represent a. you can also see dark red icons several areas. that is a little unique, not so unique but a little unique. and it is not completely unfiltered. there's a basic level before some of this information is posted. the message here is that this map which incorporates multiple layers of information served as one tool that was used i both responders and certainly not as citizens and the joplin missouri area. and served as one tool in the toolbox providing heightened situational awareness for those responders and to some extent for the citizens in the jurisdiction. the next you see is a fireman. except a couple examples we want to show. these are two different maps from two different wildfires in colorado earlier this year. that represent two different

types of crisis maps. and want to point out that's going to be important as we discuss what we're looking at on these slides. what you see is the difference in the firebirds which would be the darkest red areas on either map in the two maps. in map once the fire perimeter is not provided using authoritative data. it was drawn by citizens using social media based on information they were hearing, things they thought they saw, perhaps there drive for posting information. they indicate what they thought the fire perimeter was and what they thought evacuation areas might be what should be the larger red polygon on the left map, map one. it was initially agreed by a general citizen which was interesting, but then published as a collaborative map were others could add to that met. they could post their own and publish their own information to that map. again, without verification. so individual citizens were taking what they thought they

were saying, obvious interest in any location, using their own eyes and social media devices to post this up, and posting what they thought they were seeing. the interesting part is it was consumed by a news media agency and was again post with the news media adding their own data and their own information to this map. so what we ended up with was a map that received 2.5 million views from the general public that had no verified information on it. and that is an issue we'll talk about more as we move to the rest rest of the afternoon. the relevance of map one as i noted raises questions. who would be liable from harm resulted from a general citizen using this map? they use what they thought was authoritative information on this map and went into an area that the map indicated was not an evacuation area but was a clear area and was not, and was subsequently injured. that's going to be an issue we

talk about. we have a couple of attorneys on the panel today. we hope we'll hear from them on that and get questions from you on those issues as we move forward. now map two you will note, the sulfide was the name of the fire also in colorado as we noted produced by the local emergency response agency and develop as a public information map which included the national fire perimeter. and was published as such from an authoritative source using infrared interpretation of the perimeter. it also indicates structures around the area which are at risk based on pre-incident planning. the local fire service agency and law enforcement agencies have been preplanning on this area which had a high probability of fire so they had preplanned that, and on this map indicated -- which is good for the local citizens in that area. it also receive substantial views given the population it serves. so what we are seeing here is

one map, packaging of it is in question, another map that was from an authoritative source and that's what we want to talk about a little bit later today. so the core questions based on examples such as we just saw and others are, what are the potential liability as you see in the first bullet? these two map examples show multiple crowdsourced information feeds, and poses the core question you see on the screen. these are very complex questions. that's one of the reasons for the start of this session today, to start to identify and ask those questions and then get expert to start to talk about that and get the dialogue started in both emergency management community and within the social media community. what we want to do is try to address strategies and begin to address strategies to address these questions in a way that can reduce risk and liability explosion. and also uphold our collective duty to prevent harm among all citizens and all persons.

very quickly i'll read through the questions but what of the potential liability as we know to associate with producing or using any type of crowdsourced or volunteer information in response to an emergency? in that liability concludes -- include a couple things. posting maps as we noted early which do not necessarily have authoritative information on them, information could be accurate but nobody has dated that information. as importantly a liability of local resources and local response agencies using information being posted in that way. survey that more eyes and ears out there to provide information, but can you verify the information to make response decisions on and movement of resource decisions on. the next bullet, what can emergency response community rely on, crowdsourced information, volunteered dragnet information on crisis mapping products? again that question of how to local response agencies state

response agencies and federal response agencies start to deal with this onslaught, this large amount of information coming into the map, how do they that that end of the deal with that were human that nasa should have someone to decide particularly to do that. it may take someone to start to vet the feeds as they coming. the last is what strategies can be employed to reduce risk and liability exposure. the up jacket today as lea noted, this is the first industries to get the dialogue started as a start to lay it out here this afternoon. today spam and subsequent panels in september and in november will serve as a starting point for expert practitioners to inform the development of according to strategy and practical guidance on how the emergency response community can

engage with volunteer technical communities and use at crowdsourced and volunteer information. especially that which is location and relevant. now key terminology. we want to provide a couple of definitions. and terminology. the issues we are discussing are today our new. i know some of you will say it's not that new. certainly is not, but the response community are just starting to grapple with the issues we're talking about here today. so it's new in the respect that people are try to put definitions to some of the issues that we are talking about. no one industry as an expert on anyone or all of these things they are quick emergency response experts. we have crowdsourced experts, social media expert in the room. but no one in the room is an expert on all of these things so that's the reason for the dialogue. we want to ensure we're all often with common understanding,

dividing basic definition of key terms. and certainly this is not the final on all these terms and all these definitions. this is the start that dialogue of want to make sure we do the trick the definition provide year for the purposes of today's event only and we recognize and may be variations of these definitions as we move forward. a copy of these terms and definitions are also in the packet that you all received when you arrived. some additional key terminology, and will talk briefly about is that these become very important. the virtues he is volunteer and technology committees, independent people that if only contain virtually in person to continue their skills and expertise with the intent to be of service in times of crisis. and certainly and the road and many that are on the call with us today are part of that community. the other is emergency response

community, official government agencies and sanction on to organizations that provide public services and public safety emergency management and homeland security events. now the agenda for today. we've been through the welcome and introductions to what we do will have remarks from our panel of experts following data we moderated discussion, a q&a among those in the room. and we'll also be taking questions for this participating via the website. what does participate to please submit questions to us via e-mail at comments lab at wilsoncenter.org. that's comments lab at wilsoncenter.org. staffers were taking this course and providing to the discussion there and will be those that we get to drink the time period and

