Random River Walk

This post provides a retrospective journal of my experiences with launching and operating the MightyMoRiver project, a portal for crowd-sourcing curated information related to the Missouri River flood of 2011. Technical and operational challenges are  the subject of past &/or future posts.

This post’s style, content, and title are inspired by a random walk with a friend in a far-away restorative locale while meandering about discussing adjacent possibles, picking up the pieces, pivoting, keeping it real, and plausible futures. We’d like to think we saved the best for last…so do keep reading the entire post and we welcome your comments.

First, some background…

The Missouri River Floods of 2011 were caused by a significantly above-average snowpack and spring rainfall in the Missouri River basin during the winter and spring of 2011, respective. The tremendous surge in snowmelt and ruonff water along the Missouri river and its tributaries significantly flooded many low-lying farms, towns, and cities.

Flooding risks were often mitigated via extreme intervention efforts, such as the $25M+ spent by Eppley Airfield in Omaha, NE to return groundwater via 70+ pumps over the levee structures. In other instances, such as St. Joseph, MO, Pierre, SD, and Council  Bluffs, IA, real physical damage occurred. We also covered Minot, ND, and to a lesser extent, Manitoba, Canada, both of which were extensively flooded by the Souris River.

This photo and video at the I-680 and I-80 interchange along the Nebraska/Iowa border partially convey the scope and impact felt by many in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. More in-depth coverage of the I-680 and I-80 interchange damage, along with I-29 is available via the Omaha World-Herald.

Now that we’re all on the same page…

During the month of May, I began to form a mental picture of how various agencies might better share information with the public. This mental picture was primarily motivated by the read & forget model so easily applied after reading mainstream media reports, skimming social media channels, or digesting daily reports provided by government agencies. During a talk prepared for Infotec 2011, I’d discovered Ushahidi, an open-source platform for curating crowd-sourcing information, as shown in the slides for that talk on social media analytics.

Ushahidi’s developers provide a free hosting service, Crowdmap, with which I experimented while preparing the Infotec talk. Sahana is a related platform developed by a different organization and geared more at first responder use. Our about tab is good source of information for folks seeking more information on the technologies and back-end processes used to operate the MightyMoRiver project. We’ll delve into some of that material and the technical challenges we encountered in future posts. For this post, I simply want to highlight the events, people, and activities that made the project possible, and some of the ways in which we were able to assist others as a result of the project.

First and foremost – our goal with the MightyMoRiver project was simply to highlight “what’s possible” with respect to providing information to the public, as highlighted in this video at the Omaha Chamber of Commerce’s demo night. We particularly wanted to demonstrate the utility of providing a geospatial and temporal context with respect to the flood of information provided via mainstream media, social media, and government channels, in additional to individual reports via private pilots and professional photographers.

Some key random folks who helped along the way…

I launched the site in June and added blsousan to the team late that month, a friend in the local area with mutual interested in such projects. We later added several folks from outside the area to assist with report generation from as far away as Michigan (vielmetti), Missouri (Taunia_Adams & ThisBrian), and an anonymized friend on the East Coast (who introduced me to TimClicks, the Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake Crowdmap lead). One of my sons created many of the report drafts which were reviewed before posting. A local web developer, CoreySpitzer, also assisted along the way, as did GrantStanley and DHomann, who occasionally beta tested site operations.

To assist with building traction, and since we couldn’t possibly curate reports fast enough in a volunteer capacity, we made extensive use of Twitter (specifically, tweeting &/or re-tweeting key news articles via the corresponding account, MightyMoRiver. To further facilitate keeping up with the flood of activity on Twitter and Facebook, we also operated a daily Paper.li for an extended period of time, which we’ve since reduced to weekly publication. We also provided a Google custom search engine and alert zone layers to further facilitate finding information.

