SOS - Can Citizen Alerts Be Trusted?

The growth of open source crisis mapping tools and social media networks have given rise to community driven disaster preparation and response. These systems harness the power of mass collaboration to provide real time, predictive and expansive information from a human data stream far more quickly than emergency agencies. To date, we have seen such networks come to life after the Mexico Gulf oil spill, the earthquakes in Haiti, China and Chile and during the Australian bushfires. How effective have peer to peer alerts been in assisting or preventing suffering and damage? What have been the pitfalls and challenges of such systems? This panel will discuss how government agencies are responding to crowd-sourced crisis information; raise issues about the legal implications of user-contributed data; reveal how well the broader community has been involved with web2.0 tools for the rapid transfer of life saving insight; and cover latest developments in validation and filtering systems.

LEVEL: Beginner