Center for Citizen Media

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.

I’m on my way to San Diego to participate in Strong Angel III:

week-long demonstration will consist of a series of collaborative technical and non-technical experiments based on both lessons learned in past disasters and on emerging requirements for integrated operations. They are designed to test the interoperability, reliability, and flexibility of proposed social and technical solutions.

Our role (I’m working with some folks from several other organizations) in this demonstration is to create some on-the-fly, bottom-up media. Our theory — and it’s little more than that at this point — is that grassroots journalism, in whatever form it takes, can be a huge help both to authorities, relief agencies and, crucially, citizens themselves in a crisis.

More to come…

The California First Amendment Coalition has joined other supporters of journalism in filing a legal brief on behalf of Josh Wolf. He’s in jail for contempt of court, because he refused to hand over to the federal government out-takes of footage he shot at a street demonstration in San Francisco.

While Wolf’s sympathies may well have been with the demonstrators, he was engaging in journalism when he shot that footage. And under California’s Shield Law he’d be protected from this kind of demand from state or local authorities.

But the federal government, using a pretext so flimsy that it would be laughable if the issue wasn’t so serious — it says there’s a federal case because federal tax dollars helped pay for a city police car that was damaged in the demonstration — is carving out a huge hole in the state shield law. If the U.S. government can do this in this case, it can basically neuter all state shield laws.

Other organizations involved in this brief include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists and the WIW Freedom to Write Fund.

(Note: I’m on the board of directors of of the California First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit organization.)

Nick Carr has it down. Flog the blogosphere for being unegalitarian and the alleged “A List’s” alleged unwillingness to point to other people. Then wait for all the pointers.

I’ll tell you more later, but I’m using this posting to create a Technorati tag for a project I’m involved with next week.

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