to allow to address those. without further ado levitt introduced a our first speaker chief charles werner. i mentioned the chief werner is fire chief of the charlottesville fire department in virginia. charles werner is a 37 year veteran, volunteer and fire service. he celebrate his 33rd year with the charlottesville, virginia, fire department and presently serves as its fire chief. chief werner is a certified chief fire officer designate and national fire academy executive fire officer graduate. he has received two life setting a fourth and newest accommodations are in his fire service career. he currently serves on the charlottesville university of virginia emergency communications 911 center management board. and on the board of directors for the national alliance for public safety gis foundation. he serves on several state and

national public safety communications and leadership committees, including vice chair of u.s. department of homeland security department of homeland security sitcom executive committee. international association of fire chiefs technology council, virginia statewide interoperability executive committee, and the fcc emergency response interoperability council. he is the recipient of numerous awards include a three-time recipient of the virginia governor's award for fire service excellence. the virginia fire chief presidents award, and international association of fire chief presidents award and the fire chief magazine 2008 career fire chief of the year. he is also a nationally published author with over 70 published articles and served on the editorial advisory board of firehouse magazine, firehouse.com and urgent indications. chief charles werner. >> did i pay for that? [laughter] after much consternation i've

been thinking about social media, and another some people are sitting here cringing that i'm going to say this, but i've come to the conclusion that social media is evil. it has no redeeming quality and the public safety should be able to turn it off and turn it on as we see necessary. let's let that resonate a bit, let that soak. quite the contrary. since becoming fire chief in 2005, i have seen where there are situations that we are in situations where overcapacity. i've seen for what microburst which is one step below a tornado, with huge trees wire damage, you know that intermingling means we have a large tree canopy city. it means power outages, road blockages, a lot of discomfort for people who live in the community. i've been through two recent major snowstorms, some have

never experienced before of great magnitude with similar type situations. and then more recently an earthquake, sorry, i don't like that thing with the ground moves under your feet. at all these things have one thing in common, is we're at a point of what i would call convergence. where we have technology, we have applications, and we have connectivity. which creates a new a number of both good and bad. and one perspective i see the opportunity that it would utilize the technology correctly, if we engage the members of our community more effectively, we can create what i believe to be called a resiliency core. similar to a citizen score, but that would take this technology and exchange information to the community as to what would be gone before us as public safety to be able to see. so rather than the necessary sitting -- sending resources out to do when should service drive

around neighborhoods and getting damage, if i could instantaneously get information from credible people knowing what they need to do with an application that would make this an easy operation, and then geocoded in such way i can see the stuff, geo- spatially, it would create a whole new situation awareness much more quickly and i'll give you one big example. in addition to the microburst which we have roads close entries down and electrical wires entangled, imagine that you are responding as a first responder to minneapolis to bridge collapse. now, i know when we get dispatched to calls we are not anticipating that the entire bridge just fell. but as the conversation happened earlier this morning, in some ways with the right engagement i might get more information from a 13 year old with a smart phone and some people that are trained to provide information. but imagine if we have an engagement of our communities to provide information in such a way that we cannot only receive

information, increase or situational awareness, understand impact and be able to let's say the response of equipment that we need to cover the call, turn it around in a situation where you need assistance as public safety from situations that it becomes a magnitude much grander than we have resources to cover, major trees down, we might need transportation of critical medical people to a hospital during a snowstorm, et cetera. reverse the outsourcing kind of idea to put out the call for help for people that you've already vetted in a way that creates this to way more synergy to recover. in other words, resiliency. i think that the other part of it is, you need to be able to use these technologies in such a way you understand it, and that you can also engage in there is misinformation. you have to be ready to realize that not everybody is here to do good. some people intently want to do

harm. but there's also a challenge, because we continually seek new social media -- see new social media solutions, application. one of the problems we as public safety and we don't necessarily have the staff to keep up with a constant migration of new things. we've seen the continual change of applications. so what i challenge the social media companies is to work with public safety degrade a portal, too great an interface that allows us as public safety to have a credentialed entry into those portals that provide the ability for us to make an entry in one location that is then shared with multiple social media formats. so it'll be an interface becomes the standard for all future applications in such a way that allows us to be proactive and already be able to engage in those applications. additionally, for social media to work more directly with public safety in a way that we

can develop the applications that will create these applications that will continue to grow, this is not something necessary that the government needs to get into as far as establishing. it's about the private sector. it's worked with social media coming up with solutions that are mutually beneficial in the world to continue to sustain itself. i think the opportunity are great for us to work with social media to engage our communities, and able to do with this information and effective way possible. thanks for the opportunity to have this discussion. >> thank you very much, chief. i have noted will hold questions until the end of each panelist has an opportunity to state their remarks and they will have an open discussion at the end with questions for each. our next speaker is captain yo gikas. as i mentioned earlier from los angeles city fire department. captain gikas is a 23 year

veteran of los angeles fire department accused appointed to the rank of captain in june of 1998. is also held positions a firefighter, chief officer staff assistant and dispatch. he is currently assigned to the operations control division. captain gikas is currently assisting for technology interoperability programs, having multi-agency and multijurisdictional impact. these projects include tactical information program which is a gis basis and adore critical response information to front-line emergency response personnel. a hazmat sensor integration and interoperability project, the area wireless and reconnaissance evaluation project which is a pre-deployed public events monitoring system. and a united states department homeless agree science and technology director at first responder resource group supporting virtual u.s.a. initiative. he served on that since its inception. he also serves on the national

alliance about safety gis foundation southern california regional leadership team. his professional experts includes commander of the fire department urban search and rescue company would he handle all aspects of technical rescue including swiftwater, collapse structure, and firefighters rapid intervention. he held a position of commander of the fire command control system, aided dispatch and 800 megahertz network you. throughout his career captain gikas' responsibly include performing analysis, design and development on numerous projects involving mission-critical systems. previous assignment also included the ed advanced technology unit of the los angeles fire department tactical planning session and the is department for massacres project arch angel in the fire service represent development, developing a critical asset manager system to he attended university of california, los angeles, and california state university at northridge on a

