 Your new post is loading...
Coordination between crisis mapping and emergency response services via SMS is one of the more hopeful forms of smartmobbing we're seeing emerge. --Howard " In the wake of the January 12th, 2010 earthquake in Haiti a free phone number (4636) was established to meet the urgent needs of the Haitian people through SMS messaging. This allowed people on the ground to text their requests for medical care, food, water, security and shelter from any Digicel / Comcel-Voila device and receive aid. Through the “Mission 4636″ service 80,000 messages were received from people within Haiti, predominantly in Haitian Kreyol. Tireless workers and volunteers translated, geolocated and categorized the messages via online crowdsourcing platforms which sorted the information by need and priority, and distributed it to various emergency responders and aid organizations. Initially, the focus was on search and rescue, but the service scaled up about one week after the earthquake to include a wide range of responses, including serious injuries, requests for fresh drinking water, security, unaccompanied children and clusters of requests for food, and even childbirths."
Patrick Meier does great work with Ushahidi. Here he ties political smartmobbing to crowdsourcing disaster relief. -- Howard (HT Robert Steele) "In 2010, hundreds of forest fires ravaged Russia. Within days, volunteers based in Moscow launched their own crowdsourced disaster relief effort, which was seen by many as both more effective and visible than the Kremlin’s response. These volunteers even won high profile awards in recognition of their efforts (picture below). Some were also involved in the crowdsourced response to the recent Krymsk floods. Like their Egyptian counterparts, many Russians are par-ticularly adept at using social media and mobile technologies given the years of experience they have in digital activism and civil resistance."
Zynep Tufekci is the best informed and smartest thinker I know about the sociology of smart mobs -- Howard "Whatever else went into the apparent results, I’d like to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood (or Ikhwan as Egyptians refer to them) made it harder for the election to be stolen because they combined a superior ground game with active and sophisticated online presence to control the narrative and force a level of transparency."
How civilians helped win the Libyan information war.
Howard -- This special issue of Journal of Communication covers the role of social media in politics in North Africa/Middle East, China, Chile, Africa
"Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won this weekend's presidential elections in Russia. Soon after the results were announced, anti-Putin Russians took to the streets of Moscow and other cities to protest the outcome. Mashable is collecting the best tweets and YouTube videos from inside the country"
"Cash mobs are perhaps one of the more interesting things to happen to small businesses in the United States in the past year. The idea is so new that as of writing, no one has made a Wikipedia page on it. Urbandictionary.com on the other hand, is more up-to-date. For who didn’t bother to click that link, you can think of cash mobs as “flash mobs” with a socio-economic slant. Cash mobs semi-spontaneously organize people into spending money in small businesses in their community. These groups often target local businesses that have fallen prey to major retail chains moving into their home towns."
The protests that led to the Egyptian revolution last year were organized in part by Wael Ghonim, who used an anonymous Facebook page to coordinate the demonstrations. In his new book, Ghonim explains how social media helped transform his country.
39 Minute Interview is also included.
Via Ken Morrison
Planned Parenthood: Planned Parenthood says Twitter and Facebook played a defining role in the national uproar over Susan G. Komen for the Cure's plan to pull funding -- and then the organization's about-face.
"The series of protests against the Church of Scientology known as "Project Chanology" marks the emergence of an important form of contemporary protest movement defined by networked internal structures and pervasive memetic culture. Such a protest movement is highly dynamic- rapidly adapting to changing challenges and contextual settings. This cultural innovation is made possible by the increasing digital mediation of social life. In the following analysis, we trace the unique structural contours of Chanology, investigate how participants leveraged a unique internal structure and the memetic environment of the internet to grow, and conclude with an explanation of why the novel modes of protest used in Chanology contributed to its success and why these forms of protest are likely to proliferate in an increasingly digitally mediated environment. From a theoretical standpoint, Project Chanology both affirms and challenges conventional conceptions of social movements. The utility of Chwe's network analytical approach to the problems of coordination in social movements is also demonstrated."
"The starting point for negotiation cannot be that everything the industry got while networked citizenry was weak and dispersed is sacrosanct, and the only things on the negotiating table are Hollywood's shiny new regulatory toys. The politics have changed. Everything should be up for renegotiation, or we should use the blocking power of the network in conjunction with the veto-rich environment that is the American legislative system to prevent any additional creep from today's baseline. There is an opportunity to harness the new political energy to reverse core institutional elements of Hollywood's decade-and-a-half-long land grab. The newfound political power needs to be directed not only at these most recent excesses of the persistent efforts by the twentieth century incumbents to set the terms of cultural exchange in the twenty-first century; it needs to be directed more fundamentally at preserving the freedom of expression and a freedom to operate in the networked information economy and society."
