MightyMoRiver – motivation, overview, & video
UPDATE – we’ve written a retrospective journal post of our “random walk experiences” while operating the MightyMoRiver project and the adjacent possibles we encountered. Future posts, e.g., on technical challenges that arose, will also appear in our social media channel.
We launched the MightyMoRiver project in June 2011 to provide a prototypical example for crowd-sourcing information gleaned from social media, mainstream media, government agencies and citizen reports during rapidly breaking news events, such as the Missouri River floods of 2011.For those who aren’t quite sure what to do when you arrive at the site, or after reading the about tab, check out this video, made possible via the Omaha Chamber of Commerce and the Cornstalks start-up demo night series.
Our objective was to showcase how information could be shared with the public (versus text reports listing places A, B, and C, at times X, Y and Z). For instance, a government agency such as USACE could have instantiated an instance of the Ushahidi platform we were using to share information. FEMA could have similarly funded a university, non-profit or company to curate such a portal (and in any of those cases, at relatively low cost, as compared to the potential ROI. Another long-range alternative would be for the American Red Cross (ARC) to launch instances of Ushahidi, Sahana, or software with similar capabilities during large-scale disaster response operations.
In many instances, we were simply repackaging information from USGS, NASA, or USACE, i.e., we were slicing, dicing, aggregating and curating open data (#opendata) available via various open government (#opengov) initiatives. In other instances, we were collecting and coordinating information gleaned from traditional mainstream media sources. Other data sources included local citizens, relief organizations, or social media feeds. Thus, the project was as much about the process of cobbling the data together, as it was about creating reports and map overlays.
Given we were operating in the wild as volunteers without the legal protection afforded by any formal organization, we adopted a Wikipedia-like license and content model. Specifically, all material is licensed as Creative Commons Share and Share Alike (CC-BY-SA), and all content should be written or presented in a neutral point-of-view (to include our Crowdmap hub, Twitter stream, or curated Paper.li, the MightyMoRiver Gazette).
Future posts in this series will discuss some of the back end processes, front end creations, social media initiative and other aspects of the MightyMoRiver project. We do take this opportunity to thank some of the project’s many champions, to include police and county governments, some folks in the mainstream media and folks who anonymously provided leads.
– browse Social Media channel or 8/20/2011 entries
– print
entry written by Chris Augeri
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