NZ earthquake: the first respondent was online

Tweets, texts and wikis. From beneath the rubble of Christchurch’s nightmare, online services are again proving how quickly people and information can be connected in an emergency.
It’s been staggering how quickly New Zealand has responded. With about a quarter of its population overseas at any given time, all around the world Kiwis have been craving information from the wreckage of Christchurch’s streets, looking for real-time updates about loved ones.
And they haven’t been let down. As is now the drill the first respondents to a natural disaster on this scale are the social networks and services that are up and running online.
Among them Google’s people tracker—a tool to bring together information about survivors and the friends and relatives looking for them—is a simple two-click option and a fast way to collate details from the chaos that engulfs an emergency on this level.
Within hours of the quake the search giant also launched a Crisis Response resource, a one-stop portal for all news updates, real-time feeds from Twitter and other micro blogging sites as well as emergency services information.
How else would people know that the Christchurch-Arthurs Pass-Greymouth train services had been cancelled until March and free WiFi hotspots were being made available at Telecom Riccarton Mall?
Teamed by volunteers from around the world “working to process information” CrisisCampNZ was another first respondent online.
The web site reports launched a people finder and a resource to lodge incident reports.
Government web sites, too, have been running hot. The NZ Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management is using RSS feeds and Twitter to give information updates about the earthquake.
FutureGov’s citizen engagement journalist, Adrienne Valdez, spoke to Vince Cholewa, the ministry’s Public Information Manager.
He said that social networking was just one of the resources being used to help locate people and relate information to the public.
“It’s one of the media that the ministry uses. There is no one medium that is going to reach all the people you need to reach,” he said.
“Whether it’s radio, TV or different kinds of social media: each one has a specific audience, so the wider the range of media you can use, the wider the audience.”
Any changes in the emergency status or any news update on the earthquake triggers anRSS feed and sends out a Tweet from the ministry web site.
Messages will say “an update has been issued” and a tinyurl will lead back to the official site for more information.
“We’re not trying to engage in conversation or use Twitter or Facebook as a discussion medium, we haven’t gone that far,” he adds.
Traditional communication tools haven’t past their shelf life just yet either, as not everyone has access to online services in a crisis of this scale.
Cholewa recalls that following the Christchurch quake in September 2010, major retailers sold 19,000 battery-powered radios.
“That’s because if the power’s out, you can’t get online; your mobile battery is run down and you can’t charge them, and there is no other communication reaching you aside from the radio.”
But there’s no doubt New Zealand’s citizens have played the biggest role in the proliferation of news and information through their own personal feeds.
Be it Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter—Christchurch’s call has been heard loud and clear online.

Egypt shows the cost of ignoring real-time dialogue

I find it hard to hack through the different assumed roles of government—service deliverer to some, content manager, producer-come-editor to others. You can add to that the role of real-time communicator.
Love it or loath it, citizen engagement is now an endemic part of everyone’s function in government, and the speed at which citizens are communicating is increasing.
Social media has been a game changer in that respect. As events unfolding in the Middle East and Africa quite poignantly reveal: failing to adapt to changes in citizen behaviour or addressing a disengaged population on their terms is not an option in a digital age.
Egypt’s revolution—or Revolution 2.0 as some have called it—and the revolt in Tunisia show that governments that maintain the status quo, shut down dissent and turn a blind eye to citizens’ demands, are on borrowed time.
Part of the widening gulf between the old and the new ways of engaging is a failure to transition from analogue to digital—literally and metaphorically.

