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I-35W wiki: another great crowdsourcing example!
By WDavidStephenson | August 3, 2007
Aliya Sternstein, who 
writes great articles on Web 2.0 and other topics for National Journal’s Technology Daily, passed this one along.
Just as wikis provided invaluable crowdsourcing information during the tsunami and Katrina, e-democracy.org has created a wiki to share information in the wake of the I-35W collapse.
As e-democracy’s Steven Clift wrote to Aliya:
“Like the London bombings and the Tsunami, citizens with cameras, mobile phones, blogs, etc. are sharing their first-person perspectives. Our forums, and other places are also serving as important places for discussion. We will be increasingly relevant as people analyze what happened and decide what to do next (despite lots of river bridges, this essentially cuts a million people to the north off from a 3 million person metro-area - that is what will take a couple of years to reconnect). “
Right on, e-democracy!
IMHO, there’s no finer example of networked homeland security in action than wikis during disasters or terrorist attacks: official sites aren’t going to allow unknown individuals to post possibly erroneous information (nor should they: after all, they are official), official sites must go through cumbersome official reviews before posting (or not, as happened during Katrina, when the DHS site remained static through the worst of the distaster — IMHO, an unpardonable sin), etc. However, a wiki can link to the official sites, provide a forum for discussion among the public, allow individuals who happen to be on the scene or have other special knowledge to contribute, and, because of the unique ability for anyone to post and anyone else to edit, they can quickly erase erroneous information. Because of those multiple benefits, monitoring and contributing to them should be an assigned task for officials in a terrorist attack or disaster.
Technorati tags:
homeland security War on Terror antiterrorism smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior networked homeland security government IT collaboration location-based services geo-spatial web web 2.0 homeland security 2.0 disaster management 2.0 crowd-sourcing Minneapolis e-democracy I-35W disaster planning wikis
Topics: empowering public, technology, policy and politics, civil liberties, e-gov transformation, collaboration, networked security | |