Some random technical support encounters that spanned at least three continents…

Along the way, many other events transpired that facilitated meeting many interesting people, and which enabled us to assist others around the world. Our first “big event” was a Crowdmap outage that occurred the evening of 7/1. In a strange twist of irony. A quick tweet, and we were connected with BrianHerbert, the lead developer for Crowdmap and based in South Korea (my old stomping grounds many years ago). I happened to be attending a Fourth-of-July concert and had no cell coverage due to the plethora of people. Fortunately, Brian is very good and the tweet was all he needed.

Once I returned, the site was back up :). A few emails later and Brian and I were deep in conversation about the Ushahidi platform. This ultimately led to a major bug fix related to reports containing multiple map overlays. Bottom line, Brian, and the rest of the folks on his team, such as AngieNicoleOD and bytebandit, provided us tremendous support for which the MightyMoRiver project simply wouldn’t have been possible. Their efforts received a significant boost with the recent addition of a comtmunity manager to the Ushahidi team, HeatherLeson.

Some random opportunities to demo our project – in Nebraska and on the West Coast…

Somewhere along the way we began to participate in regional flood relief and recovery meetings. Our first public demonstration of the MightyMoRiver project was during a disaster response training session coordinated via CurtDodd, Senior Pastor at Westside Church. That event also enabled us to participate via teleconference with the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and their Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD).

We later had the opportunity to follow a presentation by Whitney Shipley from DouglasCty_JIC during a Nebraska Infragard meeting, which was facilitated by Steve Nugen, a  colleague, who also served as our iPad beta tester. Andy Alexander of the Nebraska Business Development Center and head of the Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) provided us the opportunity to describe the project at his half-day flood recovery seminar, which included speakers from FEMA, OmahaUSACE, and other organizations.

A videotaped demo is also now available thanks to invite by tchap623 to present at the Omaha Chamber of Commerce Startup Demo Night, and as reported via SiliconPrairie. I recently presented the project on the weather panel at an international workshop, KDMS, and which was chaired by John Williams of NCAR / UCAR. Although each of these talks has been useful from the perspective of gaining traction and sharing the conceptual ideas, we hope to soon have a venue for providing a longer tutorial.

Many other folks that (1) assisted with building traction, (2) provided useful feedback, (3) facilitated achieving the rest of the story, or (4) all of the above…keep reading…the best is yet to come, none of which was possible w/o these folks we randomly encountered

• AngelaTague – for providing great content via her publication venues & again, sharing the effort with their follows
• DCoover – for working with me to better understand how CAP and FEMA were working together on flood monitoring
• GunnarSimonsen & org9 – for providing inspiring words at key points when I was ready to throw in the towel
• OmahaPolice, DarciTierney, & JacobBettin – for demonstrating our keepers of the peace can successfully engage via social media
• OmahaRedCross & Danelle – for assisting with getting the word out (& we might want to chat about ARC + Ushahidi sometime)
• kc0ryz – for being another provider of great info on the flood activities
• LTFloodWatcher – for cueing me up on the #OaheFlood situation and sharing our material
• NDNGAberle & JKneuvan – for showing federal government personnel can also successfully engage via social media
• RVareGal & Peaceful_intent – for assisting us with the multiple markers issue and sharing the effort with their followers
• TifHolmesPhoto – for her patience while we showcased the ability to collaborate with external sources
• & many other great people & organizations – to include key media connections who helped share our story (you know who you are)

Our random walk again goes global…

One of the first interesting events which I was able to support as a result of this project was the world-wide crowd-sourced response to the Mumbai blasts. During that event, I met ajuonline, who travels India assisting folks during disaster response efforts. Although he was doing the majority of the work as the Ushahidi lead for that effort, he did-cross list our corresponding Mumbai Blasts Bulletin via Paper.li and the Twitter list (no longer active) we created for the event. Unfortunately, and as we both were winding down that initiative…

…a right-wing extremist launched two attacks in Norway on 7/22/2011. Given our experiences with Paper.li, curating Twitter lists, and some other tools, we moved the Mumbai Blasts to a weekly publication and created a daily Oslo Attacks Bulletin (a Ushahidi instance during that event would have likely been unnecessary). We similarly kept up publication of this source for two weeks. A key outcome of this activity involved facilitating a conversation with a colleague from Norway shortly before he dropped his daughter off for college. In addition to assisting with allaying his concerns, he’ll be using the Paper.li aggregation service in one of his college courses this semester. We also assisted SmallRivers with advertising and debugging a major update to their Paper.li platform.

