Crisis Information
Management
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Special Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation

First citizen journalist?
• Abraham Zapruder
• Bell & Howell camera
• Less than 30 seconds
• Sold to Life Magazine for US$
150,000 3 days later

London Bombings
• 7 July 2005 (7/7)
• Within 24 hours, the
BBC had received
1,000 stills and
videos, 3,000 texts
and 20,000 e‐mails.

UN CIM Stocktaking Process
• Crisis Information Management capabilities
and capacities in the UN Secretariat, NY and
key UN agencies
• Stocktaking conducted over 2008 with
DPKO, DSS, UNICEF, various arms of the
UNDP, OCHA

Key aindings
• Intra agency “point solutions” that have emerged in response to
particular events or needs
• Many of these solutions have produced excellent results and
could be leveraged across the UN system in times of crisis.
• However, at present many tools, solutions and processes remain
unknown and isolated from one another.
• Sustainability of point solutions?
• Agency learning / wider institutional learning of point
solutions?

Key aindings
• Staff transience
• Interoperability non‐existent or poor within
and between agencies learning to
information silos, data loss, duplication etc
• Poor policies and practices information
management

Key aindings
• Inward looking – beneaiciaries and public are
outside, untrustworthy
• New media and ICTs were often seen as
bandwidth hogs and serious security threats
• Parallel communications – UN mandated /
needs driven responses by staff
• Infrastructure issues at the UN Secretariat

Key aindings
• No vital records archival programme across
the institution. Data integrity and long‐term
storage was left up to individual agencies.
• Agency led categorisation of information did
not sometimes makes sense to other actors
• Information overload
• Senior management not interested

Crisis Information Management
Systems: New directions, old
challenges?

8 ICTs for shared situational
awareness
1. Twitter (micro‐blogging) (e.g. http://spy.appspot.com)
2. RSS (e.g. Google News Reader)
3. Wiki (e.g. CCCPA wiki)
4. Mobiles (SMS)
5. GPS (real time location data)
6. Mapping (GIS – Google Maps / Google Earth)
7. VoIP (e.g. Skype)
8. Social networking

Information breakdown
• Twitter
• Flickr
New media • Blogs
• SMS / MMS / Mobiles
• Social networks
Mainstream
• CNN / BBC / Al Jazeera
• Local / National TV and radio
• Print media (mainstream /
media regional)
• Alternative print media
UN • Sit reps
• Humanitarian Information Centres
intelligence
• Agency databases / email lists
• Personal contacts / relationships

Google Earth | Crisis in Darfur

Easy to use GPS

Twitter
http://www.twitter.com
• First reports of Chinese earthquake in May
2008 were from Twitter
• Mexico City earthquake in 2007
• Minneapolis Bridge collapse in 2007

Mumbai bomb blasts
26th and 27th November 2008

Spy
http://spy.appspot.com

Flickr | Vinu
http://www.alickr.com/photos/vinu/sets/
72157610144709049/

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks
• 400+ edits /
updates
• 100+
authors
• Less than 24
hours after
airst attack

Social Networking

“Revolution Facebook Style”
New York Times, 22nd January 2009
• In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is
now one of the 10 most‐visited Web sites, and in
Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo.
• About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and
around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a
total of almost 800,000 members.
• April 6 Youth Movement, a group of 70,000 mostly
young and educated Egyptians, most of whom had
never been involved with politics before joining the
group.

Gaza aid
• The Australian senate has approved $10 million USD
aid to the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Stimulated by a group of activists on Facebook who
called themselves \"The Pro­Palestinian Lobby on
Facebook.\"
• The group, which was formed shortly after the war
on Gaza started, consists of a number of networks
that together amount to nearly one million people,
including Palestinians, and internationals from
different parts of the world.

Broadcasting | Ustream.tv

Bambuser
http://bambuser.com/

Some key differences
• Systems within UN • Systems outside UN
• Agency focused and • Crowd sourced
agency owned information / outward in
• Inward looking • Veriaiability optional and
• Generally veriaied / hard
agency produced or
• Designed for scalability
trusted source
• Open source / Open data
• Set up for dissemination
standards
• Proprietary data formats
• Potential of
and systems
interoperability high /
• Little or no
Information exchanged
interoperability
poor
• Hard to learn
• Easy to learn