bachelor of science degree in business administration. he is a certified hazmat technician as well as a communications specialist and technical search specialist for fema's california task force one. captain gikas. >> thank you, rand. appreciate you leaving all of the stuff of a man of the year off. [laughter] but very much thank you for the opportunity to be here. i have to ask of the chief thoughts tremendously. this is an incredibly exciting time. i can't imagine a more exciting time to really the alive come to be sitting in a room with a group of folks like yourselves talking about the subject when we look around and rand's display their and the chiefs remarks. we are sitting on the cusp of really dramatic change i think with the technologies we have that support on a day-to-day mission, they are supporting the fire service, first responders, military. some of these technologies, whether it be social media or gis, they are direct support,

other than in the background a little bit. when i say i'm excited to be here, i'm excited to be alive. i look at our soldiers that across the ocean, and they're able to stay in touch with her family because of the technology that we've developed here. that's astounding that we can see what happened in japan almost real-time live. the disasters that were referenced. that's an incredibly exciting time. as we start down this road, i don't want to interview with anybody who is headed down this road, i know there's been discussions about social media. and i think they're some places where it's been used quite extensively. but i was asked to speak a little bit about, let's talk about where we are today right now. i'm a platoon commander of the 911 center. i am 26 firefighters on duty every day so firefighters are dispatches. we take roughly 2000 calls a day for help that coming via 911, the radio or other agencies.

we dispatch somewhere between 101,100 incidents a day it would take 500 or more people to the hospital every single day. so in our current workflow, and we talk about acquisition of information, that's where the decision is being made right now, to deliver a resource. what are we going to do with a call that comes in. the chief mentioned summer false alarm. some are malicious but for the most part most of them are legitimate calls for service. and example of crowd sourcing that we currently do with day, if you look at this way, we have an accident on the freeway, and in the state of california when a 911 call comes in from a cell phone, that's about half of our calls now, on the freeway, the systems were enough to recognize that the call is on the freeway and it will route the call to the highway patrol. that garbage routed to us and respond agency and medical service for traffic accident.

and we go through a structured triage if you will of that call. a small interrogation of the person that is called them and made in this particular example i actually have the person i was driving a car and they are injured, they were able to dial 911 and got hold of one of our dispatchers. so first thing i know is i have a first party collar. that's about as truthful as an going to get in the business we have. hopefully they know where they are, or the 911 system, the wireless system can help me figure out where they are. but i will contrast that with maybe a neighboring car, we've got a lot of traffic down in los angeles and maybe there's a bunch of cars sitting by and so else decided to call. this is not far from the norm. we're going to get, any traffic accident we will get 20 calls for the same accident. so now i have a second party collar was standing right near this injured person, and i can interrogate him and ask them questions about where they are, what's the extent of the damage and what's the status of this

entry person because we also, besides and become we also want to render aid over the phone until we can get there. so i the second party collar. but also another call coming in. this call is over for the back. the guy is angry stuck in traffic but he sees the smoke of headsweats telling me this, and where is he? well, very common on a freeway they know where they offer it is, they just as because that was the sign they saw. so now i have a third party call. can't tell me very much a geek until gc smoke and he's stuck in traffic but he's not even sure if there's an accident. then there's the fourth party collar which is another agency, trusted agency, los angeles police department, highway patrol, another fire into the nearby. so if you look at those third and fourth party collars as crowdsourced as what they are, they're probably coming through a fetid channel, calling from 911 channels we process them. will act on them and are going to talk to the treasure. we will send some type of

response. versus what we're talking about today, it's fascinating is now we'll start monitoring a map or a twitter site or whatnot and how i'm going to process that? where are they coming from? what can again from all that and how do is bend a limited amount of resources. that's what we face every single day. like i said 2000 times a day. i was also asked to give some examples of community resiliency with these volunteer programs do successfully work. we have many examples. i think the brightest shining example that is called community emergency response team, or search. i think that's very successful program probably everyone in the room knows about. that was started right in los angeles. i can brag for us a little bit. what do we have? we have a committee of volunteers, and they have volunteered to give their time and help their community be resilient in times of disaster. there aren't enough responders to go around.

we've proven that over and over again. it's going to be the committee that takes care of itself ultimately, answer some basic training and some organization we are able to turn the population into a working force that can assist, assistance or assist themselves and maybe we can assist them. one of the big issues there with that team, or the cert program is where personnel assigned to managing it day-to-day, fire captain or two or firefighters. and instructions with basic basic training, people need a standard. web identification through invest in things. contrast that with the social media or the tweet or whatnot, and we start to lose all of it of the organization that goes with a paramilitary organization and operation like a fire department is. so i hope i've provided you a little bit of that real day today. this is what we do today stuff, but at the same time i consider and take there's no doubt in my

mind what the onto portable spirit of america and the brains that we have, we will take these technologies and we're going to apply them to what i do everyday, and that is going to ultimately provide a better service. and our service is really core. it is to protect life. and mitigate any possible injuries or minimize injury to any people. and i think with these kinds of technologies, and as the chief mentioned, the advance warning and defense information we can get help support better information in a faster way, which typically and disasters and injury, time is the enemy. so i think we're headed in the right direction. i thank you again. >> thank you very much, captain. excellent examples that you put out, and hopefully we'll have the time to discuss some of those as we go forward with questions a little better. our next panelist is jodi

cramer. jodi have any children at the federal emergency management agency since 2005 pitches currently the legal advisor at fema social media program as well as fema's web governance committee. she's also a program manager for fema's offices of the chief counsels i.t. project their particular fema she worked as a contract on policy issues for several government agencies are in addition she's worked as a contractor working on content development and governance on websites such as www.g. l. o.gov, workers.gov and the gsa first gov.gov's description center as well as several private sector websites. jodi, welcome. >> thanks. i have to tell you, back in 2007 our external affairs office came to our counsel's office and wanted to set up a youtube site. we kind of laughed at them. and said why do you want to put our videos out there on the public?

