Sarah McGregor's List: 3.6 Digital Citizenship Assignment

• NYC chief digital officer Rachel Haot confirmed that the messages New Yorkers received last night were the result of a public-private partnership between the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM), the CTIA and wireless carriers.
• “This new technology could make a tremendous difference during disasters like the recent tornadoes in Alabama where minutes – or even seconds – of extra warning could make the difference between life and death,”
• “And we saw the difference alerting systems can make in Japan, where they have an earthquake early warning system that issued alerts that saved lives.”
• These PLAN alerts go out to everyone in a targeted geographic area with enabled mobile devices, enabling emergency management officials at the state and local level to get an alert to the right people at the right time. And in an emergency like a hurricane, earthquake or fire, connecting affected residents to critical information at the right time and place are essential.
• PLAN alerts are free and automatic, unlike opt-in messages from Notify NYC or signing up for email alerts from OEM.
• Not all New Yorkers received an emergency alert during Sandy because not all mobile devices have the necessary hardware installed or have updated relevant software. In May 2011, new iPhones and Android devices already had the chip. (Most older phones, not so much.)
• the system is only used by authorized state, local or national officials during public safety emergencies.
• Consumers receive only three types of messages: alerts issued by the President, Amber Alerts, and alerts involving “imminent threats to safety or life.” The last category covers the ones that went out about Hurricane Sandy in NYC last night.
• According to the FCC, participating mobile carriers can allow their subscribers to block all but Presidential
• By 2014, every mobile phone sold in the United States must be CMAS-capable. (You can learn more about CMAS in this PDF).

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• ndeed, the knowledge that everyday folk are likely to capture dramatic news moments has prompted major media organisations like the BBC to search for social media viewpoints for most of their breaking news stories. CNN has gone one better. It has set up iReport, an entire division on its website devoted to citizen journalism.
• The two businesses were in action again last week, providing platforms for people around the tri-state area to map the flooding from Hurricane Sandy and helping news organisations like The Huffington Post cover the crisis. Local people also made use of another mapping site, Mappler, to create an up-to-the minute map of open gas stations.
• And the authorities themselves wasted no time using social media to show how hard they were working on the clean up; the Metropolitan Transit Authority posted hundreds of photos on its Flickr account, demonstrating how its workers were pumping out flooded tunnels and repairing mile upon mile of damaged subway tracks.
• Too often we look at social media as an ephemeral medium. It's fast and noisy but also quite disposable in many ways. Yet from a research, data-crunching or mapping point of view, the social media "story" of Hurricane Sandy offers a treasure trove of information that can help us prepare for future storms.
• After Sandy, the authorities have a rich mix of scientific and emergency services data combined with thousands of first-hand social media accounts and maps of what went wrong and what went right during the storm.
• ities all over the world are at risk from extreme weather conditions and other infrastructure crises
• In one UN-funded project, researchers in Bangkok used a crowdsourcing mobile app to get local people to conduct real time flood monitoring.
• In Rio de Janeiro, IBM has worked with local authorities to create a new
• automated alert system that will notify city officials and emergency personnel when changes occur in the flood and landslide forecast for the city. The system uses algorithms to predict how much rain will fall in a given square kilometer.
• Combine this expertise with the big data crunching that has made smarter cities a success and you begin to see how all that online chatter around disasters like Hurricane Sandy might offer valuable insight for building better, more sustainable cities and turn all that social media reaction into action.

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• The Weather Channel has made its hurricane coverage available streaming live on YouTube.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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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