Camping on the crisis

As multiple crisis of natural and human source hit Italy, the country becomes a natural playground to test and apply crowdsourcing techniques for emergency prevention and management. In a meeting in Bologna recent developments in this area will be discussed.

Crisis and disasters have played a major role in the recent development of participatory sensing and the use of citizens as sensors: Ushahidi was born to crowdmap political turmoils, and the Fukushima nuclear accident has brought Pachube to the public attention. Nowadays, the word “crisis” often appears close to the word “Italy”. Riots, flood, earthquake and other natural disasters take place with regularity in the “Belpaese”. This astonishing record could make Italy a beautiful playground for distributed crisis management and crowdmapping.

Well, something of the kind is already happening. The most popular news site, repubblica.it, often uses Ushahidi’s platform crowdmap to represent data to the users and invite them to participate. Crisis management through web2.0 tools is relatively developed in Italy, and some interesting project has already been realized and other are supposed to appear soon. A community has been born to share knowledge and expertise; you can meet all this people next Saturday, november 19 in Bologna, from 10 am, at the Crisis Camp Italy – nothing to see with the anti-crisis #occupysomething initiatives. The Camp has been organised after the Paris european meeting by a bunch of people led by Elena Rapisardi, whose project on forest fire monitoring is explained in this nice presentation. The whole program of the Camp can be found on the Crisis Camp website.