and eventually after six months of negotiating with youtube, we were able to set up our first youtube site. and then they started to want to use twitter. and my boss at the time and i went back and forth and said what is this tweeting thing? we couldn't decide if it was a twit or a tweet or what. and why would they want to be tweeting? we started our twitter site, we actually have the i think 15 or 16 sites live now, twitter feeds. for each of our regions plus our administrator tweets. i think he was tweeting hourly during the hurricane and earthquake. and right when we start setting this stuff up we had a discussion with one of the other social media companies, and actually said to us, we are not sure if we want the government on our site. because you guys will take over. that was their concern.

and right in the middle of doing this i actually went on vacation, and believe it or not, fema employees to take vacation in november after hurricane season is over. and i was in europe, and my public affairs officer was sitting in washington, and in the middle of this someone started a terrorist attack in mumbai. and i'm watching it on cnn international, because i was getting ready to go out that night. and he's in the office and i'm e-mailing him and we are watching this thing unfold from the tweets. and cnn was basically reporting the tweets. and didn't have anyone on the ground. they didn't have a clue what was really going on, and the terrorists were actually sending out misinformation via twitter. ..

it turned out it was a mannequin. sometimes news media is not always fact. you have to be very careful on what is verify information and what is not verify the information. but i can tell you those of you who were here during the earthquake last week i was one of the many people who eventually evacuated and was stuck in a three block radius with thousands of other government employees standing there watching fire trucks go

by. everyone called out there smart phone trying to send out a call and the circuits were completely busy. but the people who were tweeting about it in washington to the people in new york found out about the earthquake before it even hit new york. that is unbelievable. the message of twitter goes faster. we went back to the office and pull out the media monitoring sites and we were able to get all the tweets that were going on about the earthquake and i mean in two seconds. that type of information, you can get multiple sources saying you can send out one of the first responders who can then verify it. but these one on one, we can color code map, verify and that will help us to reduce the liability. we started looking into this. one of my first concern is

especially talking about field tagging, i almost freaked out because i am thinking of the government is going to track where people are and at what time and place. we are the department of homeland security. how is that going to look? can you picture all of the -- we have these people who tend to go out on conspiracy theories to think we are tracking them anyway? all these people think we are going to create some database of where you were at this time and place so i talked to one of the fourth amendment experts to make sure we didn't have a violation. we were a little concerned about being homeland security and possibly taking that information even if it was sent to us because now we have a privacy issue. we have our records issue of how long do we keep this information

and if someone put in the freedom of information act requests do they sit there and piece together where you are at a specific time? that is a real privacy issue that we have to think about even talking about public safety. during the incident itself. asked someone starts noticing patterns and where they're sending reports from or where they are located that could lead to other cybercrime issues we have to be aware of. one of the other things as a lawyer that i think about is copyright issues. when someone puts a photo op on flicker and we take it and paste it into something else are we infringing on their copyright and they will sue us for copyright infringement? most of the program people are saying they put it out there so it is public. unfortunately ended the digital millennium copyright act, you

take a picture there is a copyright attached. we actually have photo policies on all our social media sites that tell people they are giving us a license to use it. we have been able to use language for endorsement. we are very concerned about endorsement. the idea of showing which stores are open so people could get supplies. we think that is a great thing but are we endorsing something that is open? we use little tricks like language and things like that to allow us to use these tools. thank you for having me. >> excellent perspective. we look forward -- i am sure there will be a few questions as we get to the question and answer session. thank you very much. our next speaker is deborah shaddon, a core team member and infrastructure working group crisis, as. deborah shaddon is and it

enterprise architect and active volunteer for crisis -- where she serves as a member of the core team and point infrastructure working group lead in chicago crisis can't lead. she has 20 years of it experience with expertise in soa application and visualization and strategy. new technology introduction and risk-management, performance and quality service engineering illegal open source from work and practices and agile development. cheese there does lead architect ranging from 10,000 to ten million. in 2010 she supported the response effort of crisis, foursquare in haiti and chili and fled in tennessee and pakistan and the blizzard in the midwest. she also organized chicago's first random act of kindness in december of 2010 and worked to build local partnerships between the volunteer and technical

community and traditional relief organizations such as the red cross which we heard about. she held a master's degree in software engineering from paul university. welcome, deborah shaddon. >> i have a presentation. thank you for inviting me to be on this panel today. i think i represent -- i am a typical volunteer member of volunteer technology community. i have a degree of understanding of i.t. issues being an enterprise architect for 20 years working for insurance company but i am one of many types of fallen tears in my community. there are other i.t. professionals, people who are academics, that like to research, there are folks that are students, that want to participate and we partner with

to the extent we can members of the emergency response and humanitarian agency. i represent crisis commons, which if you go to the next page please, crisis commons just to introduce folks is a global network of volunteers in creative problem-solving and technology to help people and communities in times of crisis. we are a group that organizes crisis camps to use events to allow us to get together our communities from virtually online as well as in certain cities, new york for instance is posting a crisis camp tomorrow night. it allows us to collaborate and brainstorm and innovate and do all those great things to serve our community. most of us are familiar with us

through the efforts of haiti and chili were over 90 days eight different countries, 50 events, 2,000 volunteers participated in crisis camp events and contributed their skills and time to helping those efforts. a lot of work was done in mapping. mapping is an important element of situational awareness and the emergency response. a lot of the crowd source efforts around mapping is one of the things we will talk about today. i have a few slides to talk about that. crisis commons is one volunteer community. we work with many other volunteer communities and recognize them. some of those communities, all

of these are open data, friendly communities that pull together folks with subject matter and/or volunteer technology expertise to work on their specific problem. a mapping platform that is open source would use most recently in irene, has many applications. other open volunteer communities beleaguer and introduced a few of them, open street maps. that was a really critical effort in support of haiti. random acts of kindness was mentioned. this is a collaborative effort between several large companies like google and microsoft and world bank, to bring together folks for 24 hours or 48 hours where we get a problem statement and hacking for community, we

work on problems statements in the humanitarian crisis response phase and it is a competition of sorts. through those competitions, people can win and possibly parlay that into another future endeavour. next slide. crowd source and mapping. one platform for crowd sourcing, it is a fairly simple concept and a lot of people can participate in this that are not technical. you would need access to the internet or other resources, but we are asking people what is needed. people are reporting what is needed and the source of some of these resources are not necessarily the mapping platform itself. maybe the internet is being curated for information from twitter feed for instance which was mentioned earlier, or

facebook or other mechanisms where people are reporting situations, information about the situation they are in, needs that they have, things they are seeing, creating the sort of citizen perspective of the situation. those can be reported in to this platform and there are some levels of verification were reports can be validated and verified and that bubbles up into a social media sort of situation. next page. this is actually a screen prints from this morning. this is irenerecoverymap.com.

