Cit Media

David Weinberger is taking great notes at FooCamp, now in a session on the “Future of news” — lots of interesting ideas from folks at Digg, NewsVine and elsewhere.

Coming off the incredible Strong Angel III, I’m heading today to Sebastopol for the annual FooCamp, another kind of human and technological mashup. My brain is overwhelmed…

From Strong Angel III:

This image (click on it, or here, for larger view) is a very low-tech proof of a concept: turning SMS messages into news flow. With the help of people from several companies, including Mitre, 2SMS.com and Google, we’ve created a small demonstration of how citizen journalists could create location- and time-based data that might be useful in any number of ways.

The idea, in this case, was part of a scenario involving a major disaster. We assumed people would be telling each other what was happening in their communities and neighborhoods, and that if they could post such information straight into maps they’d have better information to work with.

So we sent SMS text messages to a gateway phone number, converted the results into a format that Google Earth could understand and ended up with a map layer showing SMS postings. With GPS-equipped mobile phones this would be trivial. Ours aren’t, so we asked senders to make the message body start with the San Diego street address, followed by two semicolons, with the rest of the message body comprising the actual information being sent from the location. (Note: it was stupid of me to use semicolons as a way of separating the message from the location; just try to find the semicolon on the average mobile phone.)

There are lots of questions about such methods. Such as: How do we prevent, or at least deal with, gaming of the system? People surely will post from locations where they are not present. Do we have to have GPS and images before we can begin to believe what people post?

Newspapers and other traditional media should be setting up such things. The potential for citizen-augmented news seems clear.

Meanwhile, we can be rolling our own. This is a long way from rocket science. I’m already contemplating some ways to use these techniques in a variety of situations and with other tools such as camera phones, and blogs. More experiments to come…

If any of this interests you, check out ICT for Peacebuilding. Great summaries of what’s going on.

Michael Helfrich spent the day at the beach yesterday, but it wasn’t for getting a tan. He’s part of the Strong Angel project and reports on his blog:

The kinks are being worked out for how the Mission Beach data is assimilated in the EOC, but is especially gratifying to see the speed in which this technology can be deployed, but even more exciting in that it can be leveraged by many systems operating here today. RSS/SSE, XMPP, KML, XML, and Public Networks have made much of the integration quite straightforward.

So it seems that he and the folks he was working with achieved vastly better connectivity out at the beach than we did inside the SA3 site. A lesson there…

The New York Times Names Chandler Burr as Its First-Ever Perfume Critic.

I’ve been in San Diego this week at something called Strong Angel III, a project/demonstration/exercise designed to improve responses to emergencies and catastrophes, both those which are natural and caused by humans. Several hundred smart folks looking at technology and its applications in this kind of situation, and as with the last Strong Angel exercise (which took place two years ago on a lava bed in Hawaii), this one is proving immensely educational.

Also, as in Hawaii, frustrating: Despite seriously hard work by the networking people, the wireless network here has been a thorough mess. For the first two days there was barely any connectivity, and even now it’s slow (at least to my computer). For a scenario that absolutely depends, in part, on data connectivity, that’s a major problem.

The participants run the gamut from military to NGOs to corporate types to individual experimenters. The experiments include (many) tests of mapping systems, ways to move data around quickly and seamlessly, security fixes and much more. The entire thing is open, that is, not classified, so the techniques and tools are available to the public, a good thing.

This place is loaded with smart people, seriously smart. They’re finding ways to collaborate in a variety of areas that surround a scenario — a pandemic in a major urban area — that is all too possible. But the idea is less specific: We’re thinking about better responses to terrible trouble in any nation, in fact most likely not this one.

In my line of sight from my table are experiments/demonstrations with Web video conferencing; Google Earth’s folks pulling massive data sets into coherent maps; a Microsoft team helping transfer data seamlessly among sites and software applications (a fairly un-Microsoft-like process based on not so distant history), military contractors working on various projects; NGOs wondering how they can work more efficiently with other responders; and much, much more.

In the field today (Wednesday) are a teams from the Red Cross and other organizations, collecting and transmitting all kinds of real-time data that the people here are examining and, if possible, using to make better decisions. Scenarios shift rapidly; on the bank of screens in front of me the images flash by.

Mapping is a huge part of this project. Understanding conditions on the ground is an essential part of any humanitarian response to a crisis, and we’re seeing some spectacular examples of how data can come to life via maps.

My role is in the experimental/testing category. I’m working with several other people who deal with media and information issues in disaster situations. We’ve convinced the organizers to start group blogs for participants — we’re not getting great traction on getting them to blog, I  have to note — and I’m playing with some bottom-up, citizen-based journalism ideas stemming from the notion that we are all able to tell each other stuff.

For example, I’m asking participants to send SMS text messages on their mobile phones to a gateway site that will create a database of messages. If they make the first part of the message the street address where they’re transmitting from, then we have a time-stamped, location-based message about a current event. Next, we’ll import all this into a map, and see it visually in new ways.

When GPS equipped phones are widely in use, and when sufficient numbers of people are willing  to do something like this, we will be able to create a time-stamped, location-based view of what is happening through the eyes of regular citizens, not just those who observe in organized ways. (There are, needless to say, some creepy elements to this. I’m thinking in this context solely about how we could save lives in an emergency.)

I still need the Web to make all this work. But as with everyone else here, I’ve been frustrated by internal networking problems that have put a crimp in the processes. It’s been a classic example of what folks call a “tragedy of the commons” — a situation in which all these smart people find a working connection and then hammer it so hard that they bring it down. We were being individually selfish, and the result was a mess for 36 hours and beyond. (The network is still slow, even now, despite vast potential bandwidth.)

(Photos by Sanjana Hattotowa) 

Chris Anderson at Columbia University looks at various kinds of citizen journalism. Part I, Part II.

Dave Winer is excited by the ability of mobile devices to show news, and has created a service to show the NY Times on a Blackberry. Great stuff.

I’ve been reading news on my Treo for some time, using the RSS reader HandRSS (now QuickNews).

What Dave has done looks easier for users, and therefore looks like a step forward.

At the Strong Angel III demonstration in San Diego, where lots of folks are testing “the interoperability, reliability, and flexibility of proposed social and technical solutions” in disaster recovery, there’s been a serious breakdown of communications, at least wireless data using WiFi.

A classic tragedy of the commons, which I’ll describe more when the network is fully available.