Social Ch@nge

It’s no coincidence that 2012 (the latest in a long line of disaster movies from director Roland Emmerich)  is timed to release during one of the worst weather months North Americans experience. Yep, November is storm season, bringing with it power outages, floods, snow, wind – and that’s only on the west coast. We’ve written a bit about crowd-sourcing disaster information before, but now seems like the perfect time to get back into disaster preparedness.

Plague: You can check out and report to Ushahidi’s H1N1 (swine flu) map, a crowdsourced way to track unverified citizen reports of the pandemic. In British Columbia, the provincial health authority is using Twitter to try to push out information about H1N1 to a confused public.

Hurricanes: Ning is a customizable social networking site highly recommended for non-profits suffering Facebook fatigue, and The Hurricane Information Centre and associated wiki are a great case study of how flexible Ning can be as a platform for moving info out about your cause. These pages are entirely volunteer informed, and a fantastic source of local information on where to get information such as where evacuations are happening, and hurricane preparedness.

Earthquakes: A mash-up is when data from two web pages are combined into one place – among their many uses, they’re a great to visualise large amounts of data.  For example, in this mashup real time data about earthquakes from around the world is visualized on a map so that it’s easier for users to see where earthquakes are happening and how big they are.  If seeing this sort of thing makes you nervous, why not get inspired for the big one by practicing with The Great California Shake Out? In the largest virtual earthquake drill ever, nearly 7 million Californians participated on and offline in October 2009. Using information from the site, they all practiced preparedness by reacting on the appointed day exactly as if an earthquake had hit their state (local media helped with the drama by broadcasting realistic updates over the website) Afterwards, they posted their photos and stories about the experience – you can check them out here.

Snowstorms: As winter gets underway in the Northern Hemisphere, expect to see more snowstorm reporting tools. Snowbird, a project from a group of University of Waterloo students, uses Twiter and Google Earth to visualize snow fall reports around the world. Though it’s meant more as a way for people interested in snowfall measurements to quickly broadcast information to the web using Twitter, it’s easy to see the implications of creating sites where people can update information about their climate – sounds like a powerful tool for raising awareness about climate change if we ever heard one.

Have you got better sites to add to this list? Please leave your links in the comments or email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org.