CTO Blog

I guess if you wanted to take an example of an area in which extensive investments had been made to get communication of factual information right then the government emergency services would probably be a good case.

Yet when an actual emergency occurs then reality is that thousands of people who are involved using Web 2.0 technologies can do a better job of collecting, collating and informing each other than a conventional centralised emergency system.

Yup I mean the catastrophic Californian fire emergency, and for a quick overview on how citizens have been using Web 2.0 then take a look at this link.

One of the surprising examples of this is the Los Angeles Fire Depot using Twitter to broadcast out messages of accidents, fire breakouts, etc., but how does this come about? My own experience of looking into examples like this is that if this idea was formally proposed when there wasn’t a problem then the management would probably reject it as unnecessary and not ‘industrial strength’. However there comes a moment when the issues and problems become serious enough that ideas to ‘save the day’ are called for.

At this point a younger member of staff comes up with the idea of using Twitter, or whatever, and shows how to set this up quickly and immediately, and a grateful management except the capability.

It would be nice to think that this could happen without having to have such an appalling emergency to drive managers towards adopting new technology.