"SAN DIEGO -- You've heard about flash mobs, but what about cash mobs? It's a simple idea — meet up with like-minded people and spend $20 each at a local, independent store — and it has been gathering steam. The first event that received major news coverage, held in November in Cleveland, has inspired grass-roots organizers across the U.S., from San Diego to Houston to Philadelphia."
"Finally, Zuckerman argues that the lesson from the Arab spring is that revolutions are touched off by everyday people with everyday grievances – arbitrary detention, corruption and police brutality – and those people will use the tools they are familiar with to get the word out. The first thing that comes to mind after you capture a mobile phone video of the police murdering a family member isn't "Let's see, I wonder if there's a purpose-built activist tool that I can use for distributing this clip?" Rather, the first thing that comes to mind is, "I'd better post this on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter so that everyone can see it.""
|
Online emergent collective response to disaster is a form of collective action that wasn't possible before mobile and networked media. Here some evidence-based research on best practices for tweeting during a disaster. -- Howard "So how can an average citizen in the cross-hairs of a hurricane or other natural disaster propagate an urgent message to as many people as possible? A trio of Chinese researchers may have some answers. In a paper recently published in the journal Internet Research, a group from Beijing University looked at the factors associated with how frequently messages were re-shared on Sina Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter, during a May 2010 earthquake and an August 2010 mudslide in the country. Based on their findings (and a bit of our own intuition), here's how to best spread a message on Twitter in an emergency situation."
Speaking of Zynep -- "Initiated from a conversation on the Facebook page of David Brake readings compiled by Patrick McCurdy, David Brake, Zeynep Tufekci and Radamis Zaky [any other editors, add your name here]. This list aims to compile academic resources (articles, special issues and podcasts) on the role of media and communication in the Arab Spring. The aim is to provide potentially relevant theoretical work (for example on the uses of ICTs for political action or on the media and activism) and/or parallel empirical studies that can be used for comparison (eg. the use of Twitter in Iran in 2009)."
What did Ghonim do to foster online engagement that eventually contributed to real, on the streets, offline action? It's simple really. He spoke, users listened and responded, and then he acknowledged their contributions.
I wonder of it will look as nice as Paper.li, one of my favorite social curation tools -- Howard "Google News, meet Twitter News.
Twitter said Tuesday that it launched a new version of its "Discover" tab, which will attempt to present relevant news stories to users, based on tweets from people followed by the primary account holder."
"After watching Arab Spring protests topple regimes in Tunis and Cairo, Shiite protestors in Bahrain took to social media to organize their own movement against the royal family. They were unaware these same online efforts would be turned against them by the country's internal security forces, which used pictures from profile pages to identify protestors, and also hosted a Facebook page, "Together to Unmask the Shiite Traitors," which acted as a virtual snitch line. As it continues to punish its rebellious citizens, Syria has adopted more proactive tactics, closely monitoring social media sites to identify people as protests happen. According to The New York Times, protestors are forced to give up the passwords to their Facebook accounts and are jailed. The newspaper reports that Syrian activists are creating false accounts as a countermeasure."
"The online mob that prompted Kashgari’s downfall calls into question the notion that social media is an inherently positive force. In this disturbing case, it was the righteous and the blood-hungry who mobilized first. Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Director of the Social Media Lab at Dalhousie University, says that, “as a tool, social media can be used for good or for evil.”"
"If you no longer marvel at the Internet's power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl. Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog did its business. The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response. What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future. One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular website. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname and issued a call to arms for more information about her. According to one blog that has covered the story, "within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Requests for information about her parents and relatives started popping up, and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying" because her face was partially obscured by her hair."
"The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state."
The SOPA and PIPA reaction shows social media has become a powerful force for change not just in Egypt and Tunisia but also right here in America.
Via JoseAlvarezCornett
About a dozen links, some of which I will add here.
"The slogan that seems to be catching the imagination is something we put out in a tactical briefing recently: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” I think that’s a beautiful way to describe the future of the movement, because it’s going to be swarms of occupiers."
"More than 1 million photos and 1,000 hours of video have been sent to the Vancouver police in an attempt to bring anonymous rioters to justice. Social media sites have become hubs for identifying the previously unknown agitators."
|
le SMS, outil de gestion de crise et de coordination ?