We took a brief break from the grind of monitoring Missouri River activity to further experiment with Paper.li during Carmageddon, via the Carmageddon Carzette. Fortunately, the event was no big deal, as the purported carpocalypse failed to materialize. We also supported the first presidential tweet-up to further experiment with paper.li.

So around this time, a flood occurs in India. You may guess where this is leading. Yep, HeatherLeson put me back in touch with ajuonline who hadn’t done a flood-related deployment and had some category / reporting questions. Ajay did great work based on the situation report (SITREP) he later sent my way. One of these days, we should get him, Heather, and some other folks to provide a SXSW Interactive panel on the latest capabilities of Ushahidi and similar platforms (& the challenges associated with crowd-sourcing).

Our random walk returns to the U.S.…

One other outcome is that another colleague, Sajda Qureshi, will be exploring the use of Ushahidi (or a similar platform) to provide a geospatial / temporal context on her team’s research to facilitate growing micro-enterprises. More on that in October/November.

Most recently, and perhaps the final “nudge” for writing this post. Some time ago, HeatherLeson had indicated that in her role as community manager, she was highly encouraging folks to more actively use the forums, independent of any support received via email, so as to have a searchable archive of Ushahidi / Crowdmap best practices and bug fixes. Sometime after, I happened to post this bug notice.

So happened same issue was encountered by vtcRagHead while operating the Crowdmap instance to track damage  from Hurricane Irene in Vermont. Although the KML bug turned out not the problem, one 10-minute Skype call later and KML/KMZ layers were once again working for their team (Crowdmap tech note – always upload KML as KMZ, don’t use folders inside Google Earth &/or KML, and the map icon balloon pop-ups will only render what’s in the name (title), not the description field (fortunately, raw HTML still works).

So what can we learn from this random walk.…

One take-away of this long, winding, “random river walk”? Simply that sometimes the adjacent possible is not obvious. Very often, subsequent adjacent possibles are not yet imaginable, especially after factoring in black swan events generated by malicious actors. For instance, we created the MightyMoRiver project on the premise that the portal itself was an adjacent possible and someone should be providing this service (government, media or otherwise). Although a moonlighting effort (read low-key volunteer), we managed to create a useful service, get some bug fixes addressed in Ushahidi, and meet lots of creative and inspiring folks on five continents.

More importantly, following this adjacent possible enabled the existence of many other adjacent possibles. I wouldn’t have imagined assisting with the Mumbai Blasts, the Oslo Attacks, or Hurricane Irene responses otherwise. I certainly wouldn’t have reached out, or had the opportunity to do so. Sometimes a bold and energetic step is called for. So get off Someday Isle, and turn that “Someday I’ll” into your adjacent possible. Do that, and you’ll find a whole new world of plausible futures.

For now, we’re in the process of winding down the MightyMoRiver project – this post is a big step in that direction. That said, we’re happy to share our story with inquiring minds & we welcome your comments. So although the MightyMoRiver project has proved to be a very worthwhile adjacent possible, it’s simply too much effort to continue in a volunteer capacity. Happy Labor Day!

A bit of planning, a bit of randomness, and the next thing you know, you get somewhere. For tweets like this and other more concise thoughts on adjacent possibles & plausible futures, follow thoughtpuzzle.

Related posts…
1. Missouri River Floods – Nebraska, Iowa, & much of the Midwest
2. MightyMoRiver Project — Link Roll
3. App Discovery – Filter Bubbles and Random Selection
4. MightyMoRiver – motivation, overview, & video
5. Mouse Awards 2010