this is citizens reporting information to help other citizens. there wasn't an expectation that this was going to be directly used by emergency response organizations. they have other mechanisms to do that but it is one other perspective. this one was thrown out as a citizens can report information and create this map and there are categories of that information such as damage, warnings, weather that helped to make this more user-friendly. this map is built on the tee platform. next page. so there are some challenges in this space and particularly with the reliability of that data. a lot of it has to do with who is submitting this data. what is the source of this data? verifiable sources. we talked about the need of people being able to post

information from verifiable sources, youtube and twitter can be verifiable. those are sources of information. there is usually a level of trust above that. however, those are not necessarily the people on the ground. those maybe the people who are reposed in information and there's also this level of trust. certain communities stand by taskforce which is part of the larger crisis mapping initiative, looks to develop relationships with the u. n. they established a relationship with the libya mapping where they became a trusted source of some of that information. the reason they are trusted is because these folks have adopt a common methodology so they are predictable. they look to garner some training so they have a base level of training.

therefore those relationships are a lot easier to establish and trust can be created. and training at mentioned. i am also a member of the chicago emergency response team. one of the things we do has non technology volunteers is we are officially affiliated with the city of chicago. when we respond or participate in drills or participate in events, there is sort of a level of trust. you can see the person. the person shows up to your class. when you are dealing in the internet sometimes it is hard to establish direct trust because you can't necessarily see that person so there needs to the levels of verify ability in place to trust sources and who is committing the data and whether the data is coming from.

one of the other concerns is about quality of data and these are general i.t. concerns. a lot of system is deal with this. timeliness of data, completeness of data, has data been verified? with this data has implicitly or explicitly been created and could it be wrong? g.i. joe coding location but maybe i am three blocks over. i didn't mean to do it but the information is wrong. this is a malicious attack of they which happened with the mumbai attacks. whether that data could be wrong both implicitly and explicitly. and accuracy of the data. news media sources that are

trusted tend to be -- that are out there tend to be better trusted sources of data. they build up the trust over time. next slide. even non crowd source data can be wrong. i didn't realize this was going to be on tv. this is all my personal information. i am moving in two days and my new address in my new town is wrong in my car. so google has it okay. street maps has an okay. 412 southwest, south as in north southwest. not southwest is in one street which the bottom is gps has it wrong in the car. even verify -- data that you pay for can be wrong with regard to this data. the promise of the crowd source data, open street maps is the middle piece that i have here is actually correct in terms of my

new address. if it was wrong, as a crowd source platform i could go in and correct it. it is like the wikipedia of maps. if something is wrong and i see the information is wrong i can go in and correct it as part of larger crowd. i don't have to wait for a new release from -- the company where we bought our car, which takes eight hours to download just to get the map updated. certainly we tend to think that if we are going through trusted sources of that data, that data must in fact be perfect but there are situations where even that data can be wrong. next slide. so some approaches to the crowd source phase of looking at

verify ability and reliability include things like introducing multiple layers of validation. i am not the only one who gets to say 412 south west is the address. someone else can validate that and verify the triangular approach to create this perspective of data. training and trust, stand by taskforce, humanity road as volunteer community technologies have robust training in place to elevate them to a level of trust. multiple sources validation, not just data that comes in from the internet but multiple sources of that data including manuel i of sight. we put up a crowd map which is one of the platforms for the chicago blizzard in february.

we had some people reporting some incidences on that site and our volunteers knocking on some doors for elderly assistance. that is the best way to validate that information is right. automation. certainly technology itself can aid in this, it can help to aid in the validation of the data. looking at the lessons learned in the after actions after each event and what worked and what didn't and using that and taking those lessons and adopting them into a methodology -- the combination of all these things helps to make data more validated and trusted.

risk and liability concerns. there are risks to the volunteers who are out there collecting this data. we are not necessarily affiliated and therefore we likely are not covered under the good samaritan act. we have some attorneys here who can present some perspective on that. that puts us as volunteers at risk. we don't necessarily think about that when we are just trying to do good but it puts our volunteers at risk. it would be great to be able to have a mechanism where the virtual volunteers who are doing this sort of crowd sourcing of data that is used in direct response could in fact be protected. if that data is bad, it could compromise preparedness and response and the public. is the public making decisions

based on bad crowd source data? don't go here because that road is blocked versus it might be the next road over. these are some of the concerns with potentially bad data. hopefully we can have more dialogue on these today. thank you. >> thank you very much, excellent perspective. we appreciate the address corrections so at a housewarming party we can arrive at the correct address. our next speaker is governor jim geringer, former governor of wyoming and director of policy of esri. he received a b.s. from kansas university and spent 12 years reserve service in the united states air force working on unmanned space programs for the department of defense and nasa. project included remote sensing

satellite, the gps system, the mars viking lander, national energy astrophysics observatory and others. he served in the wyoming legislature from 1983-1994 including six years in the house and senate. the governor served two terms as wyoming governor from 1995 to 2003 during which time he focused on improving education through standards, accountability and technology, modernizing wyoming's economic base to include technology, changing how natural resource agencies among state, federal and local governments work together, establish in community family service programs and implementing strategic planning and information systems. while in office he chaired the western governor's association, education commission of the state, was lead governor on energy policy and served on a variety of national and regional technology initiatives.