Some governments are hopelessly locked in an analogue world: they don’t see that communication has evolved. At the same time, through social media, disgruntled voters and dissident groups are moving to one another like balls of mercury.
Zachary Tumin, Special Advisor to the Director, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School spoke to me about this transition: “Some of the essential elements of the vision we see around the world are, of course, increased transparency, real-time engagement by government and citizens: via text, mobile and the Web—it’s a bi-directional conversation rather than a ‘talk-at-you’ engagement.”
That seachange that has taken place in the last decade, but particularly in the last four or five years through social media and new Web 2.0 tools. And the pace of change in the Middle East is dramatic.
The Dubai School of Government’s recent Arab Social Media Report in its inaugural edition found that the number of Facebook users in the region almost doubled in 2010, from 11.9 million to 21.3 million.
The report analysed data on Facebook users in all 22 Arab countries, in addition to Iran and Israel.
Usurped governments not only have been blind-sided by a vocal citizenry, talking faster online than propagation can keep up, but the notion that the citizen-to-government ‘dialogue’ is now happening in real-time.
Tumin says that governments understand that citizens are now active participants or ‘producers’.
“Open data has allowed us to find the answer to complicated problems faster and we see the trend towards treating citizens not as objects but co-producers in a system of solutions,” he says.
Of the governments that continue to ignore this reality: “They’re going to lose eventually,” he says, “because government leaders who connect and mobilise their citizens through Web 2.0 tools can do so quicker, faster and cheaper than people who don’t.”

Reaching the final third: London's real Olympic goal

Just in case it passed you by, I’m going to refer to some of the startling figures we heard at the Sri Lanka FutureGov Forum event in December on the issue of digital inclusion.
They show how very real the digital divide is across Asia. According to research conducted by LIRN Asia Research, 74 per cent of Sri Lanka’s poor rural population had never used the internet, 23 per cent didn’t know it even existed.
Those kinds of figures are replicated across Asia, but the digital divide as a global policy issue has a divide of its own—between developing and developed worlds: the latter is struggling to connect the ‘final third’ of its citizens, whereas the former is dealing with largescale infrastructure challenges and huge remote and rural populations.
In the UK, where I’m from, much has been made of offering low cost laptops, £98 (US$158), to those who don’t have access, through the London: Race Online 2012 initiative, a Government-sponsored push to close the digital divide before the 2012 Games.
That is an initiative which has been successful in connecting rural and remote communities across Asia, although a recurring problem is ensuring programme sustainability.
Developing nations, who are championing e-government, faster broadband and a closer relationship between government and citizen through Gov 2.0 initiatives have, without doubt, been guilty of taking their digital eye off the ball.
If you’re not online in the UK, you’re excluded from a wide selection of service offerings—banks, the National Health Service (NHS), online shopping and recruitment, to name just a few, are established in delivering premium online services (groceries from large supermarkets are cheaper purchased online).
Developing nations are realising that in order for a digital economy to be ubiquitous, this policy problem has to be solved.
If you’re unemployed and unconnected the outlook is bleak. In 2007, over seven million jobs were advertised online in the UK, some exclusively, a figure which is set to increase significantly when cuts begin to roll out across the public sector in the coming months.
Cash-strapped councils will place most of their vacancies online in order to save money, according to the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Even the recruitment of the 8,000 London Ambassadors required to make the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games run smoothly, is primarily being conducted online.
Libraries, also a likely target of the austerity measures, were formerly a guaranteed safe-port-in-a-storm for those unable to get Internet access at home.
But the UK’s Public Library Modernisation Programme, worth £2 million (US$ 3.3 million), was recently shelved by the Department of Culture Media and Sport.
If you’re young, the future is bleak: “It highlights the effects that the Government’s drive to increase online services has on young people who have limited or no access to the internet,” a recent report Young People and the Digital Dividepublished by the advocacy group Catch 22 highlights.
Marketing gurus won’t like this but there are a significant number of young people who aren’t ‘digital natives’: they don’t walk around with an iPhone in their hand and wouldn’t know Angry Birds from World of Warcraft.
It is a cruel, but assumed logic, that all young people are, but as the Catch-22 report stresses: “While research suggests that the majority of young people are online, there are a number of young people who have either limited or no access to the Internet.
“These young people are increasingly invisible to policy makers and those whose responsibility it is to bring everyone online.”
A home computer and internet connection could increase potential lifetime earnings for young people in digitally excluded households by over £10.8billion (US$17.45 billion), a report conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers alongside London: Race Online 2012 found.
That is a startling statistic. If the London Olympics does succeed in closing that divide, it will be some achievement.