JITC lab comes online in early March, it will offer simulated Emergency Alert System (EAS) alerting capabilities.  Ability to test with the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) will be coming soon, which will include what FEMA calls a “toy cell” that can send CMAS alerts to CMAS-enabled mobile devices in their lab.

During testing, the lab can be set up to restrict COGs to their current IPAWS permissions, or AOs can experiment with alerting presently outside their permissions on the IPAWS production site.  For additional details on the JITC Test Lab, see our previous AWARE post.

IPAWS Response Codes

AOs should be aware that IPAWS returns Response Codes back to your Alert Origination Service Provider (AOSP) for every IPAWS Message you send, but not all AOSPs pass the codes back to the AO at the local agency.  If you are not seeing responses from IPAWS displayed on your alert origination software after sending a message, you should ask your AOSP why these messages are not being displayed for you.  The codes indicate if your message was accepted by the dissemination channel(s) for which you intended it (such as EAS, CMAS, etc.), and if there was a problem with your message a very specific error code will be returned.  In the case of CMAS messages, the IPAWS response will indicate which carriers acknowledged receipt of your message (and are presumably sending it to mobile devices on their network).  These IPAWS Response Codes can be very useful in troubleshooting, and they give you immediate feedback verifying if your message was successfully accepted by IPAWS.  All AOs can benefit from seeing these response messages displayed on their AOSP software.

IPAWS Conformance Testing

AOSP developers were informed on the call that FEMA regularly gets requests from AOs for recommendations on what AOSP system to buy.  While FEMA doesn’t recommend specific systems, it was stated that soon FEMA will begin referring AOs to check for AOSP systems that have completed the IPAWS Conformance Testing offered by the Preparedness-Technology, Analysis, and Coordination (P-TAC) Center under the Supporting Technology Evaluation Project (STEP).  The systems that successfully complete this testing are then allowed to post a Suppliers Declaration of Conformity (SDoC) on the Responder Knowledge Base.   AOs looking for IPAWS-conforming systems to purchase should visit the RKB.us site and search on “IPAWS SDoCs”.  FEMA strongly encouraged AOSP developers on the call to go through the P-TAC STEP IPAWS testing and get their AOSP product SDoC listed on the RKB site as soon as possible.

Weather alerts for the New York City area during Superstorm Sandy, as displayed by Google Public Alerts

Hurricane Sandy put social media’s value for emergency response on the front page. Patrice Cloutier goes so far as to assert that “there’ll now be a before Sandy and post-Sandy in SMEM.” There’s no doubt: people use social media during disasters to get and give information and to interact with authorities. But is this the full picture? This article looks more broadly at social media’s potential and asks some questions we’ll be exploring in future articles.

As AWARE has discussed before, EM practitioners typically see three basic ways to use SM to help manage emergencies:

• Team building: laying the groundwork by establishing a trusted, familiar social media EM presence well before disaster strikes
• Intelligence gathering/situational awareness: both the public and the authorities use social media to find out what’s happening before and during an event, especially on the “hyper-local” scale
• Information distribution: SM channels are essential, new-normal conduits for getting the word out on every type of issue

These play out in various ways depending on the type of emergency and its lifecycle, as one report explains here. The SMEM timeline spans the gamut of the full event lifecycle, from preparedness, to alerts and warnings, to response, to recovery and community resilience. The core social communications platforms — Twitter, Facebook, blogs — are the ones most often cited. Most discussion focuses on text exchanges — how to extract valid, timely information from “big data” SM message flows, how to message accurately in 120 characters, how to geo-target receptors, how to staff and fund expert SM staff. So the scope of social media’s relevance to EM is already huge.

Is this the limit of how government should define its interest in SM? It depends in part on how you define social media, and in part on how broadly you want to approach the emergency management enterprise itself.

…defining social media

If you define social media as personalized, one-to-many communication with the ability to create free-form, event- or purpose-specific networks, the discussion gets generalized well beyond the social platforms. With SM increasingly aligned with the mobile computing, hand-held or vehicle based infrastructure, we are in the world of the “citizen sensor” — every person with a smartphone being potentially an active or passive source – maybe even an involuntary source – of many types of information, not just human communication. Sean Gorman asks, “is social media the human geography of the emerging human sensor network?” 

Hurricane Irene social media analysis from Geocommons

And what about the disparity between professional and consumer mobile hardware? A professional device might survive being run over by a car, but is it as powerful and as connected as a $200 smartphone? Should we leverage private BYOD equipment to be a reliable (and cheaper) part of the first responder’s kit? At a minimum, thinking in this direction seems almost a must for financially strapped jurisdictions.

…defining the boundaries of EM

If you then broaden “emergency management” to include the entire EM enterprise, not just the management of events, things get more open-ended. Can we use SM techniques to plan better research agendas, design better equipment, fund equipment development, and even purchase it? How will SM affect the interplay, and relative weights, of professional versus volunteer responders? We know that totally non-governmental SMEM initiatives have been extremely successful in other countries (Usahidi, Sahana) – what are the implications for the U.S., not just for managing disasters, but for planning at the NIMS level?

Social media is just approaching adolescence, so we have little perspective on what’s next. Think back on the Internet itself — social media’s technological parent. In a Web 1.0 world, when people first got network access to basically static web sites, the Internet looked like a cheaper, quicker way to access documents and publications. But then came Web 2.0 and 3.0. If it were 1995 and one asked how big a role will the Internet play in emergency response, the answer would probably have centered on information distribution. Looking back from today, what would we say? The Internet has profoundly changed virtually every element of society and the economy, including all aspects of EM operations.

Then there are changing social mores – what people expect from SM, but also what they are willing to do. Expectations of what people want from SM in an emergency are already surprisingly high, but we know less about what they are willing to do, or be encouraged or trained to do. The Forest Service’s motto, “Only you can prevent forest fires,” is more than grade school nostalgia—it’s social engineering on a national scale. Smokey is recognized by 95% of adults and 77% of children. This Forest Service program has prevented who knows how many fires over almost 70 years. What if “if you see something, say something” were operationalized in the school system and through advertising to encourage specific habits for crowdsourcing key information in a disaster?

Imagine if the “see something, say something” campaign were operationalized through schools and advertising like Smokey the Bear was.

Then there is the “dark side” of social media — the threats, the risks (as were seen during Superstorm Sandy). What role does social media play in causing emergencies themselves? What about malicious use? Do terrorists use SM to plan attacks — do criminals use it to plan and carry out crimes? What about non-malicious, but negative SM-related phenomena? Flashmobs are one example. Are there others? What about the monopolization of bandwidth during events, with implications for infrastructure planning, management, and cyber security. Finally, what are the legal and ethical questions we need to ask now, and anticipate for tomorrow?

A pillow fight that took place in Lausanne, Switzerland, in front of the courthouse

AWARE will explore these open questions over the next few months. Our reader’s thoughts, insights, and suggestions for topics are welcome as always.