BluePrint: Social Media

Introduction

Social Media is playing a important role in Disaster and Emergency Management.

Description

<Briefly describe the solution, e.g. start with a user story>
<Name existing solutions, e.g. in other applications>

Requirements

• Create searches/filters of various social media feeds
  • Simple hashtag search
  • Machine learning algorithms(?)
  • Ability to display these feeds on Dashboards
  • Display on the map
  • Trends over time
• Ability to track actions (tasks?) take in response to Social Media messages
• Measure Social Media Engagement
  • Number of followers (+ trends over time)
  • Number of Tweets (+ trends over time)
  • Number of re-tweets / likes (+ trends over time)
• Share information from Sahana Eden on Social Media
  • A user sharing it on their accounts
  • Allow Sahana Eden to publish new information automatically to it's own account

EOC staff are overwhelmed - in the first phases of an emergency they can only act on big picture information (e.g. clusters of incidents) rather than individual incidents. Displaying a screenful of photos allows one to quickly get a good amount of information.

Use-Cases

As an Emergency Manager, in order to support the decision making for the type of the resources allocated, the type of response (containment, evacuation etc.) and the scale of response, the information needed woud possibly include:

• The type of incident (Fire, earthquake, chemical gas release, civil disturbance etc.)
• Secondary hazards
• Any information that would be helpful to prioritise the life saving activities (between incidents and within incident)
• Any logistics support that might be needed (crane to clear the path, mobile radio repeater to ensure flawless communication etc.)
• Secondary (non-life saving) response (food, shelter, communication etc.)
• Local response resources (human, tools, vehicles, facilities etc.) available that might be helpful

Some possible workflow diagrams may look like:

​https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1tlQVX5KhXx9qRYerVXQtdbbw_JOWS4z4ryJUu_DPOaI/edit

​https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1w_lCzWI9GzE0mqLOdCr3fHUvnTYyKEvuFDbGsc8kYk4/edit

​https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1P2uO0_kmfk324z53gPS1ypHgh3eCP2jtQway_LcVONk/edit

​https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1Lv4w-GVHmUg2TrGV994v1_lhyBvcfZ1tV8hsm2_Ptfg/edit

Projects

There is a huge scope for for Social Media Integration in Sahana Eden some of which have been listed here. These are some more specific projects you may be able to engage with

Social Media Feeds

Enhance the feeds which are displayed on the homepage ​https://github.com/flavour/eden/blob/master/controllers/default.py#L283 which are controlled with these settings ​https://github.com/flavour/eden/blob/master/private/templates/000_config.py#L9.

• Improve the styling of these feeds
• Allow users to create their own dashboard with customized feeds
• Re-factor the code so that it is easy to insert feeds on other pages (eg. Module Index Pages)

Map Feeds

Allow the user to add layers of geo-tagged data from Twitter / YouTube onto the Map

Publishing data to Social Media Account

Allow Sahana Eden to be configured to have a Facebook or Twitter account it updates to. Look at the msg_search_subscription_notifications function (​https://github.com/flavour/eden/blob/master/modules/eden/msg.py#L818) which is used to send emails to users for Saved Searchs - ideally this could also be used to save search criteria, and then when new records in that search are updated - a FB or Twitter update for the system is updated.

Design

Implementation

<Leave open for a list of implementation>

References

• ​Designing a Social Media Module for Emergency Management in Sahana Eden
• ​Social Media in emergencies communications guidelines
• ​http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/disasters20/Twitter-Trends-Disaster-Response-090412.html

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