he was a member of the committee on america's climate choices under the national academy and served on the mapping science committee under the national research council, current member of the community resilience committee under oak ridge national laboratories, advisory committee for the global positioning satellite system, board of governors of park city center for public policy, current share of the board of trustees of the western governor's university. he joined environmental systems research institute in the summer of 2003 as director of policy and public sector strategy to work with senior elected and corporate officials on how to use gaea's spatial technology in business and government. welcome. to our panel. >> thank you. i think the reason for the lengthy introductions is to establish our authenticity and authoritative and this. has nothing to do with the data we're talking about today.

it is embarrassing to those up here but welcome, nonetheless. i want to welcome the observation as an opening that discussing social media for public safety and emergency response or crisis response whether social media or volunteer geographic information or volunteerism in general is not new. within the last half century we have had things such as the civil air patrol reported incidents of spot in what could be unknown aircraft that could be invading our country. we have had social media going way back to when alexander graham bell invented that little device that evolve into a party line. if you want to know what social media exchange was the first facebook was the party line. most of it was monitored rather -- let's not get into that too far. when it comes to what we're discussing today, put the

geographic information in one category and social media information in another category at the risk of oversimplification in this way. gis and gis data is data. someone needs to do something with it. some activity needs to be done on it but social media introduceds two keys things -- emotions and passion. that has changed the nature of how we respond. the difference from 50 years ago to today is the volume and velocity. how quickly it comes at you and how large a quantity it may come at you. those are the things we are not prepared for today. in addition to the emotions of passion, one of the risks of using that type of information was observed by mark twain so it goes back further. mark twain said rumor halfway around world before truth gets its shoes tight.

we still deal with that today. i am going to have you go through these slides fairly quickly but let me hit a couple highlights early on. somewhere in here. there we go. i don't know who to attribute this to. it was sent to me but i use it to illustrate how quickly something can happen. in the public safety and the emergency response world the first seventy-two hours are critical. that is when everything is happening locally. i want to introduce a new element. the first twenty-four hours can become extraordinarily impacting because the first responders to any incident are the victims. the ones who are involved in that incident. they typically are the ones first to take action. we call that the zero hour. in the first six our the microbe media such as twitter coming on and mainstream media this particular illustration uses the newspaper. i assume it is the online newspaper because the bridge will be off in six hours. more likely it is going to be

some type of video media, television or otherwise. within 12 hours the sharing will be going on very substantially through all the various social media we are talking about within 24 hours. people are already editorializing about it. those are the newer elements that have to do with volume and philosophy as well as the wide variety of things that are in there. we could go on to the next one. typically in the remote sensing community and gis community we are aware of well known sources of information for geographic preference. it might be satellite based, gps and other imagery sensing satellites from seaborne to airborne to fix the ground stations and the like. what we are not used to are the activities that can occur such as please go on, when everyone is a sensor.

this is a representation using a different model. this is the referendum in sudan held earlier this year and how many people took an interest early on in where they are located based on the tweets exchange during that time. i use that as an illustration we talk about an event being localized because everything happened local area but all of a sudden it is impacted by whoever has connectivity around the world. what has affected volume and velocity and engagement of the public is this poem. there are two things that are dominant here. what is access to the internet and the other is usedability of a smart phone which means it is able to use the internet and access any number of social media platform that engage the public or become a sensor. every one of them has a camera and many of them have audio as well so you can provide feeds

from almost any citizen anywhere in response to as a commentator, or as a victim or first responder and many of the people who are officially trained as first responders within various allotments of the public safety domain will use these same devices. if it change the face of how we operate it is a game change. i will put two slides up to illustrate the types of standard ways of thinking in the emergency response community from mitigation to preparedness' response and recovery which are the four key elements of how we react and public safety or crisis circumstance. as we consider what is going on with the use of volunteered geographic information and social media the variety of platforms that are out there are workflow is going to be altered in how it moves forward. i don't think the basic principles will change such as the information that is soft ahead of time to mitigate the

impact of any circumstance, the hurricane predictions that went on, analytics that went into that, better modeling than ever before on our hurricane that has been cited or the preparation, having an agreed upon method of displaying information by an official source. what becomes a great challenge is when there is no clear structure of the illustration used early on of one map generated by crowd sourcing and the other generated by an official agency. you will always have -- you need to be prepared to deal with that. crowd source, volunteer generated information. all of those are useful especially to fill in gaps particularly early on but there has to be some way of designating which is a trusted source so that people will know what the limitations are on any of these activities.

the bottom shows the greatest challenges taking data out of silos. we are talking about getting too much information voluntarily. we don't know how to manage it where in the past why we can't get the data out of those silos. they won't sunni their data. we are challenged on both fronts still today. i put this up to say they have to change these work flows and concepts to accommodate that. the next one illustrates the same type of thing that breaks down into those areas. we are talking primarily data management as we talk about these sources of information. that leads to how you handle that analysis. how do you verify or impose limitations on the reliability of the data? you may use it knowing limitations are there. the situational awareness creates the opportunity for the greatest awareness we ever had the opportunity to experience. in the last one, field

operations, you can rely on information in near real-time rather than waiting for a time lapses and updating those things. why don't you flip through these quickly and i will comment as we go through. this is the operating view by an official agency but the deepwater horizon. unified command, types of things where people in put information into other purposes that come up at the last we are dealing with now. integration of near real-time field reporting rather than once per day was the first time it was used in this circumstance. as we go to the next one and keep paging as i comment quickly, field impact reporting, this is an official field impact report where volunteers generated information would be different. please keep going. the joint unified command operated their own youtube site to convey information to the public. when you are filtering social

media there are a variety of ways to use analytics to do this through technology rather than having a personal review to look for keywords and time stamping and geography, both flicker and twitter have a g.i. joe reference to them. keep going. on the sudan statistics are revealing. the location information for 95% of the tweets came from the user's twitter profile. there is a caveat there. what is in their profile might not be where they are. it could have been from letter to/law under to in their profile. only 1/2% were g.i. joe tag. there's an illustration of the types of things you have to assess as you go into that. only 11% were original information. the balance were updated or referencing to other sites and searches. please go on. this has to do with what we call

a heat map in the gis industry. that is the aggregation of several social media messages at once. this is go to the next one. property damage and are will read from this because i can see it better. hazards, evaluations and power outages and the next several if we could keep going, power outages over a sequence of days. it illustrates how you can aggregate this information to give you heat maps. is an illustration to focus priorities and allocate resources. this is just another example. you have seen enough of those so i will go on. this is from the earthquake disaster response 2.0 illustrating connecting with neighbors. craig got better situational awareness before he got official

word from the san bruno explosion. i am sure he was caveated appropriately how much he should say about that but he is tweeting during all through the user conference. this is the national level exercise in the area in middle america. we learned a lot about the effectiveness of social me and how people followed along even when the field teams were dispatched. the community knew what was there when they were coming. we have provided public information, map templates free of charge. go to the next site. there are several made available including all kinds of back information. it is an illustration of how the private sector has volunteered for free any number of resources, templates and information that can be used so the public can become involved.

