Volunteerism in the Social Age
Posted by RB on December 30, 2009
The events surrounding the crowd-sourced map for the 2009 Oklahoma blizzard are very interesting and deserve to be shared. The power of volunteerism, technology and social media all collided to create this impressive and unique exercise. This is my account of what happened.
For me it all started with a simple Tweet. From @sidburgess to @mattwilliamson.
@mattwilliamson can you call me asap
6:41 PM Dec 24th
At the time, I had no idea what that was about. A bit later I started seeing posts from @sidburgess talking about an interactive map for reporting road conditions and locations of people that were strandred. The map was setup at http://blizzard.clevyr.com which is ran by @mattwilliamson.
When I caught up with @sidburgess he was in the early stages of organizing the group of volunteers on Google Talk. He asked me if I could help. Seeing how it was snowing outside and I was not going out, I figured why not. At this point there were about five people in the chat room and working on the map. We were focusing on people that were stranded in their car, people opening their homes, and shelters. There were several key places where there were a lot of reports were coming from. We were following the real-time update over at KOCO and anything we could see on TV or that came in via Twitter. It was around this time that someone setup a Twitter account called @OKBlizzard and a google mail account. At this point it felt like we were official. We started having people send us information to put on the map.
For the first several hours we were coordinating the entire activity via google talk. We had started talking about expanding the effort to a 24-7 thing and needed a place to organize that was a bit more permanent then google talk. This allowed us to have a dedicated place to communicate about the map and other activities. It was also a place to send new volunteers to help out with the map project. You can find the history of the room at http://yackall.com/room/okblizzard.
Once a new home for chatting among the volunteers was established at Yackall, we had more people volunteer and a lot of new updates added to the map. We started to add road conditions. We had several people tasked to creating the first iteration of the road conditions for a large portion of the state. We had people monitoring the email and Twitter feeds. We had several people using websites that would aggregate the Highway Patrol, Sheriffs, and EMS radios for several counties and posted the updates. Several people were working the KOCO stream, including @sidburgess, for any new updates and to help pass out information for people that were following the updates there. Everbody was watching KOCO and retweeting anything related to the Blizzard. I kept meaning to check to see if anything from the Blizzard was a trending topic on Twitter, but I was usually chasing down new information. Around 10pm we started seeing hints and links to a crowd-sourced map on several news sites. Personally it was very cool that a couple of concerned citizens were using technology and volunteering to organize the vast amount of information and make it publicly available. I do remember tracking down some random road in Oklahoma to update the condition when I heard the KOCO TV anchor start talking about places to get information and the map was mentioned. I immediately went into the Yackall room to make sure everybody knew and could watch the coverage that our effort was generating. The room was full of people excited and messages of excitement were being sent out over the mention of the map..
People started to drop off because of different reasons with most promising to get up early and work on the map. Some of us decided to stay up late to continue the updates. I lasted until about 3am. I know my updates started to drop off as it got later. One of the last things I remember was the Oklahoma Highway Patrol started to wake the truckers that were stuck around I-35 and Tecumseh road and it sounded like those people that were stuck there would be moving soon. When I went to bed I was curious to see what updates if any would have been made. I was a bit nervous that the movement would die overnight.
Boy was I wrong. I woke up and the first thing I did was check on the Yackall room. There were people updating it pretty regular. Next I checked on the health of the server and noticed that it was severely overloaded. What normally is a sub-second update of a new message was taking as much as 10 or 15 seconds to update. I notified my hosting company (http://getyourwebsitetoday.com) and we began to work on the problem. I modified the site to not be so intensive and the hosting company checked on the hardare and processes on the server. It took about 20 Minutes for things to get back down to normal.
I worked on the project on and off during the morning and early afternoon of Christmas day. There were not many strandred motorists. It was mainly updating accidents and road conditions. We also started adding new items to the map. We added links to the city traffic cams and there were several that were linking to video of the roads or what they saw. We continued to have a good number of volunteers and several regulars working most of the day and into December 27th.
Overall it was a very good experience. For me, my Christmas plans were moved to Sunday and I enjoyed giving my time around the Christmas holiday season to helping a greater good. Most of the people I volunteered with I had never met before in real-life. I have since added several to my followers list on Twitter.
@sidburgess did an interview with a local TV station and that interview can be found here. http://ow.ly/Qy30. One thing of note is the interview was done over Skype.
If you have a story about how the map or technology helped or effected you during the Blizzard of 2009 in Oklahoma, please drop me a line and share it or post it in the comments.
