Geospatial – Page 19 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/08/232012/08/23

Patrick Meier: How Civil Resistance Protests Improve Crowdsourced Disaster Response (and Vice Versa)

Phi Beta Iota: This may well be the most important post Dr. Patrick Meier has done to date. Robert Steele is writing a new chapter or article, Public Administration in the 21^st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant — The Public that will integrate and expand on the core insight at the conclusion of the below post: routing around government may be the most important non-violent ethical means of displacing corrupt governments and restoring the sovereignty of the public.

How Civil Resistance Protests Improve Crowdsourced Disaster Response (and Vice Versa

When Philippine President Joseph Estrada was forced from office following widespread protests in 2001, he complained bitterly that ”the popular uprising against him was a coup de text.” Indeed, the mass protests had been primarily organized via SMS. Fast forward to 2012 and the massive floods that recently paralyzed the country’s capital. Using mobile phones and social media, ordinary Filipinos crowdsourced the disaster response efforts on their own without any help from the government.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: How Civil Resistance Protests Improve Crowdsourced Disaster Response (and Vice Versa)”

2012/08/222012/08/22

Patrick Meier: Crowdsourcing Disaster Response in Iran – How Volunteers Bypassed the State

Geospatial

Crowdsourcing Disaster Response in Iran: How Volunteers Bypassed the State

Posted on August 22, 2012 | Comments Off

The double earthquakes that recently struck Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province killed over 300 people and left thousands more homeless. Iranians are par-ticularly adept at using Facebook and other social media platforms. So I was hardly surprised to learn that Iranian journalists launched a Facebook group to collect and and share reliable information related to the earthquake’s impact. Some of these journalists also visited the disaster-struck region to document the deva-station and aid in the relief efforts.

Existing Facebook groups were also used to bring help to those in need. One such group, called Female Equals Male, encouraged followers to donate blood at centers across the country. An Iranian who works at one of these centers was taken aback by the response: “… it was the first time that I have ever seen people being so eager to donate blood. It has always been us, pushing, advertising and asking people to do so.” Female Equals Male already had over 140,000 “likes” before the earthquake.

Read full post with photos.

2012/08/212012/08/21

Anthony Judge: Recognizing the Psychosocial Boundaries of Remedial Action

Culture, Economics/True Cost, Geospatial, Knowledge, Politics

31st October 2009 | Draft

Recognizing the Psychosocial Boundaries of Remedial Action

constraints on ensuring a safe operating space for humanity

Introduction

Planetary boundaries of the environmental system
Necessity for urgent action, globally, regionally and locally
Global remedial action boundaries
Substantiating the remedial capacity boundaries
Polyocular strategic vision
Systemic isomorphism
Representation of boundaries of coherence of complex systems
In quest of systemic functional connectivity

Full Paper

2012/08/142012/08/14

Patrick Meier: Crowd-Sourcing, Crisis Mapping, & Sustainable Resilience

Geospatial, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy

Could Social Media Have Prevented the Largest Mass Poisoning of a Population in History?

I just finished reading a phenomenal book. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, was co-authored by my good friend Andrew Zolli of PopTech fame and his won-derful colleague Ann Marie Healey. I could easily write several dozen blog posts on this brilliant book. Consider this the first of possibly many more posts to follow. Some will summarize and highlight insights that really resonated with me while others like the one below will use the book as a spring board to explore related questions and themes. Read full post.

Crisis Mapping for Disaster Preparedness, Mitigation and Resilience

Crisis mapping for disaster preparedness is nothing new. In 2004, my colleague Suha Ulgen spearheaded an innovative project in Istanbul that combined public participation and mobile geospatial technologies for the purposes of disaster mitigation. Suha subsequently published an excellent overview of the project entitled ”Public Participation Geographic Information Sharing Systems for Co-mmunity Based Urban Disaster Mitigation,” available in this edited book on Geo-Information for Disaster Management. I have referred to this project in count-less conversations since 2007 so it is high time I blog about it as well. Read full post.

2012/08/072012/08/07

Patrick Meier: Traditional vs. Crowdsourced Election Monitoring: Which Has More Impact?