the big difference is the volume of information, the velocity of information, how the public wants to be involved. in terms of a policymaker. i have served in that role from time to time. in today's situation compared to not many years ago where the hierarchy control the information and dispensed it as needed and was able to control everything that went in or out of the disaster situation, i would offer these -- there are no secret anymore. don't assume you can hide information or try to hide information. random hacks of kindness will find you if no one else. i am sure they will. any individual who is willing or able has the power to expose what were private in the past. you can expect an on scene commander or incident commander what you do and say will be

bloged about. you have to reconcile contradictory practices or decisions that are going on. every newscast will have an instant expert advising on the appropriateness of the decisionmaker whether it is that alan or the president or any governor. it puts the burden on all of us to assure any efforts are sincere, defensible and authentic. it changes our work flow. we discovered with social media being what it is today that one way messaging is not going to work anymore. you don't just provide information. the public wants to be engaged in a dialogue and actively involved. world of talk about how technology is going to isolate us from each other it has been anything but. we should invite contributions from the public. we want to build good will and trust. if you don't build trust in a crisis situation you have anarchy and that is the greatest risk we have in the industry of providing support to public

safety. don't communicate strictly through press releases and scripted interactions. doesn't work anymore. a system for listening is critical to remaining responsive. i will let it go at that and save my other comments for the question and answer session. >> thank you for bringing your experience to the private sector as we grapple with this issue. thanks very much. our next panelist is edward robson, a practicing attorney with robson and robson base of pennsylvania. advises businesses of all types, nonprofit organization and government agencies. he also represents local public safety agencies including volunteer fire companies and ambulance organizations advising them on a variety of matters including internal governments, standard operating procedure is

legal contract negotiations including first amendment issues and personal policies. he has authored several published articles on social media policy for fire departments and risk and liability of public safety agencies relating to their employment policies and social media policies. since 2003 he has served as a volunteer medical technician with the radnor fire company in pennsylvania. prior to joining robson and robson he entered with curtis and letter of the united states district court for the eastern district of pennsylvania and was a law clerk with abrams and of philadelphia civil division. he is a graduate of philadelphia university and received his ph.d. bobby witt from university school of law where he was editor of the villanova sports and entertainment law journal. thank you for being with us.

>> i would suggest the law has not had an opportunity to evaluate this. it has not weighed in quite yet. liability surrounding technical communities is all over the place. i think it creates some interesting -- what i will call exotic legal issues. first amendment issues. jurisdiction issues. privacy issues. but at the end of the day i think the number one issue is not going to be exotic but the mundane. i think it is going to be state court law. it will be negligence claims from people who were injured from misinformation or by failure of technical and volunteer community response or of the emergency response community to respond to a call

on social media. i think the question becomes what do the does the technical and volunteer community over to the general public when they are operating in their capacity as technical volunteers? generally speaking we all have a duty to act reasonably and not put people in unreasonable harm. the question then becomes what is reasonable? for the technical and volunteer community? that is a difficult question. at this point it would seem we need some level of filtering to verify at least a simple sense the veracity of information coming in before it goes back

out. the other question which i think is interesting is to what extent can the technical volunteer community be held liable for their failure to act? generally speaking, you have no duty to act or rescue, restatement of tour puts it, fully. if you are sitting on a dock smoking a cigar watching somebody drowned in a lake you can continue to sit there and finish your cigar without liability. the law generally doesn't impose an affirmative duty to rescue or to act. courts are somewhat uncomfortable with this notion. for a variety of reasons. they have carved out a variety of deceptions. one exception is you may have a duty to respond if you created

the danger. one situation aiken vision is a piece of information coming in regarding a bomb in a public place. without verifying it, a technical volunteer, community sends it out and cause a panic. they then learned that that is not accurate but do nothing to resolve the situation. there is liability there. another situation where the duty may arise is if there's a special relationship between the technical volunteer community and the general public.

courts recently when looking for special relationships, they will look to the public's dependence on an organization or individual. as the public becomes more dependent on these groups we need to consider what effect that may have in creating a liability for failing to act. the long and the short of it is i would suggest technical volunteer communities should sit and finish their cigar. there's a role to absorb the data, organize it and make it available but to the extent you undertake a rescue in the sense of directing responders actively or suggesting people go one way

or the other, there is the potential for some additional liability. the second thing i would like to touch on is the emergency responder community. unlike volunteers these organizations have a duty to act imposed by statute. typically it hasn't been an issue as to when the duty arises. someone calls 911. now with the advent of social media and crowd sourcing and things like that the question is what happens when somebody texts 911 or when somebody puts a twitter feet or facebook post on to a municipality's fire department website? in the past you could make a reasonable argument that it is

not reasonable for that citizen to expect somebody to respond. i am not sure that is true any more. i would suggest emergency service organizations be very clear about when they believe that duty arises. they can do that with disclaimers on their web site but the conservative approach would be to alert citizen that every point of access in the department so for example, if somebody texts 911 they should receive a text message back that says we will not respond. hang up and called 911. that should help define the emergency response community's judy and limit liability. that sound like ten minutes to me so i will yield my time back to the chair. >> thank you very much.

