Twitter Helping Respond to Gulf Oil Leak
RT @Twitter: Tweet with #BPspillmap to report an incident to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade or check out reports so far on this map: http://bit.ly/aeQb0Y
Twitter announced yesterday on it’s official Twitter account the integration of Twitter and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is a system created by students to allow everyday citizens to report oil in places they frequent, because of the Gulf Shore oil leak.
What is the Oil Spill Crisis Map?
This map visualizes reports of the effects of the BP oil spill submitted via text message, email, twitter and the web. Reports of oil sightings, affected animals, odors, health effects and human factor impacts made by the eyewitnesses and the media populate points on a this public, interactive, web based map. The information will be used to provide data about the impacts of the spill in real time as well as document the story of those that witness it.
Who made this?
The Oil Spill Crisis map is brought to you by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and was developed in partnership with students of Professor Nathan Morrow of Tulane University. This technology, utilizes the Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.org) crisis mapping platform to map eyewitness accounts of the oil spill disaster. Ushahidi was first used and developed by Kenyan bloggers to display reports of post-election violence. Since then Ushahidi has been used in other emergencies like the Haiti Earthquake (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/) response, Washington DC’s winter blizzard (http://snowmageddoncleanup.com/) and in Atlanta (http://crime.mapatl.com/) to track crime. The Oil Spill Crisis map is first application of Ushahidi in a humanitarian response in the United States.
Your Brand on Twitter
Mashable has a good list of things not to do (and things to do) with your brand on Twitter. I realize many of you are just starting your organization’s social media brand, so I hope this is helpful. This think this item is especially important (many of us break it):
4. Don’t Auto-Tweet
It’s OK to set up tweets to roll out while you’re away from your desk, but think long and hard before you automate an entire feed to stream into your Twitter account. Users can smell a bot from miles away, and the point of Twitter is to be personally engaging more than blatantly promotional. Also, this might go without saying for the tech-savvy marketers among us, but don’t automatically DM new followers; it’s seen as spam. And never DM someone your account doesn’t also follow.
Local News and Issue Reporting
EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news aggregator (explanation), is expanding into the government 2.0 arena with the integration of SeeClickFix (Wikipedia). SeeClickFix allows citizens to report issue (non-emergency issues) to local governments and community activists. EveryBlock covers the new integration on their blog:
Our friends at SeeClickFix run a site where you can report non-emergency community issues, like potholes, graffiti or street light outages. They’ve shared their data with us so that EveryBlock users will get notified whenever an issue has been reported nearby.
See the great coverage in ReadWriteWeb:
Everyblock aggregates public records, blog posts and other content about very specific geographic locations, automatically. SeeClickFix acts on a similarly hyperlocal basis, giving its users the ability to report issues to their local government using their smartphone.
Build That Fiber Yourselves
In the next couple of weeks, Google will announce the winners of the Google Fiber for Communities applications (we covered the initiative previously). Wired has a good article on what communities that don’t get into the fiber project should do: contact a fiber provider, go out for bonds, and build it yourselves:
Wilson, North Carolina, runs a city-owned network called Greenlight that offers an unbundled 20 Mbps up and 20 Mbps down connection for $60 a month. Cable subscribers can get 10 Mbps up and down for $35 — and those who need even faster connections can go all the way up to 100 Mbps.
But there are lots of ways for cities to start a network without committing to building everything at once — which often requires a bond measure.
Settles points to Santa Monica, California, which started with a fiber-optic line serving the government, then expanded it slowly as the city worked on projects like street renovation and sewer-main installations. In March, it launched the Santa Monica City Net, a 10-Gpbs open-access network that Santa Monica businesses can use — which includes Google and some top hospitals using it for tele-medicine. That network is 10 times faster than what the FCC calls for as a goal in 2020.
We all know that it isn’t as easy as deciding to put broadband in our communities, but this has to be a better option than changing the name of your city (Topeka, aka Google, Kansas) or jumping into a shark tank.
FEMA’s Social Media Site
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a great site for it’s own social media accounts and explanation of what they do. Check it out here, and read FEMA’s factsheet on social media usage here.
About this page, FEMA writes:
FEMA has been engaging in Web 2.0 tools and on social media sites nationwide as part of its mission to prepare the nation for disasters. FEMA’s goals with social media are: to provide timely and accurate information related to disaster preparedness response and recovery; provide the public with another avenue for insight into the agency’s operations; and engage in what has already become a critical medium in today’s world of communications. FEMA’s social media ventures function as supplemental outreach, and as appropriate channels for unofficial input.
All FEMA social media accounts outside of the www.FEMA.gov domain carry the branded femainfocus look and feel. This provides consistency and accountability for content in that the public and our partners can rest assured it is the authorized FEMA account and that the information is accurate. Citizens can engage more easily with the emergency management community through social media sites, and increase their role in disaster preparedness, response and recovery.
FEMA has wholeheartedly engaged social media, how does your organization stack up?
Accomplishing Social Good
GOOD has a thoughtful article on using social networks and social media to accomplish social good. While it is a very high-level piece, I think it is good to keep in mind the big picture of what our technology and tools can do.
Ways to Increase Engagement
The Harvard Business Review has a good article on ways to increase engagement through existing social media account. Some of the recommendations include using a suggestion box and enabling widgets that your citizens can use.
Why the Need for Open Records
As part of Sunshine Week, the nation’s new Freedom of Information Act ombudsman, Miriam Nisbet, took part in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press. This question-and-answer really struck me:
Q: Why is this important to the average citizen, someone who doesn’t work for a newspaper?
A: “If people are going to know how their government is operating, what they are doing that affects them, what they are doing on behalf of the people, they have to be able to see the records that reflect that. The documents that are being created, the data that are being produced. Particularly, you look at huge government programs and all the data that come out of that. Those data belong to the people, and they should have a right to see them and then do with them what they want.”
This stuck out to me because we as public administrators often think of only the media, local newspaper, or kooky citizen as requesters of open records. In reality, “Those data belong to the people.”
Smart Phones Helping Us Serve Citizens
Along the same lines as yesterday’s tweet from the Newark Mayor, today we have a great article in Governing from the former Mayor of Indianapolis. Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in American Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, writes about how “smart phones are revolutionizing how governments serve its citizens — and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.” The article is titled, “Phone + GPS + Camera = Revolution“. This is a very good read.
PS- You can follow Stephen Goldsmith on Twitter, he’s @S_Goldsmith.
Newark Mayor Improves City Through Twitter
Newark Mayor Cory Booker tweeted this earlier today:
I’m on it: Thanks RT @pb83 Mayor there’s a MONSTER pothole at Munn & 18th Ave. Sumbody’s gonna lose a piece of there car.
The original tweet from the Newark resident was:
@CoryBooker not sure who 2 address this 2, but there’s a MONSTER pothole at Munn & 18th Ave. Sumbody’s gonna lose a piece of there car.
That’s service for you.
Report on Gov Social Media from UPenn
The Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania has released a report titled Making the Most of Social Media: 7 Lessons from Successful Cities. An overview of this good read:
[This] is written for local governments—cities, counties, townships and their affiliates—that are beginning to experiment with social media and would like to get more out of them. More than two dozen early adopters were interviewed for this report, and their experiences offer some lessons to local governments about what sorts of tools social media offer, how to integrate them into a busy office, and how to use them creatively to be more effective.
Code for America and Local Gov Web 2.0
A new group called Code for America (which is backed by Tim O’Reilly) is trying to help local governments “leverage the power of the web.” GovTech has a great article on this new group.
They are on Twitter at @codeforamerica.