Kevmorgan11's List: Digital Citizenship research

• As Hurricane Sandy approached the US in October last year hundreds of thousands of people used social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to keep abreast of the storm. When the dust settled, people turned to those networks again to follow recovery efforts and find out transport information.
• At the second day of social media week in New York on Wednesday representatives from Con Edison, MTA and JetBlue gathered to discuss their interactions with people through the storm and how that had changed their practices after Sandy moved on.

• Michael Clendenin, director of media relations at Con Edison, said the @ConEdison Twitter handle that the company had only set up in June gained an extra 16,000 followers over the storm. He was also able to clarify that the much-shared "explosion" that happened at the company's 14th street power plant in Manhattan, was not actually an explosion.

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• While you wait—and while you still have power—we've collected some of the most interesting digital tools you can use at home to track the storm's progress and capture this weather event as it happens. Whether you're a weather geek, news junkie, or just a concerned citizen, these sites and platforms will keep you in the know until the storm passes.
  
• Weather Channel YouTube Livestream
    As of yesterday, The Weather Channel has made its hurricane coverage available streaming live on YouTube. This could prove a useful resource as the storm continues on its track toward the Jersey Shore and New England. YouTube is promoting the feed at the top of its homepage—and it appears to be quite popular, with more than 55,000 people watching at almost noon.
• Popular hashtags are #sandy, #frankenstorm, and #Instacane. "This Is Now," a real-time streaming platform, displays photos as they're taken from all five boroughs of New York City. For breaking news junkies, these photo-sharing sites could be the quickest way to get access to the tens of thousands of pictures being generated by those in the path of the storm.
• Hint.fm's Wind Map
    While this map is not directly associated with any government agency, Hint.fm's wind map is a gorgeous tool for watching surface winds in near-real time. Taking wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database, the results are updated each hour to show exact wind speeds and patterns. The result is a beautful, Van Gogh-esque moving portait of this powerful storm.
• New York Times Rooftop Webcam
    Situated 50 some stories above the New York Times newsroom, this high-definition camera updates every minute, providing snapshots of midtown Manhattan. Facing eastward, the camera will show Sandy as it bears down on Manhattan. It's also the perfect tool for New Yorkers without access to a window view to survey the deteriorating conditions.
  
• Google's Crisis Map
    Google's interactive map may be one of the best tools around for those in the direct path of this storm. Updated in real-time, this crisis map overlays evacuation routes with a weather radar, current and projected forecasts, emergency shelter locations, as well as information about flood surges. All the information is layered on the map so you can turn it on and off as you see fit.
• Twitter
    This is a no-brainer, but needs to be included. Sites like the Huffington Post have put together handy "Who to Follow" lists for the Hurricane. Government and local crisis and disaster organizations will be tweeting out helpful storm information and meteorologists and citizens on the ground will be updating with dispatches from hard-hit areas. 

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• Twitter adds 100 more cities to its local trends function; The tool allows users to view the most talked about subjects in their local area BYLINE: John Hall SECTION: NEWS LENGTH: 384 words Twitter has announced it is to extend its 'trending by city' feature to an additional 100 locations. The tool, formerly known as 'trending topics', is one of the more popular functions on the social networking site - allowing users to view the most talked about subjects in their local area. In a blog post on its website, Twitter said: "Today, we're bringing Trends to 100 more cities around the world including Istanbul, Frankfurt, Guadalajara and Incheon. With this update, we now surface the 'most breaking' news in more than 200 locations". In a practical sense, the tool acts as a filter for Twitter users to limit trend results to cover just a specified location. The function has been used to share information locally on a wide range of subjects, including natural disasters and emergencies such as Hurricane Sandy, and sporting events such as the London Olympics. Localised rescue operations have been co-ordinated using the tool and, following the 2011 UK riots, it was also used to coordinate citizen tidy-up operations via #riotcleanup. While it is obviously popular with Twitter users searching for local information, the tool is also of use to those in the media who, in a click of a button, can discover the most-talked about subjects or breaking news stories in a specified area. In Istanbul, Turkey this morning, top trends included '#tekkisiyim' - a song by the rock band Kesmeseker; 'Fenerbahçe - Göztepe' - tweets about the football clubs; and 'Kobe Bryant' - the US basketball player who reached 30,000 career points last night. In Frankfurt, Germany today the top trends were '#FCBBOR' - tweets about Bayern Munich's 4-1 Champions League victory over Borisov last night; the self-explanatory '#mentionatwitterbestfriend'; and 'Nikolaus' - tweets about St Nikolaus Day which is celebrated today. In Guadalajara, Mexico the trends were '#QuieroConfesarlesQue' - which tweeters use to confess their secrets; '#BTRForGrammy' - a campaign for the American boy band Big Time Rush to win a Grammy; and 'PSY' - tweets about the Gangnam star's Grammy nomination. Finally, in Incheon, South Korea this morning, top trends included 'watershed', 'meeting' and 'generously' - all political trends about the forthcoming presidential election on 19 December and its candidates Moon Jae-in and Park Geun-hye.Enhanced Coverage LinkingPark Geun-hye. -Search using:Biographies Plus NewsNews, Most Recent 60 Days LOAD-DATE: December 6, 2012 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH PUBLICATION-TYPE: Web Publication JOURNAL-CODE: WEBI Copyright 2012 Independent Digital News and Media Limited All Rights Reserved

     

    

• STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Forecasters had never seen a storm as perplexing as Hurricane Sandy. In retrospect, the storm was bigger and far more powerful than it sometimes seemed. Its meandering track, its lack of a distinct eye and some unusual atmospheric occurrences made Sandy easy to underestimate and very difficult to accurately predict.
• Sandy was a demonstration of just how bafflingly complex atmospheric disturbances can be. The storm changed the way hurricanes are monitored and reports are issued.