great perspective from the legal side and your experience as emergency response. thank you very much. our next panelist is martin valentine, senior underwriting portfolio manager for usaa who provides insurance banking investment retirement products and services to 8.4 million members of the u.s. military and their families. mr. valentine leads efforts to help usaa members to build disaster resistant homes to make more durable communities. he is an expert in loss mitigation and catastrophic risk-management was 21 years of experience. he works closely with the federal alliance for safe homes which most of us know in the insurance institute for business and home safety to promote strong, well enforced building codes and loss prevention programs that protect homes and families. he is the co-chair of the

insurance institute for business and home safety residential alliance committee and serves on the fortified state for living taskforce. mr. valentine earned his m.b.a. from state liu university and holds finance from the university of south florida. he of the chartered property underwriter and holds an associate management education. >> appreciate that. we have some first responders here who have talked to was a little bit. as an insurance professional i want to share my perspective and being second responders and hurricane irene was an example of that. as the first responders are staging their activities the insurance companies are behind them trying to stay out of the way of the responders but using a lot of the same information. the power of the technology and facial analysis and aggregating data and validating information which you heard from, panel members is extremely important when i give my perspective from risk-management perspective from

the insurance perspective. i just want to share with you some thoughts on risk-management and how gis technology can apply to making decisions more precisely. the work had the opportunity to do with gis goes back to resilience communities which we heard about. how do we make communities safer, stronger, better response time and want to have buildings that are more resilient to storms. the science is not behind building at structure that is indestructible but you can greatly increase chances of returning to something that is coming back to hit the land. that is very important in the community and from an insurance perspective. precision and transparency and facial analysis. when you look at multiple data players you can get it from the public sector and also have the opportunity to apply your

business rules to determine more precision around how you manage your risk and just those levels of risk-management i take the perspective of you are identify and arrest and assessing the risk and prioritizing your risk. as an example if you think about the united states and some of the natural disasters we had this year, we had record-setting tornadoes across the country, snowstorms in the recent past, wildfires we have to respond to and the hurricane season is just starting to kick up as we have seen. it is important from a risk-management perspective to make decisions in 50% of the u.s. population near the coast line, how to manage your portfolio and spread that risk. gis helps do that. again, way to do that -- take a

look, we saw some slides of neighborhoods or maps. to bring it closer to this room here, traditional underwriter risk manager wood group this entire room as a risk. a homogeneous group and would be yes or no, same price. with more precision analysis, information and technology i can charge individual price for everybody in this room and make a decision for everybody in this room. it might be yes or maybe and it might be no. maybe might be of i can ensure you at this price if i'm willing to take some mitigation action if you will. that is turning the tables and making the things more flexible to provide more alternative solutions to customers. most of us consider ourselves to the special. i don't want to pay the same price as someone else if i feel

i take care of my home better than others and an essay for driver. maybe i am not but that is the way i feel. price me accordingly. we often talk about visuals are very compelling. having the rooftop level view of something allows folks like me and others in the risk-management business to really see how close that house might be to the coastal storm and what the particular heat maps may show in terms of risk when you look at data layers and consider storm surge and wind bands and things like that. when i see how close it is rather than looking at an old atlas map we used to do back in the day it helps say yes, no to things that are really close together. that is be speaking as an insurance professional. we want to thank that officials are more compelling and i tend to agree with that and also helps us understand risk. how do you incorporate gis into

the infrastructure of your business if the key components you think about is can you make it scaleable across the enterprise? you need to meet the needs of your key stakeholders and make sure it is an enduring model that is multi dimensional and very flexible. you want to simplify the complex. a lot of information comes in. how do you filter that out to make a decision in a timely manner? that is easier said than done. here is something to think about. transparency. what if you get to the point you are fully transparent and self underwrite? that is really validating information. you need to get to the verify state on that. lifelong underwriter has trouble trusting without verifying but there's an opportunity for

insurance to take the next step in that fashion. i appreciate the time. >> thank you for that perspective. thanks to all our panelists for great opening remarks. [applause] many of you probably have questions. hopefully justin and opening remarks those questions have been answered or pointed in a direction for further research but let's take questions starting with questions from the room and let me reiterate for those joining us by web submit your questions by e-mail to commonslab@wilsoncenter.org. yes? [inaudible question] >> i work for the city of springs fire department.

deborah shaddon talk about voluntary geographic information is collected, i was interested in two things. in your insight into how first responders should utilize information you provide. are you providing them with any intention for that community to use that? edward robson, if you wouldn't mind elaborating on what you talked about. if that is being provided, and i am a fire department using that how the limit by exposure and liability to the mechanics of using that wisely and effectively in my community but not burying ourselves in lawsuits? >> the idea of collecting this data through virtual volunteers

is to create those situational awareness reports. it is one perspective. is not the only one. we heard some of that. it can be another tool. i do believe we have an interest in trying to established those relationships more formally so some of the data we collect which could be useful could be used. one of the ideas we would like to explore for instance is when the public is collecting the data from your perspective and it can be different whether you are fire or police what are the ways that data should be categorized? we tend to take guesses, shoulders, damage, but maybe there is another way to take that information that would be more useful and have a more direct impact directly to the

community and that is an area where we are looking to evolve and explore. >> the short answer is i'm not really sure. the reason i say that is i'm not aware of cases that have been litigated. i am not aware of any law directly on point. in some sense it is a guess. the analysis here, i think is whether you have been reasonable. is not particularly different from any other claims against the fire department. the first thing i would suggest is the reasonable. have some procedure for vetting out some information. have it written. don't make it up as you go. make sure people are following it. i would suggest documenting where it is coming from.

go from there. it is a risk but it is hard to evaluate at this point. certainly a policy that has been reviewed that has input from an attorney but also from your chief officers, your administration, you guys will be the experts in the field. it is worth something in court that we analyzed this. we believe this is in the information we gathered and document the policy and make sure people are following it. that is my suggestion. >> go-ahead. >> the follow-up on that is curious talking about that, if they are curating information and creating trusting sources and