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

Traditional vs. Crowdsourced Election Monitoring: Which Has More Impact?

Max Grömping makes a significant contribution to the theory and discourse of crowdsourced election monitoring in his excellent study: “Many Eyes of Any Kind? Comparing Traditional and Crowdsourced Monitoring and their Contribu-tion to Democracy” (PDF). This 25-page study is definitely a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. That said, Max paints a false argument when he writes: “It is believed that this new methodology almost magically improves the quality of elections […].” Perhaps tellingly, he does not reveal who exactly believes in this false magic. Nor does he cite who subscribes to the view that ”[…] crowdsourced citizen reporting is expected to have significant added value for election observation—and by extension for democracy.”

My doctoral dissertation focused on the topic of crowdsourced election observa-tion in countries under repressive rule. At no point in my research or during interviews with activists did I come across this kind of superficial mindset or opinion. In fact, my comparative analysis of crowdsourced election observation showed that the impact of these initiatives was at best minimal vis-a-vis electoral accountability—particularly in the Sudan. That said, my conclusions do align with Max’s principle findings: “the added value of crowdsourcing lies mainly in the strengthening of civil society via a widened public sphere and the accumulation of social capital with less clear effects on vertical and horizontal accountability.”

Read full post with screen shots.

2012/07/302012/07/30

Patrick Meier: Twitter Dashboard & Media Analysis for Crisis Response

Analysis, Civil Society, CrisisWatch reports, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, Geospatial, IO Deeds of Peace, P2P / Panarchy, Peace Intelligence

CrisisTracker: Collaborative Social Media Analysis For Disaster Response

I just had the pleasure of speaking with my new colleague Jakob Rogstadius from Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (Madeira-TTI). Jakob is working on CrisisTracker, a very interesting platform designed to facilitate collaborative social media analysis for disaster response. The rationale for CrisisTracker is the same one behind Ushahidi's SwiftRiver project and could be hugely helpful for crisis mapping projects carried out by the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF).

Read post see screen shots.

Towards a Twitter Dashboard for the Humanitarian Cluster System

One of the principal Research and Development (R&D) projects I'm spearheading with colleagues at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has been getting a great response from several key contacts at the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In fact, their input has been instrumental in laying the foundations for our early R&D efforts. I therefore highlighted the initiative during my recent talk at the UN's ECOSOC panel in New York, which was moderated by OCHA Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos. The response there was also very positive. So what's the idea? To develop the foundations for a Twitter Dashboard for the Humanitarian Cluster System.

Read post see screen shots.

2012/07/292012/07/29

Patrick Meier: Introducing GeoXray for Crisis Mapping

Advanced Cyber/IO, Geospatial

Introducing GeoXray for Crisis Mapping

My colleague Joel Myhre recently pointed me to Geosemble’s GeoXray platform, which “automatically filters content to your geographic area of interest and to your keywords of interest to provide you with timely, relevant information that enables you and your organization to make better decisions faster.” While I haven’t tested the platform, it seems similar to what Geofeedia offers.

GeoXray says:

GeoXray provides time saving focus – geographically, topically and across time. GeoXray automatically filters content to your geographic area of interest and to your keywords of interest to provide you with timely, relevant information that enables you and your organization to make better decisions faster.

GeoXray serves this triple filtered textual information through an industry standard (Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)) Application Programming Interface (API) to any OGC compatible client software. Geosemble also provides a powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) with GeoXray that enables you to immediately begin using and benefiting from GeoXray.

Perhaps the main difference, beyond user-interface and maybe ease-of-use, is that GeoXray pulls in both external public content (from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, News, PDFs, etc.) and internal sources such as private databases, documents etc. The platform allows users to search content by keyword, location and time. GeoXray also works off the Google Earth Engine, which enables visual-ization from different angles. The tool can also pull in content from Wikimapia and allows users to tag mapped content according to perceived veracity. One of the strengths of the platform appears to be the tool’s automated geo-location feature. For more on GeoXray:

Original Post with Many Screen Shots