• The computer models, software tools forecasters use to find consensus on what big tropical storms will likely do next, are rarely in complete accord. But this time they produced a confusion of disagreement. Some proved, in retrospect, to be remarkably accurate. Others were wildly wrong.

  Most computer models had predicted the storm would turn to the northeast, out to the open ocean, as they have historically done. Instead, blocked by the presence of an unfortunately timed and placed mass of high pressure air, Sandy did just the opposite. The storm, which had been weakened as it passed over colder water just off the New Jersey coast, made a surprisingly sharp turn to the west.

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• Team Rubicon is a non-profit relief organization that dispatched volunteers from its network of nearly 5,000 military veterans to provide relief to those in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. They distributed supplies, cleared debris from damanged buildings and transportation routes, and coordinated the actions of 10,000 spontaneous volunteers.
• Members of our Philanthropy Engineering team embedded with Team Rubicon at their command center in the Rockaways. While on site, our engineers developed a plug-in that allowed volunteers to collect requests for assistance using smart phones and iPads. We trained volunteers to use Palantir Gotham to collect requests for assistance, prioritize them according to urgency, dispatch resources appropriately, and track progress toward completion.

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  Beyond the partnership with Direct Relief and Team Rubicon, we are also committing to partnering with businesses and organizations that can assist in providing additional necessary hardware, technology, and services to support and supplement our donations of software, hardware, and engineering expertise. We will continue to deploy engineers and data scientists as new resources in the supply chain of disaster relief efforts in order to expedite the delivery and effectiveness of relief.

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• For those looking for up-to-the-minute ways to seek and share information about the disasters, it’s clear social media channels are emerging as the best, most accessible tools. Meanwhile, the top status update on Facebook for example, the morning of October 30 was “We are ok,” written by people reassuring their distant friends and relatives.
• Here are just a few of the ways that authorities and companies are using popular networks like Facebook and Twitter to keep people up to date in the wake of Hurricane Sandy:

• A day before Hurricane Sandy touched down, netizens began to congregate via etherpads, Google Docs and IRC, assuming the name “HurricaneHackers.”

  HurricaneHackers teamed up with Sandy CrisisCamps—a series of hackathons organized by CrisisCommons around the world—to host a hackathon at MIT Media Lab. About 30 participants worked together throughout the day to figure out how a remote set of volunteers could support Sandy relief with communication technologies.

  Pablo and Denise were the main facilitators for the hackathon. With Pablo’s experience organizing OccupyData hackathons and Denise’s participation in hackathons, we knew that a common gathering place is powerful for imaginative and holistic thinking, and to matchmake that thinking with real world needs.

• n the immediate aftermath of Sandy, people across the city used Internet and social media to communicate with their loved ones and let them know they were OK or needed some help. The Internet is no longer a frivolous thing, it's a critical tool during and after natural disasters like Sandy. And in Red Hook, a neighborhood mostly comprised of low-income public housing residents, Internet is sometimes a luxury very few people can afford.

• It's in this low-lying neighborhood that an unlikely alliance was formed. A pair of mobile do-gooders with a gizmo-filled bus, a group of hackers, and a local non-profit teamed up to give the residents unprecedented free Internet access.

   

  The do-gooders are Joe and Debbie Hillis, who drove 1,600 miles from Saginaw, Texas to New York on the day Sandy hit the East Coast to help people in need. After getting to New York, the Hillises went door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood to give relief to victims of the storm, from the darkness of Lower Manhattan to Staten Island and Breezy point, driving a special bus they retrofitted with all kinds of tech devices.

• Called the mobile technology recovery center, it's designed to give disaster victims and first responders all the tools they need in the first hours and days after an hurricane, a tornado on any other calamity.

   

  The bus is equipped with UHF and VHF radios, so that it can become a makeshift command center for police, firefighters and medical personnel. It also stores 30 workstations, four servers, a mobile server rack, two laser printers, more than one hundred routers, 5,000 feet of cables, computer repair parts, switches, hard drives and much more. "Every time we get to a disaster we find something we don't have," says Joe, "that goes into our 'lesson learned.' "

   

   

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• Rockaway natives who began organizing an impressive relief effort starting the day after the storm, well before FEMA and other organizations arrived. A group of BSD digital strategists shared guidance on their website — www.rockawayhelp.com — built and launched quickly by a team of volunteers. We offered the group free access to the BSD Tools, which they’re now using to manage hundreds of volunteers and requests for help.

   

    And we’re just a tiny part of the tech community’s response to this storm. We hope some of these efforts lead to permanent tools that will be ready to deploy when the next disaster hits.
• • The New York tech meetup and Hurricane Hackers built quick networks, held hackathons, offered free IT advice and support to affected businesses, launched real-time maps and social feeds, and more.
   
  •   The Occupy movement transitioned into disaster relief mode and made great use of the web as an organizing tool.
   
  •   A group of high school students in New Jersey launched a crowdsourced map of gas stations so drivers could share notes during the two-week gas shortage in the area. (See below for a photo of the map)
   
  •   Crowdfunding has been critical in rebuilding efforts, as sites like GoFundMe have helped residents and communities raise millions of dollars to begin rebuilding efforts.